Kingdom of Crowns and Glory

by Laura Greenwood et al.

  “Rabbit?” I asked, remembering my time-pressed guide. “Rabbit, where are you?”

  “Here!” A white, fur-covered finger rose from the grass below me. “You’re squishing me, Alice Carroll.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” I veered up, my cheeks glowing red. “Sorry, rabbit.”

  “Theodore,” the rabbit said while he dusted off his suit. “You can call me Theodore. But there’s no time for delays. We’re late!” He retrieved his watch from in the grass, shook it, and then rushed off again, gesturing for me to follow him.

  “You can’t give any hints yet, I guess?” I asked, struggling to keep up with him. Rabbits were surprisingly fast. “Like… Where are we?” I gestured at our surroundings, the meadows we were in, the clear blue sky. “Last I remember, when we left, it was night, and now it’s the middle of the day.”

  “Oh.” The rabbit shrugged, as if it hadn’t even noticed the strange time anomalies. “We’re in Wonderland, that’s all.”

  “Wonderland?” I frowned. “What’s that?”

  “It’s my home,” Theodore said. “And in a way, it’s yours too. You just don’t remember, because it’s not yours. I mean, not in this timeline.” The rabbit kept on rushing ahead, often jumping up and chomping its feet together.

  “Not in this timeline… You’re asking me to believe a little, Theodore. Different timelines? Wonderland? Are you sure I wasn’t drugged?”

  “Of course not!” The rabbit seemed offended by my suggestion. He adjusted the hems of his jacket. “I’ve been tasked to bring you home. Well, not home, since this isn’t home, not to you, at least. To a different Alice it is. And to someone not named Alice.”

  My frown deepened. “You’re losing me again.”

  “We’re heading to a tea party with the Duchess,” the rabbit said, as if that explained anything. “It’s just right through this field.”

  “So, we’re late to a tea party.” I had no idea tea parties were so important that being late to them was something to get as upset about as the rabbit was, but to each their own.

  “Not just a tea party,” the rabbit said, even though he had called it exactly that just a few minutes ago. “The Duchess is looking forward to meeting you. Fair warning, though. She’s a little mad. But we’re all mad here.”

  I blinked, wondering what that meant, when we reached the end of the field. To our left was a line of trees, and I could already make out the contours of a small house peeking out from between the trees. “Is that the Duchess’s house? It doesn’t look that fancy.”

  I bit my lip, hoping I hadn’t overstepped any boundaries, or had been rude, but the rabbit just shook his head. “No, it’s not the Duchess’s house. The Duchess lives in a castle, as Duchesses do. This is the house of the Lone Turtle.”

  The Lone Turtle… “Is he the only turtle around, perhaps?” I asked.

  “Of course not.” The rabbit seemed offended again, and checked his watch for the twentieth time. “Why would he be the only turtle?”

  I wanted to smash myself in the head. Just when I thought I had figured something out about this strange place, something else popped up. “Why do they call him the Lone Turtle then?”

  “Why do they call you Alice Carroll?” The rabbit replied to my question with another question.

  Great. Basically, shut up and don’t ask anything else, Alice, I told myself.

  The rabbit led me along a path in the forest, which led straight to the house. The closer we got, the quainter the house looked. With pink shutters, a pink door, and pink-and-white tiles mixed together, you would think the house was owned by the pink Power Ranger, rather than by a turtle.

  In front of the house stood a large table, and various cups, spoons and plates were decorating the table, each of them a different size and model. It was a cacophony of colors and shapes, too over-the-top to be appealing. Even the chairs at the table were all different: some tall, with ornate decorations, others small and simple, everything as mismatched as possible. Whoever the Lone Turtle was, he or she had a severe lack of style.

  As we entered the front yard, the door burst open, and the occupant of the house, a life-sized turtle appeared. The turtle wore an apron – in pink, what else?—and was carrying a tray filled with cookies.

  “Theodore!” the turtle exclaimed in a voice that seemed way too low and masculine for a turtle looking like that; I had expected the turtle would be female, given it dressed like that.

  “Good afternoon.” The rabbit bowed. “My apologies for being late.”

  “You’re always late,” the turtle said, shrugging it off. Obviously being late was no big deal to the Lone Turtle, so why had Theodore been so upset about it?

  The turtle walked toward the table and put the tray of cookies down. “Will you introduce your guest, Theodore?”

  “Oh, she’s no guest.” The rabbit climbed on the nearest chair and waited for the turtle to fill a cup of tea. “She’s just Alice.”

  “Alice.” The turtle finished pouring the cup of tea and handed it to the rabbit. “I’m quite sure I don’t know an Alice.”

  “You wouldn’t know her.” Theodore lifted the tea to his lips and took a sip. “But she’s also someone else. You would know the someone else.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Turtle,” I said, interrupting their conversation. “Theodore keeps on talking in riddles like that.” I held out my hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  The turtle wiped its hands on its apron, and then turned to shake my hand. “Nice to meet you too. I made cookies enough to feed a small country, so please, go ahead.”

  I sat down on one of the empty chairs, and grabbed a cookie. Just as I was about to lift it to my mouth, I caught the rabbit and the turtle both staring at me, wide-eyed. “What is it?”

  “You can’t just sit there.” The rabbit shooed me away, almost pushing me off the chair. “Pick another chair.”

  “What? Why?” I stood up, slightly taken aback.

  “That’s the Duchess’s chair,” the turtle explained.

  “Oh, I see.” All right, that made sense. If the Duchess had a preferred chair, then it would probably be a bad idea to go sitting in that exact chair, if I wanted to make a good impression on her. Not that I knew why I would want to make a good impression, but someone named the Duchess sounded important.

  I picked another chair to sit down, but the moment I pulled the chair back, the rabbit and turtle both gave me a pained expression.

  “What now?”

  “That’s the Duchess’s chair,” the rabbit said. “You’ll need to pick another one.”

  “No, that was the Duchess’s chair.” I pointed at the first chair I had tried to sit down in. “They can’t both be the Duchess’s chairs.”

  “Why would a Duchess only have one chair?” the rabbit asked, as if it made perfect sense that someone would claim more than one chair as their own.

  This was getting annoying, but I told myself I had to stay calm. Different places could have different customs, and who was I to judge if some foreign Duchess claimed more than one chair?

  Moving to the next chair, I had already pulled it back, when both the rabbit and turtle flung toward me, shouting, “no!”

  “What is it this time?” I snapped at them. “Did the Duchess claim this one too?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” the turtle replied. “Sorry for the inconvenience.”

  I stared at them, putting my hands on my hips. “You’re meaning to tell me that the Duchess claimed all these chairs.” I indicated the rest of the mismatched group of chairs. “Are there any chairs that are not taking by this mysterious Duchess?”

  The turtle and the rabbit exchanged a curious glance between them. “Well…” the rabbit said.

  “There is one,” the turtle finished, pointing at a chair standing to her left.

  I walked over to the chair and let out a loud sigh. “Really?”

  “I’m afraid so,” the Lone Turtle said. “But why don’t you taste a cookie?”
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br />   Reluctantly, I sat down on the miniscule chair. The chair seemed made for dwarves, or leprechauns, or maybe small children. It didn’t have a back to lean against, and it had four legs painting bright pink. I felt like I was at a children’s tea party, forced to play along.

  My legs reached higher than my head as I sat on the chair, and I couldn’t even look above the table.

  “This is highly uncomfortable,” I complained.

  “Cookie?” The turtle asked.

  I opened my mouth to reply, but the turtle took the opportunity to shove a cookie into my mouth. “Taste them, they’re delicious,” the Lone Turtle said.

  Sulking, I ate the rest of the cookie, while contemplating how I had found myself in such a peculiar position, sitting on a children’s chair at a tea table in the garden of a turtle with an uncanny obsession for pink.

  “When will the Duchess arrive?” I asked my companions, while the turtle poured me some tea.

  “Oh, she will be on time,” was the cryptic response.

  I widened my eyes at the rabbit, annoyed that while the Duchess obviously took her sweet time to arrive, the rabbit had urged me to hurry up every chance it got.

  Theodore wisely ignored me, and sipped some more of his tea. “This is delicious, like always. Too bad the others couldn’t join us.”

  “Would be a fine party then, indeed,” the turtle said as he sat down on his own chair, towering above me.

  “The others?” I asked, but before the rabbit could respond, a trumpet sounded in the distance.

  “Ah, that will be the Duchess!” Theodore clapped his paws together and jumped on top of his chair. The turtle did more or less the same, except it crawled rather than jumped.

  Since the two animals were standing on their chairs for the Duchess’s arrival, I figured I better do the same. The peculiar little chair wobbled from left to right, and I had trouble keeping my balance.

  The trumpets increased in volume as the guards of the Duchess were approaching. I prepared to see a bunch of stern-looking guards, armed, maybe in medieval attire, protecting the Duchess.

  What I didn’t expect was that rather than guards, the Duchess was accompanied by a marching band.

  The trumpets were only the beginning. Drums, cymbals, tubas, they all passed the revue, marching past the front yard of the turtle’s home. The members of the marching band were a variety of animals: the elephants played the tubas, giraffes played the trumpets, a lion was handling the drums. Was the Duchess part of a circus act or something?

  The band stopped moving forward, and continued marching in their stationary spots, repeating the same tune but louder and louder.

  I cringed, looking at the rabbit and the turtle. If any of them put their fingers in their ears, so would I. Unfortunately, my two new companions only added to the noise by starting to march themselves, on top of their chairs.

  I tried once, nearly toppling over my kiddie chair, and then decided marching wasn’t in the cards for me.

  The noise swelled and swelled until I thought I was going to go deaf for sure. Then, as it reached its crescendo, the noise abruptly stopped, with a loud “bam” “bam” “bam”.

  The rabbit and turtle promptly launched a hand-clapping salvo, shouting “Bravo!”

  A figure sneaked through the marching band, toward the fence surrounding the turtle’s garden. At first, I only saw the person’s silhouette, but as the band parted to let her through, the Duchess came into view.

  There was no doubt in my mind this woman was the Duchess. She had a wig on her head almost as tall as I was, a white monstrosity shaped in the form of a swan. Her dress was light pink, with a tight-fitting bodice erupting into an enormous waist. If she wanted to, she could probably hide her entire marching band under that skirt, considering how big it was.

  The woman had white make-up on her face, and she resembled one of those ladies from the history books who hung around in Versailles, having lavish parties, drinking, and sometimes losing their heads.

  One of the marching band members, a giraffe, pushed open the fence, allowing the Duchess to step through. With her head high, the Duchess strode toward us. She held a fan in her left hand, which she waved about every two minutes, although it wasn’t hot outside today at all.

  “Is this her?” The Duchess asked, by way of introduction. She clapped the fan shut and pointed it right at me.

  “This is her,” the rabbit said. “Please, Duchess, please choose your seat.”

  The Duchess held her chin even higher, so high it was almost comical, and moved from chair to chair. Some chairs, she dusted off with the fan, looking for any speck of dust or dirt. Others, she just looked at solemnly, as if the chair reminded her of some great evil that had transpired.

  After taking several minutes to inspect each chair, an agonizingly slow process that made me want to hit her over the head with the fan, the Duchess turned toward me, pointed the fan at me again, and said, “I want that chair.”

  I probably stared at her as if she was crazy, because really, you’d have to be crazy to pick this tiny, awkward-fitting chair over any of the other chairs at the table.

  Rabbit and turtle shot me menacing looks, as if I had chosen the one chair the Duchess wanted, and had done so on purpose.

  “Uhm… Do you want me to move chairs?” I asked, secretly hoping she would say yes.

  “Is she dim-witted?” the Duchess asked to my companions.

  The turtle gestured at me to stand up, which I did. “Please, Duchess, have my chair.” I indicated she could sit down, while I moved away, toward a different chair.

  The Duchess promptly sat down, which looked even more awkward than when I had done it. Wearing her bombastic dress, she could barely sit on the miniscule chair.

  I had to resist the urge to burst out laughing, but I didn’t think a Duchess would be too pleased if I laughed at her, especially not right in her face.

  “Good. Tea, please,” the Duchess said.

  The turtle immediately followed her command, pouring the Duchess some tea.

  Lifting up the tea cup and bringing it to her lips, the Duchess said, “You must have some questions, Alice-who-is-not-Alice.”

  “Uhm.” I folded my hands in my lap, not quite sure how to behave. I probably had a million questions, starting from what the heck Wonderland was, to why she had a marching band existing only of exotic animals, why she was called the Duchess, to why on God’s green earth, she had decided she wanted that chair when literally any chair in the known universe was more comfortable than this one? “I do.”

  “I will not answer any of them,” the Duchess decided before she sipped her tea.

  “Uh…” I looked from her, to my new turtle and rabbit friends.

  Theodore shrugged. “Questions are useless anyway.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. First, he dragged me here under the premise this Duchess wanted to meet me, making me believe she would at least answer some of the bazillion questions I had, and then when she refused, he brushed me off just like that.

  “Instead, I will tell you a story.” The Duchess put her cup of tea down, opened up her fan, and waved it back and forth. “A story about a Queen.”

  I moved to the edge of my seat, hanging on her every word. “A Queen?”

  “Long before, in a different time, yet a similar time, there was a King.” Strange how it was supposedly a story about a Queen, but started out with a King… Still, I decided it was better not to interrupt and to just listen to the Duchess’s tale.

  “The King wanted to unite two kingdoms. For this purpose, he had decided his oldest daughter, the Crown Princess, should marry the Crown Prince of a neighbouring kingdom. Their union would end a feud that had been brewing between the families for generations. It would bring peace and prosperity to Wonderland.” The Duchess paused to sip from her tea.

  “But the Princess was self-absorbed. She didn’t care for anyone but herself. So, when the time came to meet the Prince, he couldn’t love her and sh
e couldn’t love him, because she already had one person and one person only to love: herself. What followed was war.”

  The rabbit and the turtle hung their heads. A tormented, haunted look flashed across Theodore’s features, and I wondered what the rabbit had seen during this war, what horrors he had witnessed.

  “The war ripped Wonderland apart. Some fought for the world as we knew it, others fought for a brave, new world. No matter what side you fought on, we all lost in the end,” the Duchess said while she patted the Lone Turtle’s back. “For at the end of the war, only one stood victorious: the Queen of Hearts.”

  I wanted to ask who this person was now, but I wisely kept my mouth shut, listening to the story.

  The Duchess traced the edge of her cup with her finger. “The Queen of Hearts commands an army of playing cards. She rules over all of Wonderland with an iron fist, and when anyone does something she doesn’t like, she has their heads chopped off.”

  I grimaced, unable to stop myself. “That’s gruesome.”

  “It is.” The Duchess nodded. “In her madness, the Queen of Wonderland arranged for a Tournament. Since she has no heirs, she wanted to choose her heir through such a Tournament. Many of us thought it wasn’t such a bad idea, judge someone on their merit and skill rather than on what they inherited through their blood. Many people tried their luck.”

  The Duchess paused for dramatic effect, before she looked me straight in the eye and said, “They all died.”

  “What? Everyone?”

  “You’re like an annoying echo.” The Duchess lifted her hands to her head, making circles on each side, right above her ears, something my mother always did when she had a headache. “Yes, everyone. Else I wouldn’t have said ‘they all died’, right? Then I would’ve said, ‘some of them died’.”

  “Grammar is key,” the rabbit chimed in, probably hoping to score some points with the Duchess.

  “So, of course, no one wanted to participate in the Tournament anymore,” the Duchess said. “But the Queen rather enjoyed it. Watching people die in agony is far more amusing than having their heads chopped off. So, the Queen decreed that from that point onward, all citizens of Wonderland who were imprisoned, would have one of two options: first, choose for the simple method of execution-by-axe, or two, choose to try their luck in the Tournament.”