by Eva Chase
“Perfect.” A little shiver of excitement ran through me. Maybe I didn’t know how we were going to displace the Queen of Hearts completely, but I felt so much closer to saving those prisoners. When I told Theo what Unicorn had offered, he’d have more ideas to build on those plans. We could make this happen.
“Is that all for now?” Unicorn asked. “I would like to get in a bit of a run. On my own, if you don’t mind.” His tone turned a bit haughty, maybe to cover his embarrassment about how he preferred to run, more animal than man.
There was one piece of the larger scheme I’d been wondering about since seeing the new tiger-ish Knave in the old shark-ish one’s place. And I didn’t know when I’d see Chess next to ask him. He might not even have the most accurate information, since it’d been quite a while since he’d chummed up to the Diamonds.
“Just a couple more questions,” I said. “About the Queen and her claim on the throne. The Queen before her, her mother, she isn’t around anymore, is she?”
Unicorn shook his head. “Our current Queen ascended on her death. Unfortunately picking up too many of her practices and adding awful new ones of her own.”
“There’s a King of Hearts too, isn’t there? And they have some children—heirs.” When the Spades had talked about the murdered prince, they’d called him the Queen’s “youngest” son.
Unicorn let out a snort. “The King is good at standing for portraits and saying encouraging words in commanding tones, and not much else. Sometimes I wonder if she’s had him beheaded and pearled, he’s so dull. And the children… There seems to be more squabbling between her and them and amongst themselves than there is cohesion. I’d imagine you can divide and conquer easily enough once she’s out of the picture.”
“They don’t have any special powers or weapons or whatever I should know about?” If the Queen had found the magic to capture Time, who knew what else we might face?
“Hmm.” Unicorn’s brow furrowed in an uncannily humanlike way. “I’d say they’re all relatively useless. She obviously thinks so—that’s why she was so set on having another, and why losing the young prince cracked her up. I don’t know that she’s even thought of who will succeed her, she’s been so busy stewing over that loss. Although it is hard to know for certain, given that she keeps at least one of them locked up.”
I blinked at him. “Locked up? Her own kids?”
He looked abruptly wary again. His feet sidestepped nervously as we continued our amble around the field. “I’m not sure how many even know about the one. I was simply—if she knew I saw—it was an accident, you know.”
What, did he think I was going to tattle on him to the Queen?
“Of course it was,” I said in the most soothing tone I could manage. “And she won’t find out. What did you see?”
His jaw worked for a few seconds as he worked up to the answer, his gaze shifting straight ahead. His voice dropped so that even the Red Knight at his post on the other side of the field wouldn’t have been able to hear him.
“There’s an inner courtyard, one I shouldn’t have been in. It was a long time ago, just before she trapped Time. She came out with a princess I’d never seen before—it must have been a princess, because she called the Queen ‘mother.’ A young woman, not much older than yourself. It was the strangest thing. The Queen was fretting about her attempts to get with child—all failed so far—and the princess started talking as if the new prince were already born and partly grown. The Queen told her to stop, and then she said something about the palace walls falling, and…”
He trailed off with a sickly expression. A fresh prickling of nausea was filling my own stomach. Talking as if the new prince were already born.
“What?” I said. “Then what happened?”
Unicorn ducked his head. “The Queen struck her, right across the head, back-handed with all those heavy rings, so hard the poor thing fell. There was blood everywhere, and… The Queen hustled her right out of the courtyard, and I never heard another thing about it, never saw that princess again. She must still be locked away in the palace somewhere. If the Queen hasn’t killed her since.”
The nausea twisted up through my chest. I stopped walking. “Where did the Queen hit her? Exactly?”
Unicorn shuddered, but he raised his hooved hand and tapped me gently on my left temple at the edge of my hairline. Right where Mirabel’s scar still marked her pale skin.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Theo
“You were right,” Dee announced as he ambled into my office, his red hair looking even more starkly vivid amid the white walls and furnishings.
Normally I enjoyed being right about things, but I had the feeling this was one of those occasions when I’d have been better off wrong. “About what?” I asked, getting up from behind my desk.
“Rabbit and the looking-glass,” Dee said. “Caterpillar must have set up an arrangement with the Queen. Our long-eared friend hops his way over to the palace and comes back with the goods.”
Damn. That knowledge didn’t help us any. The only way home I knew of for Lyssa still lay deep within the palace walls. Even my inventions weren’t likely to get us that far, especially now that the Queen would have her guards extra vigilant after our recent break-in.
Even a few days ago, I might have felt a little happy in the midst of my frustration—that I didn’t have to face the possibility of Lyssa leaving just yet. Remembering that, my jaw clenched.
She deserved a real choice. She deserved options. Somehow or other, I was going to give her them.
And if she was given the option to leave and she stayed anyway, then we could both be sure she was where she truly wanted to be.
“Thank you for following up on that lead,” I said. “Dum is still gathering intel on the shifts in patrol?”
Dee nodded. “You know my brother. Check everything and then double-check just in case. He’ll probably be around in a few hours. Did you need me to handle anything else in the meantime, boss?”
“I could use some more singe-powder, if you know where Dum usually picks that up,” I said. “And see if you can’t track down Chess in the meantime. I’d like to talk to him.” And find out why in the lands he seemed to be making his disappearing act a permanent show. Cheshire had always had some odd quirks, but I wouldn’t have expected him to pull a fade when we were on a verge of either the greatest crisis or the greatest victory the Spades had ever been a part of.
“Aye, aye!” Dee gave me a cheeky salute and headed out the door.
I’d barely had time to sit down when the elevator’s notification system informed me, “Lyssa is arriving alone.”
I sprang back up and walked over to the door to meet her. My heart started to thump off-kilter as I waited for my first glimpse of her beautiful face. It’d only been a few hours since I’d last seen her, right before she’d left this morning. I’d spoken to her dozens of times before that over the days before. But one night had shifted the balance entirely.
The way she’d held her ground in the club even when the guards had started to turn on her. The way she’d stood up to them even then. The way she’d talked to me afterward. Shouldn’t a queen be ready to defend her people?
I wasn’t worthy of her, not as I was now. I wasn’t sure I was worthy of much in the face of that devotion. She’d proven in one moment that she was braver than I’d been my entire life. How many sacrifices had I stepped back from and let others take on so I could protect my secrets?
And I still hadn’t come up with a solution that I could stomach.
Lyssa hurried in the second the elevator door opened, her eyes wide with an anxious glint and her cheeks flushed as if she’d run at least part of the way. My spirits sank. She’d gone to her meeting with Unicorn, and this was how she’d come back?
“What happened?” I said. “Is Unicorn betraying us? Do I need to warn the rest of the Spades?”
Lyssa came to a halt, her hands clenching and releasing at her sides. She dragged in a b
reath. “No,” she said. “It’s not Unicorn. But—maybe we do need to warn people. I don’t know. I don’t know what to think. He told me something— Theo, how long has Mirabel been here in the Tower?”
Tension prickled through my body. “Since the time of the White Knight before me,” I said. “He introduced me to her, already set up in her apartment.”
“Do you know where she came from? What did she tell you about how she got that scar?”
Fuck. What could Unicorn have revealed to her? But maybe she didn’t actually have the full picture, or even the right one.
“All I need to know is that she wasn’t treated well there, and she fled after she was attacked,” I said. “Why? Did he say something about her?”
Lyssa shook her head. “Not exactly. But he said he stumbled on the Queen of Hearts once, in part of the palace that was supposed to be private, and he saw her talking to a woman who seemed to be her daughter, who was talking as if she could see the future. And the Queen got angry with her and hit her right here—right where Mirabel’s scar is.” She touched her temple, her eyes going even wider. “She could be the Queen’s daughter, a princess of Hearts. Who else could she be? It’s too big a coincidence.”
Damn Unicorn. I fought to keep my voice steady. “Perhaps it is. Would it matter that much if that’s where she came from? She’s here, helping us, not the Queen.”
“Do you know that for sure?” Lyssa said. “We have no idea—she knew we were going to the Checkerboard Plains, didn’t she? She could have been the one who passed on that information, not the guy Hatter went to see. Maybe the Queen bullied her into acting as some kind of spy. Like I said, I don’t know. I don’t want to think she’d hurt anyone, but why would she keep it a secret otherwise? We have to at least talk to her about it, find out where she stands.”
“Lyssa…” Looking at her, I felt my resolve shift. Here was my moment. Did I really want to delay the inevitable when it would mean telling so many more lies to maneuver around this discovery?
No, I didn’t. The lies I’d already told were bad enough.
Before I could decide on the right words to proceed with, Lyssa knit her brow. “You don’t seem surprised. Did you already know?”
Well, that was as good a starting point as any. “I did,” I said in a measured voice. “I’m the only one who does, as was the White Knight before me. We don’t talk about it because she came here to find a safe haven away from the palace, away from the Queen. The Queen would have Mirabel killed if she found out where she is. Only a handful of people other than me even see her, speak with her. She wants to see the Queen of Hearts fall as much as any of us do.”
“But…” Lyssa set her hand on the edge of one of the worktables as if she needed it to steady herself. “Why haven’t we been asking her for more help, then? Not future stuff, but even—details about the palace, the Queen—anyone who’s part of the family must know things even people like Unicorn wouldn’t.”
My throat tried to lock, but I wouldn’t let it. “I don’t like to remind her about that time because it distresses her,” I said. “And we don’t need to get that information from her. I know as much as she could ever tell us.”
Lyssa blinked at me. “You can’t know everything, no matter how closely you keep an eye on things or how many people you talk to.”
“I don’t know everything,” I agreed. “But I know more than probably even Mirabel does, since the Queen kept her locked away. I had free run of the palace for the thirteen years I lived there.”
Lyssa was smart. She’d heard enough to put the pieces together just from that. She stared at me for a moment, her mouth falling open.
“Theo, you—”
“Mirabel’s my sister,” I said, to avoid dragging the revelation out any longer. “I was born a prince of Hearts.”
For a moment, she just gaped. “Thirteen years… You’re the prince? The one everyone thinks was murdered?”
My mouth twisted somewhere between a grimace and a smile. “Yes. Do you want—this is a lot to take in. We could go to the other room, sit down—”
“No,” Lyssa said with a sharp shake of her head. She let go of the table to stalk a few paces across the room, then spun to face me again. She peered at my face, her brow furrowed, as if she were looking for answers in the shape of my eyes, the line of my jaw. Did she see a family resemblance now? There wasn’t much of one, thanks to my efforts at disguise and my having a different father from my older siblings.
“Tell me now,” she said. “All of it. I don’t understand. Chess said he was there, that he saw the prince’s head…”
“Was he?” A raw chuckle worked its way up my throat. “All right. From the beginning.” I hesitated, caught by the urge for something to lean on myself. It had been so long since I’d really talked to anyone about this.
“I told you before that I was born into the freeze,” I said. “That was true. My mother, the Queen—she managed to shield me from the worst aspects of her rule for a little while, but it didn’t take long before I realized how cruel and unjust she could be. I started to sneak off the palace grounds to see what people did in the city and noticed how much hardship they were facing at her hand. She wanted me to be her heir, to be ready to take the throne when her days were over, but her ideas about how to reign… I knew I couldn’t be that kind of king, and I knew she’d do so much more harm before I had a chance to change anything from the palace.”
“So you ran away,” Lyssa filled in. “You managed to convince her you’d been murdered.”
A jab of guilt ran through my belly. “I wish there’d been a better way, but I could only work with what I had. Maybe there wasn’t any way she could have believed I was dead and not blamed the Spades. I went by the executioner’s rooms every day for almost a year, waiting for a corpse to turn up that was close enough. By the time a boy did, I had to take the opportunity. I splashed pig’s blood around and bashed the face to hide the differences in features…”
Decades ago, that had been now, and I could still smell the bloody stink of the severed head, still feel its stiffened flesh against my fingers. My stomach turned with the memory.
“I did it late at night,” I went on, “so that there wouldn’t be time for anyone to notice the head missing from the chambers or any detail that would give away that it wasn’t mine before the day reset and the dead disappeared.”
“Why didn’t you reset back to where you were supposed to be?” Lyssa asked.
I smiled stiffly. “The Queen of Hearts has kept many secrets. When she imprisoned Time, she stole a small portion that she tucked away separately for her own use, if she wanted to make a permanent change around the palace. She couldn’t stand to be stuck, of course. I stole her entire remaining supply when I ran. The vase that was smashed—she kept it in there. I wanted her to think it had been loosed, that it was gone. I used it to escape. I used it to fix myself in this building overnight, once the White Knight had taken me under his wing. I couldn’t have managed without it. I thought it was going to be our key to overthrowing her.”
“But you didn’t use it,” Lyssa said, frowning. “When I came—you acted like it was something special that the changes I made and the things I touched stayed that way instead of resetting.”
“It was, then. I—I made a miscalculation. I couldn’t join the Spades right away. I’d have been recognized. I had to grow older, build my body, change my face… The previous White Knight found me where I was hiding out in the woods. He helped me stay hidden, and he brought supplies like the powder to darken my hair. He broke my nose, as little as he wanted to.”
I gestured to my face, the ache of the weeks while that injury had healed coming back to me. “He taught me everything I could have needed to know, and when enough time had passed that we didn’t think anyone would notice a resemblance to the supposedly dead prince, he introduced me as his apprentice. He was more a father than my actual father ever was. We were making plans, building our numbers. And then—”
My throat constricted.
“And then?” Lyssa prompted quietly.
“A Diamond came, tipsy on something, demanding the Inventor’s work,” I said, forcing out the rest of the story. “When my mentor told him there wasn’t time to finish what he wanted before the day flipped over, he stabbed him and left. I felt his heart stop. He would have disappeared as soon as the clocks hit midnight. I thought there was still a chance, if I could get it beating again—there are ways…”
I’d felt time spilling out around me, fluttering against my skin, as I’d pumped the heels of my hands against the former White Knight’s chest, listened for the faintest hint of a pulse, a breath, willing him to come back. That guilt dug so deep I was never going to uproot it.
“I failed,” I said simply. “I couldn’t revive him. I lost all the time I’d been preserving. I had to work with the same world everyone else did.”
“So you took his place, and you kept lying to everyone about who you were.” Lyssa’s voice was even, but her stance was rigid. She held her arms tightly across her chest. “How many years has it been? Why haven’t you stopped her?”
“I’ve been trying,” I said, but that answer sounded weak even to me. “I’ve worked behind the scenes, and I’ve kept my true role secret, because I can help more this way, Lyssa. If she found out I was alive, do you think I could fight off the horde of guards she’d send to collect me? I have a lot of faith in my abilities, but I’m still just one man.”
“You’re her son! Wouldn’t she listen to you?”
I laughed sharply. “Not for a second. Why do you think I was her heir—the youngest, the baby? All my older brothers and sisters managed to disappoint her somehow or other. She wanted to mold me into an echo of herself. I’d have scars too, you know, if she hadn’t been careful, if those wounds hadn’t reset. She whipped me to bleeding the few times I let slip something that didn’t fit her vision of the king I was supposed to become. If she found out what I’ve done, she’s as likely to take my head in an instant as listen to one word out of my mouth.”