ArchEnemy
She’d spent no more time with Alice than could fit in a single afternoon; despite the speed with which they’d become friends, for all Molly knew, the lady could have been frequently late to appointments. Still, Alice’s tardiness made her uneasy.
“I’ll check for her at the deanery.”
But Molly couldn’t remember if Alice was supposed to be coming from home. What if she came from the opposite direction and she arrived while Molly sought her in Tom Quad? She had begun to notice this need she had to protect Alice—indeed, would have been hard-pressed not to notice it after what had happened yesterday at the riverside . . .
“Look at that cute fellow!” Alice said, tossing a handful of seed in the direction of a plump duckling with black and gray feathers. “It’s a wonder his little legs can hold him up.”
“Won’t be able to by the time we’re done,” Molly said, and sprinkled seed on the ground for the drake and his fellow quackers. But then, at the upper edge of her vision, she caught sight of seekers dive-bombing toward Alice. Unthinking, she lurched in front of her friend, simultaneously whipping off her jacket and holding it spread out above her to catch one of the insect-birds before its beak could descend into Alice’s neck. The rest of the seekers swooped momentarily away as she thrust her catch downward with the motion of one shaking dust from a blanket. She didn’t watch the creature hit the ground but cartwheeled a circle around Alice, trapping the returning seekers one by one in her jacket and throwing them hard to the ground until the sky was clear, the threat gone and—
Alice and everyone else at the riverside stared at her in openmouthed incredulity. Molly scoped the ground for seekers, because they probably weren’t dead, but there were none to be seen, just wads of crumpled paper and splintered wood.
“Do you have something against kites?” Alice asked.
Homburg Molly: more like her father, who’d made a similar mistake years before, than she would ever know.
“Kites?” she repeated, only now understanding that what she’d thought seekers were nothing more than paper-and-wood constructions being flown by nearby schoolchildren whose leisure she had violently done away with.
“Where did you learn such acrobatics?” Alice asked.
Molly was at a loss to answer, but Alice yelped with laughter and took her hand and together they ran from the river and the children’s accusatory faces.
Twenty-five past the hour.
“I’ll give her a few more minutes,” Molly said.
Their second meeting had taken place at the tea shop on St. Aldate’s, where, over a pot of estate tea, Alice had spoken at length of her parents and siblings, and of a gentleman named Reginald Hargreaves, whom she was starting to fancy, and who, she was fairly certain, fancied her. With anyone else, Molly would have been bored—envious of Alice’s close family bond probably, but bored. Except with Alice . . . to hear such mundane stuff from a lady who looked and sounded exactly like Queen Alyss Heart!
Whereas her own life had been marred by war and loss, with little of the solace offered by family, Alice’s centered around her family and had been subjected to no combat whatsoever.
Half past the hour and still Alice hadn’t . . . but here she was, running up from the direction of Tom Quad, agitated.
“Molly, you’ll never guess what’s . . . a man is dead! At the house! A man with . . . I hardly know how to . . . with knife-fingers who tried to harm mother and father and Lorina and Edith! The authorities are there, but my father has no idea who the man was! No one’s ever seen him before! Why he would ever want to harm the gentlest, most caring people in the world, I can’t . . . but that’s not the strangest part! No, the strangest part is who saved them!”
“Who?” Molly asked. A man with “knife-fingers”? She knew of only one.
“Me! Well, it wasn’t me, of course, I wouldn’t know the first thing about fighting anyone, let alone a devil like that! But it was me, a woman utterly like me in every way! It’s all so, I don’t know, impossible! I just came to tell you I can’t spend the afternoon as we’d planned! I must get back, in case . . . oh, in case I don’t know what! It’s all so dreadful, so dreadfully impossible, so . . .”
Alice was already hurrying back to the quad, and Molly had fallen in step with her, alert for threats; if Ripkins had come to Earth, other assassins might be lurking. But why would Ripkins want to harm the Liddells? A woman utterly like me in every way. Wasn’t that what she had said?
At the quad, Alice squeezed Molly’s hand and left her, passing through the curious Oxfordians milling outside the deanery, and now that Molly had a moment to herself—
A woman utterly like me in every way. She had definitely said it. Which meant . . . could it be . . .
“The queen,” Molly breathed.
She would ask Dodgson. She would relate what had happened to Alice Liddell and ask him what he thought her words meant. But when she pushed open the door to his rooms, all intentions left her, because seated across from the reverend—
Alyss Heart.
CHAPTER 51
IT HADN’T been the easiest thing to do, to direct her steps to Reverend Dodgson’s door. Running from Carfax Tower, the object of unwanted stares, Alyss slipped into an alley, where she could be alone, invisible, while she subdued her panic and waited for her clothes to dry, determining her next move.
Something must have happened to the Pool of Tears.
Because puddle portals didn’t just evaporate en masse like that. She again tried to sight a portal with her imagination’s eye, discovered herself completely incapable of remote viewing; she was without imagination. But unlike the first time she’d been robbed of her power, she didn’t feel even a temporary release from responsibility, from duty. The most—the worst—she had ever done, ever could do, was ignore her responsibilities as queen and White Imaginationist. “Release,” as she knew too well, was not possible. But her next move? How could she make any move without the Pool of Tears?
Am I never to see Dodge again?
She couldn’t bear the idea; much less would she be able to tolerate the reality. How could she live, not just without Dodge, but without knowing what would become of Bibwit and Doppelgänger, the walrus-butler, Mr. Dumphy, and so many others?
Don’t give in to fear and despair. Think.
Yet if the oracles had had anything to do with the Pool’s disappearance, her situation could very well be hopeless. It was the most probable explanation, wasn’t it? The Pool of Tears, like imagination, was gone. And how had Arch known of the Liddells? There were, to be sure, a few possibilities as to who could have told him of the family, but none made as much sense as the caterpillars; they always knew everything. Only the caterpillar-oracles had power and vision enough to be behind it all. But even so, even supposing the oracles were behind it all . . .
Blue my enemy? I can’t . . . I don’t accept it! Think.
She couldn’t go back to the Liddells’ without facing questions from them and the police, the answering of which would accomplish nothing. Her answers wouldn’t be believed. What about Prince Leopold, the man who’d once almost become her husband? No, she’d gain nothing there: She’d have to get through too many royal attendants to reach him, and besides, he wouldn’t recognize the committed Heart she currently was.
Then she remembered Dodgson.
If she had a list of people from whom she’d most like to seek aid, Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson would not have been on it. She didn’t know how he might help her, but Homburg Molly was supposed to be with him. And there was no one else.
Opening his door to her, the reverend was not as taken aback as he would have been a fortnight earlier, the outfit of a Wonderland farmer’s maid distinct enough to inform him that his visitor was not Alice Liddell but Queen Alyss Heart.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, after they’d stood several moments in silence.
Sorry, he said, for failing to acknowledge the truth of what she’d confided to him all those years ago. Sorry for
taking a young girl’s confidence in vain and turning her memories into absurd little books. He had never been sorrier in his life. He could never have known that her bloody tales of Wonderland hadn’t been fiction—to believe such would have required a different man—but ignorance of his crime did not excuse it, and every hour he spent with Homburg Molly served as chastisement for how he’d betrayed her.
“And where is Molly?” Alyss asked, not quite able to keep regal authority from her tone or manner.
“S-she is . . . ah, well . . . she should b-be returning soon. Very soon, I’m sure.”
Sitting at his modest tea table, describing her predicament, her anger toward this nervous man broke. If she wasn’t able to completely let her guard down with him, she could not allow past hurts and prejudices to get in the way of present necessities.
“Something’s happened to the Pool of Tears,” she concluded.
“And the Heart Crystal?”
“I assume so, since I can imagine nothing.”
“Nor I. H-has anything such as this ever happened to the Pool of Tears before?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
An awkward silence threatened, but Dodgson began to speak of Molly. His inhibitions fell away in his enthusiasm, and by the time the girl opened the front door, Alyss knew everything there was to know about her extraordinary talent in math and logic, which Dodgson believed might rival the girl’s Milliner skills.
“Molly,” Alyss said, standing.
The girl didn’t move. She glanced from Dodgson to the hall and seemed on the verge of running away, but then a breath of resignation filled her. She stepped forward and prostrated herself. “My queen,” she said.
“Please, Molly, get up. We don’t need such ceremony between us, especially now.”
Alyss embraced her as she would a sister. Overwhelmed, Molly nearly sobbed: for the queen to treat her like this after everything! She tried to explain how she’d wanted to be forgiven for contaminating the Crystal Continuum, for being weak-willed and doubtful of the trust that had been placed in her; she wanted to explain how she used to want this forgiveness even though she hadn’t thought she deserved it, but that now, while she was no less regretful of her actions, she was willing to accept the burden of what she’d done. And yet she couldn’t speak; her mouth wouldn’t work.
“I know,” Alyss said. “I know.”
Finally, Molly managed, “You were at the Liddells.’ ”
“I was. But I wouldn’t be here now if there were a portal anywhere in the city. There is no way back to Wonderland.”
Molly felt an unmooring inside of her: No way back? But that meant her father could never return for her, that they could never—
“At least we have each other,” Alyss sighed.
Dodgson cleared his throat. “And me.”
“Ah.” The queen smiled with a sadness that might have reached back generations. “Let’s hope—no, let’s believe—we are enough.”
CHAPTER 52
WONDERLAND’S ORACLES sat upon their respective fungi, the vibrant blue, green, red, orange, yellow and purple of their spongy mushroom thrones contrasting sharply with the faded colors of the wise, riddle-tongued creatures themselves. The oracles’ colors had begun to fade with each passing lunar hour, their skin becoming ever more dried and shriveled. Prophetic larvae of immodest proportions: They who had been ageless and suffered no debilitating physical change since before there was such a word or concept as “queendom” were at last showing the effects of aging, victims of an accelerated process that kept time with the dying Heart Crystal.
Ignoring their hookahs, the caterpillars sat wearily, as if sitting were itself an exhausting enterprise. Forlorn, distrustful, they blinked milky eyes at the tarty tart caldron before them—the third caldron delivered to them by Arch’s intel minister who had been ordered to regularly supply them with fresh treats.
“So tasty and yet so dangerous,” the once orange caterpillar said of the tarty tarts.
“You first,” the vaguely yellow caterpillar insisted to the formerly red caterpillar.
“I couldn’t possibly think of partaking before Green,” the formerly red caterpillar demurred.
“It would be bad form to help myself before Blue has had a nibble,” said the barely-green-any-longer caterpillar.
The not-quite-blue caterpillar grumbled and said, “I’m stuffed,” though he hadn’t eaten a tarty tart in hours, his digestive system having lamentably grown tarty tart intolerant.
The more-ashen-than-purple caterpillar, in a painstaking, arthritic semblance of his earlier enthusiasm, betook himself to the caldron, brought a squigberry tart to his mouth, bit into it and—
“Ow!”
Two of his teeth had fallen out, stuck in the tarty tart.
“What did I tell you?” the once orange caterpillar said. “So tasty and yet so dangerous.”
“Obviously!” the vaguely yellow caterpillar said to the barely-green-any-longer caterpillar.
The barely-green-any-longer caterpillar crinkled his face. Not sure he understood what his fellow council member was about, he said questioningly, and in a single rush of breath, “I was going to mention that the king has done what Everqueen requires but which we could not tell him to do outright because, wary as he is, he wouldn’t have done it, and so we arranged circumstances in hopes that he might figure it out on his own, which he has since done, thinking he is catching us unaware with his doings?”
“Obviously!” said the vaguely yellow caterpillar. “He believes himself to be a strategist without equal!”
“The risk to ourselves was necessary,” the not-quite-blue caterpillar reminded them. “Although there are possible futures that hold the worst for the Crystal and this council, the only path toward establishing Everqueen is through the events we have put into motion and on account of which we currently suffer.”
“And now it is up to Alyss Heart.”
“And the girl.”
“Yes, the girl! Homburg Molly!” said the others.
“And one other,” the not-quite-blue caterpillar corrected. “The council forgets a possible future that now appears imminent as a result of our intervention.”
“I see so many futures, I can’t keep them straight!” complained the once orange caterpillar.
“Welcome to old age,” said the barely-green-any-longer caterpillar.
“You never could keep them straight,” the formerly red caterpillar said to the once orange caterpillar.
The more-ashen-than-purple caterpillar, not knowing what else to do with his two broken teeth, returned them loose to his mouth, after which the eyes of every council member went wide as they all envisioned the imminent future scenario to which not-quite-blue had referred, and which involved none other than—
“Redd Heart!” the oracles cried simultaneously.
CHAPTER 53
THEY HAD maneuvered nearer the Iron Butterfly, as close as Redd thought they could get without being betrayed by the unsubtle tread of their jabberwocky, obscured from sight by burial mounds made in earliest time.
“You have a quarter lunar hour to get in position,” Redd said.
Without a word, Alistaire Poole and Sacrenoir galloped on their jabberwocky to opposite flanks of the Iron Butterfly. For the next quarter lunar hour not a word was spoken, though Vollrath several times opened his mouth, on the verge of speech, only to shut it again at the sight of Redd’s unwelcoming demeanor, her unrelenting focus on the Butterfly. She was, the crosshatched creases around her downturned mouth declared, not to be distracted with trifles, and Vollrath’s fear for his life was a trifle.
“It’s time,” Redd said, just as—
Booooshhhhkrrrchhchchchk!
An orb generator exploded on the sunrise side of the Butterfly, which Sacrenoir, positioned behind a burial mound in the area, had set off. A knot of Astacans on the Butterfly’s sunrise side started toward the explosion site.
Raaaarghghgh!
On the Butter
fly’s sunset side, a jabberwock bucked and roared and spewed flame. The beast had been prodded into the open by Alistaire Poole and was supposed to tramp toward the megalith, though it was evincing more interest in the burial mound the assassin was hunkered behind.
“Idiot beast,” Redd muttered, watching from her hidden vantage.
She scratched two scabs of skin from her jabberwock’s back and stuck them in her ears. Vollrath and The Cat did likewise. Redd pointed her scepter at Siren Hecht and the assassin unhinged her jaw and let out a head-splitting scream as—
She and her murdering cohorts spurred their jabberwocky into a run behind their mistress, stampeding toward the Iron Butterfly. Doomsines, Awr, and Astacans fell to the ground in pain. Some covered their ears with dirt, ammo cartridges, whatever was near, trying to block out the wretched peal of Siren’s voice. Others pounded the ground or thrashed in agony. Redd and her assassins weren’t without pain themselves since jabberwock skin did not completely prevent Siren’s scream from penetrating their skulls. Which was why the assassins went round to every writhing tribal warrior and did away with them as quickly as possible. Within the Iron Butterfly, they split off in every direction, eager to rid the place of Arch’s followers and leaving no one alive, while Redd herself stalked the cobwebbed corridors, stabbing the sharp end of her scepter into every Doomsine warrior and intel minister unfortunate enough to fall in her path. By the time she passed into the Iron Butterfly’s innermost sanctum, Siren had stopped screaming. One by one the assassins entered the cavernous room to find Redd surrounded by the dead and dying, staring with disgust at a giant knitted thing taking up the center of the floor.
“I’m right next to it but feel no stronger, no Power of Proximity,” Her Imperial Viciousness said.
The assassins didn’t understand, but Vollrath stepped up to the knitting and started to pull at it.
“Help him!” Redd scolded.
Before she could grow more impatient, Vollrath and the assassins had the cocoon of caterpillar silk bunched on the floor. With the Heart Crystal freed, Redd extended her arms and lifted her face to its glow, absorbing its energy through every pore. And so she remained, her assassins in silent awe until—