Boooooooooooooooooooooooooooshhhhhhhhhhhchchchchchkkckck!
The first of Alyss’ generators detonated against the Iron Butterfly’s roof. The second generator, directly behind the first, plummeted through the hole made by the explosion and crashed into the Heart Crystal, but—
No second explosion. While Redd was frantic, yelling at Vollrath for an explanation, her coveted source of imagination began to throb violently, each throb causing the Crystal to grow in size and increase in brightness.
“Your Imperial . . . hurry!” Vollrath urged, yanking at a rose vine of Redd’s dress, cutting his hands on its thorns. “We must leave at once!”
“NEVER! THE CRYSTAL IS MINE!”
But no sooner did she utter the words, holding out her arms to the Crystal, than it swelled and filled the sanctum, consuming her and Vollrath entire, while—
Outside, where a number of card soldiers and tribal warriors had already been distracted by the massive orbs falling from the sky, all fighting stopped. Alyssians and Heart Cards, Doomsines and Club soldiers, assassins and mercenaries, all held off bashing and shooting at one another to stare.
It was like nothing anyone had ever seen: Where the Heart Crystal had been, a great font of kaleidoscopic energy shooting up through the Iron Butterfly’s demolished roof; a geyser of natural power, both frightening and beautiful, pushing up to the heavens, its rainbow colors and lightning-works roiling out across every gwormmy-length of visible sky.
CHAPTER 58
THE INITIAL burst from the Heart Crystal dimmed, calmed to a steady up- and outflow, a fluid column rising from the Iron Butterfly and then spreading out to blanket the clouds, extending to unknown ethereal regions, revealing—
Wonderland’s entire caterpillar council. Restored to their rich shades of blue, green, red, purple, yellow, and orange, the larvae of notable girth floated on clouds of hookah smoke, their mouths unstuck from their pipes as they stared wide-eyed at the glittering heavens.
“Everqueen,” they said as one.
A disturbance rippled through the witnesses—the remaining legions of Wonderlanders and Boarderlanders, the mercenaries recruited from Earth, Redd’s assassins. Alyss Heart had emerged from the hobblebush and was approaching the Iron Butterfly, the caterpillar council, Dodge. Bibwit scurried out from somewhere and walked along with her.
“Alyss! We thought . . . we didn’t know if . . . something’s happened to the Heart Crystal. As yet we don’t know how bad it is, which is to—”
“The Crystal’s destroyed,” Alyss said in a tone that caused the tutor’s ears to jerk back, startled, then lean tentatively forward.
“You?” he asked.
“Me,” she said.
This did little to tame Bibwit’s ears, which seemed to be trying to separate from his head as he and Alyss stopped beside Dodge, in the shadow of the caterpillar council. The guardsman turned his battle-weathered eyes from the miraculous sight of dispersing energy and smiled at Alyss. “Not looking my best, am I?”
“But you’re alive.”
She reached out her hand. He took it, interlaced his fingers with hers.
Skittish, Bibwit glanced at Alyss and the caterpillar-oracles. With an uncharacteristic lack of confidence, he began, “Wisest council, while Alyss Heart’s mistake is I assume the impetus—which is to say, cause—for this, your unprecedented appearance—”
“You have done what was required for the establishment of Everqueen,” Blue interrupted, addressing Alyss. He motioned with his two frontmost legs at the rest of the council, the legs behind echoing the gesture. “We’ve all done what has been required.”
“Yes, all done what was required,” the other caterpillars said, bobbing their heads.
Bibwit was stunned to silence.
Alyss looked to the sparkling sky. “That is Everqueen?”
The oracles again bobbed their heads.
“Imagination has been established forever,” said Blue. “You and others with imagination will have the gifts with which you were born. For those of future generations, it will be the same. Some shall be born with much imagination, others little. As it is now. But Everqueen can never be destroyed, nor the inspiration she provides lessened.”
“Possession of the Crystal corrupts,” Alyss said under her breath, remembering what Dodgson had said.
Blue puffed on his hookah and exhaled in short bursts, the smoke spelling out a single word: I-N-D-E-E-D. “Everqueen is imagination,” he said. “Imagination is Black and White. There is both or neither. Rose Heart has become part of Everqueen.”
“We pledged to help reclaim the throne!” Green exclaimed.
“And so we did!” put in Orange.
“If Rose Heart assumed we were reclaiming it for her—” Purple elaborated.
“—that was her business!” finished Yellow.
“But we reclaimed the throne for imagination!” Red clarified.
“Mr. Anders?”
It was a Two of Hearts, standing over something just inside the Iron Butterfly’s entrance. Dodge limped over and found—
A golden-haired kitten, curled up, dead, its back ravaged by razor-card slashes. He stood staring down at the creature and said nothing. Most of his life had been lived for this moment. The motivation for taking air into his lungs day after day . . . there it was, its last life gone.
He felt Alyss at his side. He didn’t much want to hear what she was going to say—that The Cat’s death wouldn’t counterbalance his father’s murder; he would get no relief or sense of closure from it. But she did the perfect thing, uttered not a word, hooked her arm under his and seemed content to stand with him as long as he wished. It was good, he thought, good and right that the vengeful part of him was dead. He had better things to live for.
Hatter and Molly approached.
“Remember that promise you made awhile back to Queen Genevieve, the one about seeing to Alyss’ care and protection?” Dodge asked.
The Milliner nodded.
“Maybe you shouldn’t worry about it so much, since I have been unofficially trying to handle it anyway. And you’ve a lot to occupy your attention, what with the re-established Millinery and your daughter . . .”
“I plan to spend as much time with my daughter as she’ll allow,” Hatter said, his eyes on Molly.
“As our duties allow,” the girl corrected, returning his look.
Behind them, Bibwit was regaling the white rook and white knight with his plentiful thoughts:
“Well, well, I don’t know that I shouldn’t chronicle this extraordinary adventure for the public archives—which is to say, in order that future queens might learn from it. I realize I’m nothing more than a venerable member of the tutor species with an unruly head of hair, but what, I ask you, is imagination if not the potential for betterment? Forever losing the chance to improve, both ourselves and Wonderland—why, in some ways that would’ve been worse than losing everything! Excuse me.”
Bibwit reached under the sleeve of his scholar’s robe and tapped the receiver node on his crystal communicator’s keypad—before, to anyone else’s ear, the device even sounded. Projecting as if from the tutor’s navel on to the air: an image of General Doppelgänger in Heart Palace.
“General, sir!” the knight and rook cried. Their commander, with the wounds he’d received at Blister’s hands visible, had looked better.
General Doppelgänger smiled in greeting. “Bibwit. Chessmen.”
“We were beginning to fear we’d lost you, General,” said Bibwit.
“Not yet, Mr. Harte. Not yet. I intend to fully recover and serve Queen Alyss as long as she’ll have me.”
“Ahem hem hum,” Blue grumbled loudly, to get everyone’s attention. “We oracles have been in Wonderland these many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many years, waiting for the time of Everqueen. Now that she’s come . . .” the oracles shone beatific faces to the sky, “... we are no longer needed.”
&n
bsp; Upon which, with astonishing speed and dexterity, each oracle wrapped himself in a chrysalis spun of his own silk. And as Redd’s surviving assassins—Siren Hecht, Alistaire Poole, and Sacrenoir—slipped away into the surrounding country, as Club Cards of high number and earth mercenaries escaped to cause trouble another day, the cocoons broke open and the largest butterflies ever seen in the queendom emerged, flitted up and away into the streaming energy of Everqueen as—
Alyss and Dodge, Hatter and Molly, Bibwit and General Doppelgänger, the Heart soldiery and white chessmen, all joined together in huzzahs.
CODA
Reverend Dodgson sat at his desk with only the ticking clock and crackling fire for company. His imagination hadn’t failed him once in the fortnight since he’d last seen Alyss Heart and Homburg Molly and, with notebook open before him, he reasoned out the answers to his math puzzles as fluently and creatively as ever. The more time that passed without harm to his creative powers, he believed, the more it signified Alyss’ victory in the war for imagination and the less chance there was of his again being accosted by Redd Heart or The Cat. Although he couldn’t know for sure. Which was why he wouldn’t throw his false starts to I, Redd into the fire. Not yet.
It was a stanza from the poem he’d published at the conclusion of Through the Looking-Glass. He had perhaps never written anything so true; for whatever else was to happen, Alyss Heart would remain a phantom in his life, a presence he thought of from time to time, but particularly whenever he crossed paths with Miss Alice Liddell. Musing thus, Oxford’s most famous bachelor closed his notebook and set down his pen for the night as—
Half a world away, a man who’d appeared out of nowhere was allowing himself to be nursed back to health by the nuns of St. Mark’s Church in New York City; a man who had once been a conquering king—at present one of Earth’s anonymous multitudes but who, with his outsized ambition, his skills of manipulation and self-promotion, would one day be as recognizable to millions of Americans as he was to Alyss Heart.
And where was Wonderland’s queen? Sharing a pot of tea with Dodge in Heart Palace’s ancestral chamber, with Bibwit Harte before her, chattering on and on and on, while the walrus-butler bumbled about the room’s perimeter, trying to be inconspicuous.
“I’m told that if one stands at the edge of the Pool of Tears and looks closely,” the tutor reported, “it’s now possible to see the water, which continues to rise as Wonderlanders refill it with tears of happpiness.”
“Happiness?” queried Dodge.
Bibwit’s ears folded once, then straightened. “Over the possibility of seeing long-lost loved ones again. I should also report, my dear, that the Clubs’ trial is set to begin next quarter-moon and Boarderland’s tribal leaders are back in their own country, hashing things out among themselves and apparently not the least concerned as to what’s become of Arch. However, I can’t help saying that no one’s quite been able to explain to my satisfaction what’s become of the king, and if he’s living . . .”
The tutor chose not to finish his thought: a rare occurrence.
She hadn’t returned to a paradise, Alyss reminded herself. As much as she hoped otherwise, she knew that in years to come the Pool would be refilled by more than a few tears of sadness. And regardless of what happened to the Lord and Lady of Clubs at their trial, there would still be anti-imaginationists in Wonderland, as there would always be Black Imagination devotees.
“What are you thinking?” Dodge asked her.
“Just that I’ll never give up on the principles of White Imagination, never stop working to secure the greatest good for the greatest number of Wonderlanders, no matter the obstacles or enemy.”
“I have tutored you exceedingly well, haven’t I?” Bibwit beamed.
“So well, Bibwit,” returned the queen, “that I won’t be remiss and ask you to stay while I attend to a personal matter of great importance.”
“Of course you won’t,” Bibwit said without moving.
The walrus-butler waddled over and put a gentle flipper to the tutor’s back, to urge him toward the door. But the learned albino didn’t budge.
“Walrus, Bibwit, would you please leave us a moment?”
The tutor glanced at the butler, who was trying to tell him something with his eyes. Baffled, not understanding, he said, “Yes, of course. I believe I have to powder my head,” and allowed the walrus to lead him from the chamber.
“A private matter?” Dodge asked.
Alyss went to him, took his hands in hers. She said his name softly, almost to herself, and then—
“I know we haven’t always agreed, and that I’ve disappointed you in some of my actions, especially recently.”
“No more than I’ve disappointed you.”
“I will always try and live up to your generous belief in me, Dodge. I’d ask for a reciprocal vow if I didn’t know the standards you set for yourself are higher than any I could request from a friend and . . . husband.” She paused, let him take in the word. “Despite my faults, will you be my husband, Mr. Dodge Anders?”
The guardsman remained silent for a maddeningly long time, then—
“Will I become your husband, the happiest man in the queendom? Yes, Alyss. Yes.”
He leaned close and kissed her—each too lost in the other’s touch to notice the figures of Queen Genevieve and King Nolan watching them from the wall’s looking glass, witnesses to a love that could only add to the wonder of Wonderland.
Frank Beddor, ArchEnemy
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