Until then, she would let them worry. They were the ones who had threatened to disown her, after all.
There was no going back.
She was desperate, but she was also hopeful.
Gathering her voluminous skirt, Cath stepped up to the mirror, inhaled a deep breath, and stepped through.
She was back in the meadow, caged in by towering hedges on every side. The grass was speckled with crimson and gold and the sugar-molasses scent filled Cath’s lungs.
No sooner had she stepped forward than she heard footsteps behind her—Jest and Hatta, with Raven perched on Jest’s shoulder.
Hatta lifted an eyebrow and looked mildly surprised, perhaps that Cath was desperate enough after all. But all he said was, “Haven’t anything for warmth, Lady Pinkerton?”
She glanced down at her ball gown and bare arms. “I was not expecting an adventure tonight, and my shawl was taken by the castle courtiers.”
He grunted, as if this were a weak excuse, and brushed past her, moving toward the well.
Jest took hold of her hand. The bells on his hat jingled extra loud in the stillness.
Hatta knocked his cane three times against the well’s rocky ledge before leaning over and smiling into its black depths. “Hello, Tillie.”
Two small hands appeared at the top of the well, followed by a child’s gaunt face. She was ghostlike, not more than six years old, with white-silver hair that cascaded down her back and skin the color of milk thinned with water. Her eyes, in contrast, were coal black and far too big for her face.
“Where have you been, Hatta?” Tillie said, pulling herself onto the wall and perching there on her knees. She wore a white muslin dress that was covered in filth, as though … well, as though she’d just crawled out of a well. “We’ve missed you.”
“I’m sorry, love. It’s been a busy time. Are your sisters around?”
“They’re at the bottom, racing boats made from two halves of a lady’s boot.” Tillie grinned. Both of her front teeth were missing. “Is that Jest? Ah, and Raven as well. How do you do?”
“Hello, Tillie,” said Jest.
“Nevermore,” greeted the Raven.
Tillie’s gaze drifted to Catherine. “And you are the girl he brought before. The one he finally kissed and kissed.”
Cath blushed, but no one seemed to notice.
Hatta cast his eyes upward. “I could have gone without that knowledge, love.”
Tillie dropped her head to one shoulder and stared hard at Cath’s skirt. “Your ankle is repaired.”
“Yes. Thank you for the treacle,” Catherine stammered.
“It is not mine.” Tillie held her gaze. “But then, it isn’t yours, either, though pay for it you did.” Her lips pulled upward, but the smile made no attempt to reach her impenetrable eyes. Cath wondered if that youthful face had ever seen a true smile.
She was unsettling. A child who carried the sorrow of an old crone.
“Tillie,” said Hatta, “we need to get through the Looking Glass again. Will you open the maze for us?”
“The Looking Glass again, again,” Tillie singsang. “How many times have you passed back and forth now, Hatta?”
“Too many to count, love. But this is important.”
“You have said that too many times to count.” She pouted. “Always one is coming and one is going but none are ever, ever staying. Won’t you come down to the bottom and race boats with us a while? I’ll fix you a cup of piping hot treacle.”
“That’s a kind offer, but I’ll have to accept it another time. For now, we must get through the maze.”
“All four of you?” Tillie asked.
Hatta nodded. “All four of us.”
The child heaved a great, heavy sigh. “My sisters and I are ill, Hatta. We have been dying a long time, and must ask for payment to sustain us.”
“I understand. What is the price for our passage?”
Tillie listed her head, her black eyes staring up at him as if she were in a trance. “Lacie wants a feather, black as blackest ink. Elsie wants three joker’s bells that twinkle, tink tink tink. And I shall take your time, dear Hatta. Five minutes will do, I think.”
Hatta glanced back at their group before asking, “Nothing from the lady?”
Tillie’s hollow gaze fell on Cath and she had to force herself not to shy away. Slowly, the child shook her head. “She has nothing we want. Not yet.”
Then she grinned again, that same eerie, gap-toothed smile.
Cath stood by silently while they made their payment. A tail feather from Raven and three bells torn from Jest’s hat, all dropped into the well. Hatta went last, pulling out his pocket watch and turning the hand forward, five minutes. He didn’t seem happy about it, but neither did he complain.
Tillie nodded once payment was made and vanished back into the well. Cath tensed, but there was no scream and no splash down below.
“You are running out of minutes, Hatta.”
They turned. A new girl sat cross-legged on a fallen, moss-covered log. She was identical to Tillie, with the waxen skin and eerie dark eyes, only her silvery hair was cropped short like wild leaves.
“I know, Elsie,” said Hatta. “You keep taking them from me.”
She scrutinized him, unblinking, for a heartbeat too long, before she allowed a close-lipped smile. “How much longer will you run from Time?”
“For as long as I can.”
A third voice sang, “Time would never find you here.”
Cath spun again. The third girl stood beside the wall of hedges, again a mirror image of her sisters, although her shining hair had grown all the way to her ankles. Huge, bottomless eyes watched them across the glen.
A door was now set into the hedges behind the third Sister, an enormous wooden structure with black iron hinges. Tillie stood beside it, digging her bare toes in the dirt and gripping its enormous handle.
“You could stay with us, you know,” said the third girl.
Hatta shook his head. “I’m sorry, Lacie, but I can’t.”
“What about them?” asked Tillie, pointing her chin at Cath and Jest and Raven.
Cath was glad when Jest answered, as she didn’t think she could speak. “I’m sorry, but we must go back to Chess. We have a role to play.”
“Oh yes,” said Elsie. “Two Rooks, a Pawn, and a Queen. That’s how the riddle begins, but howsoever shall it end?” She started to laugh.
Cath shivered.
“We shall see what role you have to play,” said Tillie.
“Once you reach the other side,” added Lacie.
Tillie pulled open the ancient door. Its iron hinges creaked and the wood grated against the moss-covered stone. Cath could see nothing beyond but more hedges.
In unison, the Sisters murmured, “We will all greet fate, on the other side.”
Cath took a hesitant step forward, with Jest gripping her hand and Hatta a mere step away. As they approached the door, she saw that there were stairs on the other side, a short flight of crumbling stone steps that dropped down into another forest meadow. Overgrown hedges pushed in on either side, making the stairwell too narrow for her and Jest to walk side by side.
She followed Hatta through, lifting her skirt to keep from tripping on the uneven stones. Leaves clung to her hem. Shadows pushed in from the sides.
The moment they passed through, the massive door slammed shut, making Cath jump. Jest squeezed her shoulder and his presence alone warmed the chill from her bones.
They reached the bottom of the steps and Cath paused. Her brow furrowed.
She glanced back, but the stairs were gone. She was staring at the empty wall of an enormous hedge, with no doors and no exits.
She turned again, her heart pattering against her sternum. They were still in the same forest glen with the same treacle well.
But this time, the Three Sisters were already waiting.
CHAPTER 43
ELSIE, LACIE, AND TILLIE sat on the edge of the well sip
ping from porcelain teacups. They still wore their plain white dresses, though the meadow seemed colder than before and Catherine thought they must be freezing in such flimsy fabric.
The oddest thing, though, was that the three girls were now wearing masks. An owl. A raccoon. A fox. The masks were tied to their heads with ribbons and only the girls’ enormous eyes could be seen through circular cutouts—so black and fathomless it was like looking through the holes into nothing.
Catherine was grateful when Jest’s hand found hers again, lacing their fingers together.
It was a strange thing, to stare across a peaceful forest glen at three little girls and feel that she’d stepped onto a battlefield.
“Hello,” said Hatta, with a calmness that was offset by his tense shoulders. “Tillie. Elsie. Lacie.”
The girls did not move. They held their teacups in one hand and their saucers in the other, their pinkie fingers pointing at matching angles.
“We’ve been practicing,” said the Owl.
“We’ve been drawing,” said the Raccoon.
“We’ve seen many things,” said the Fox.
They sipped their tea in unison.
“I have given you five minutes of my time,” said Hatta. “Show us, so we might be on our way.” It sounded like a script, like a tired conversation he’d recited too many times.
The Sisters were quiet for a while, their empty eyes gazing, before Lacie the Fox set down her teacup and stood. Her long hair clung to her calves as she stepped away from the well. The silvery ends were sticky with treacle.
Jest and Cath released each other’s hands so Lacie could pass between, splitting them like an ax into a log. She reached the wall of hedges and pushed her hands into the brush. Grabbed and pulled.
The leaves and vines fell away, revealing a wall of stone. It was covered in drawings. Some were faded and smeared, while others still glistened from wet ink. The Fox stepped back and beckoned them to approach.
Cath stepped closer, scanning the array of drawings. A marigold. A mosquito. A menorah. A milk bottle. A branch of mistletoe. Mousetraps and mirrors and memory.
“See our new work?” said Lacie the Fox, gesturing to a group of drawings, and Cath noticed that she had Raven’s quill tucked behind one ear, dripping ink down the back of her neck. Her fingers were smudged with recent ink as well, though Cath was sure they’d been clean before.
Catherine followed the girl’s gesture and felt the blood drain from her body.
The drawing showed two men. One was on the ground, surrounded by a pool of darkness that she assumed was blood. His head had been severed clean from his body. A three-pointed joker’s hat lay on the ground beside him.
The second man stood in the distance—enormous and cloaked in an executioner’s hood. A bloodied ax was in his hand.
A memory darted through her thoughts. It was the same ominous shadow that had followed her across the castle’s lawn on the night she met Jest. The shadow that always attached itself to Raven.
She recoiled, pressing a hand over her mouth. “Why?” she stammered, knowing that Jest was right beside her, alive and well, and Raven was his friend and would never hurt him. Or did she know that? The picture was detailed enough to insert a sliver of doubt into her thoughts. “Why would you draw something so terrible?”
“Cath…” Jest’s voice was strained. He wasn’t looking at the same drawing. Her gaze followed his and she saw—
Herself. Sitting on a throne, wearing the crown of the Queen of Hearts and gripping a heart-tipped scepter in one hand. Her expression was cold as stone.
Her mouth ran dry. “What is this?”
“It’s … it’s you,” he said.
She shook her head. “They’re just drawings. Terrible drawings.”
Beneath that image was another, this one of Hatta. He sat at a long table scattered with broken teacups and cracked plates. Rather than surrounded by friends and music and laughter, the chairs around the table were empty. His hair was unkempt, his hat tilted to one side, dark circles beneath his eyes. His smile was crazed.
“Why would you show these to us?” Jest growled, his hands tightening into a fist.
The Fox folded her hands and recited,
One to be a murderer, the other to be martyred,
One to be a monarch, the other to go mad.
“That last one will be me,” said Hatta. He’d taken off his top hat and was fiddling with the decorative ribbon. Cath didn’t think he’d looked at the wall once. “Always the same fate, the same warning. As you’ll see, I’ve not gone mad yet.”
He said it as if this were proof that the drawings were nothing but harmless whimsies. Cath wanted to believe that, but Hatta seemed more shaken than he wanted to admit.
They were leaving Hearts, she told herself.
She couldn’t become the Queen of Hearts once they were gone.
Maybe she would become a monarch—Jest wanted her to become the new White Queen after all. Maybe that’s what the Sisters meant.
But there was no mistaking the crown topped with the heart finial in the drawing.
“Your future is written on stone, but not in it.”
Catherine spun around. Elsie the Raccoon stood arm’s reach away, the expressionless mask and hollow eyes peering up at her. Cath hadn’t heard her approach.
“It’s only an idle warning, then?”
“It is a truth,” said the Raccoon. “But one of many.”
“Many, many muchness,” said Tillie the Owl, her voice like a sad trill. “Eeenie meenie miney mo.”
“Choose a door, any door,” Elsie continued. “They all lead to this truth. It is a fate, and fate is inevitable.”
Catherine shook her head. “If they all lead to this, then how can we avoid it?”
Tillie tittered. “Time cannot follow you here, so he cannot follow you out. To put it most simply, you mustn’t go through a door.”
The Sisters all started to laugh, the sound shrill and bubbling. Cath hated the sound.
“Fine, we won’t go through any doors,” said Hatta. “May we go?”
“Patience, patience,” said Elsie.
“Don’t lose your head,” said Tillie.
They turned their heads together and snickered.
“We drew your grandmother too, a long, long time ago,” said Elsie the Raccoon, drawing closer to Cath’s voluminous skirt. “The first Marchioness of Mock Turtles. Do you wish to see her?”
“You mean the Marchioness of Rock Turtle Cove,” said Cath, and though she shook her head, she still followed to where Lacie was pointing and saw a drawing of a beautiful girl surrounded by turtles and lobsters. Her many-greats-grandmother, recognizable from a portrait that hung in her father’s library.
How old were these girls? How long had they been here, drawing the future in the key of M?
“We have one minute still,” said Tillie. Her sisters came to join her, all surrounding Cath and staring up at her. “Won’t you tell us a story?”
She gulped. “I’m not a good storyteller like my father, or grandmother, or … I’m sorry. You’ll be disappointed.”
“Then we will tell it,” said Tillie.
Elsie curtsied. “A gift to take with you through the Looking Glass.”
“Another truth we’ve seen,” added Lacie.
They began to recite in a haunting voice, like synchronized puppets:
Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater,
Had a wife but couldn’t keep her;
He put her in a pumpkin shell
And there he kept her very well.
Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater,
Had a pet and couldn’t feed her;
Caught a maid who had meant well—
What became of her, no one can tell.
Cath and Jest both clapped politely when they had finished, though Cath was disturbed by the poem. She’d never heard the rhyme before, and thinking of Sir Peter tightened her stomach.
She looked at Hatta, who was still clutching th
e brim of his hat against his stomach. Tapping his fingers, impatient. She wondered if this happened every time he wanted to pass through the Looking Glass. If he gave up five minutes of his time to look at their drawings, listen to their tales, humor them as well as he could.
He wasn’t humoring them much now, but then, Cath knew it would drag on her after a while too. It was difficult to be polite when you wanted to run away.
“Are you sure you wish to go?” asked Tillie the Owl, cocking her head to one side. Cath kept expecting the masks to take on expressions—to smile or cry—but there was nothing but blankness about them.
“Or do you wish to play?” said the Fox.
“We could fix you some warm treacle,” added the Raccoon.
Jest shook his head. “We must go. But thank you for—for the poem, and for showing us your drawings.”
“Fine,” said the Raccoon, sounding put out by the refusal of their hospitality. “We’ll open the maze for you. You’ll want to go right. Right is always right. Except when left is right, naturally.”
“Do you remember the way, Hatta?” asked the Owl.
Hatta tipped his hat to her. “Like the way to my own hat shop, Tillie.”
Tillie cocked her head—like a real owl with her humongous eyes. “Your hat shop,” she said, quite plainly, “is on wheels.”
“Don’t get lost, Hatta,” warned Lacie the Fox.
“Don’t lose yourself, Hatta,” added Elsie from behind her Raccoon mask.
“Or anyone else,” added Tillie with a secretive laugh. “Shall we draw you a map of the maze before you go?”
Hatta shook his head. “I know the way.”
The girls nodded and spoke again in unison. “Farewell, then. So long. Good eve. Murderer. Martyr. Monarch. Mad.”
Cath shut her eyes, her skin writhing. She wanted to get away from them. She was suddenly as desperate to get away as she’d been to get here in the first place. She found Jest’s hand and squeezed and was grateful when he squeezed back.
Then she heard the chirrup of three jingling joker’s bells. She opened her eyes in surprise, but the girls and the bells were gone. The glen fell silent. Not a breath, not a breeze.