“But I’ve hardly s-seen her in n-n-nine years. She re-re-refuses t-to have anything t-to do w-w-with m-me.”
Hatter considered the sadness, the mournful reminiscence, in the reverend’s tone. The man was telling the truth. “Where do I find her?”
“Sh-she l-l-lives at…at the d-deanery here at Christ Ch-Ch-Church.”
Hatter was about to ask where the deanery was, but his eye alighted on a newspaper spread open on the tea table. One of the headlines caught his attention:
Lewis Carroll’s Muse Alice Liddell to marry
Prince Leopold
Alice Liddell?
“She goes by a different name?” he asked aloud, but more to himself than to Dodgson, who said nothing. There was urgency in his voice when he asked this time, “Where is the deanery?”
“In…in the n-next quad. The b-b-blue door, but…” “But what?”
“She is currently at K-K-K-Kensington Palace, prep-p-p-paring for-”
Hatter snatched up the newspaper and bolted from the apartment, scanning the article as he sprinted in the direction of London. Why had the princess taken a different name? How could she pretend to be an ordinary, soon-to-be-married young lady of Earth? He hadn’t known what to expect when he found the princess: perhaps a young woman not quite ready to fulfil her destiny, a woman who would need convincing of her own powers, in whom the bravery of a warrior queen was not yet second nature, but he hadn’t expected this.
Kensington Palace. Hatter ran toward the front gate, showed no sign of stopping. “Halt!” one of the guards ordered.
Hatter leaped, somersaulted over the gate, and dropped to a crouch, startling a young, baby-faced guard patrolling the grounds. The guard tripped, his rifle went off, and-
Hatter spun with the force of the bullet. He’d never been shot before. Incredulous, he touched the bloody wound. The guard stared at Hatter, paralyzed, unsure what to do.
Whistles were blown. The clap and patter of running feet all around. The wild, angry barking of guard dogs set loose. Hatter had little choice but to run. The bullet had hit him in the shoulder, severing tendons and ligaments, shattering bone. He couldn’t move his right arm. It hung limp, banging against his side, trailing blood. With his free hand, he put constant pressure on the wound to slow the bleeding. With difficulty, he jumped over the palace wall and hurried into a darkened street, got two-thirds of the way down it before he discovered that it was a dead end.
The pack of dogs had already closed in when three guards appeared at the street’s entrance, came forward with drawn rifles and bayonets, squinting into the shadows where Hatter stood, trapped. No doubt a dagger or corkscrew would have whistled out of the darkness into their vitals if Hatter had had no other choice. But when the guards reached the end of the drive, it was empty, deserted. They saw only a puddle on the ground where no puddle should naturally have been, the dogs growling at it until, with a few tentative sniffs, they began to lap up the dirty water.
PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT
A FTER THIRTEEN years, morale among the Alyssians was low. They languished in conditions hardly fit for mud-grubbing gwormmies. Every day brought defections and security breaches. The unspoken consensus was that a meaningful victory like the one at Blaxik would never be theirs again. Driving Redd out of Wonderland had once been a realistic vision, but the Alyssians were now reduced to a handful of splinter groups striking at insignificant targets in remote regions-an outpost monitoring jabberwocky movement in the Volcanic Plains or a weighing station for corpse-laden smail-transports at the edge of the Chessboard Desert.
Redd had made it known that she would reward those who turned traitor to the Alyssian cause. One and two at a time, Alyssians surrendered to members of The Cut and divulged the location of Alyssian
camps. The camps would be bombarded with cannonball spiders and glowing orb generators, or flattened to dust by Redd’s rose rollers-onyx tank-like vehicles with treads of black, toothy roses. Defectors were never heard from again, but Alyssians with their own thoughts of defecting chose to believe that their former comrades were too drunk on the pleasures of Redd’s reward to send word. The truth was, surrendering Alyssians were bound hand and foot, their limbs and chests slashed to spur the appetites of the flesh-eating roses, and thrown into pits where the roses ate them alive.
At the oldest of all Alyssian camps, deep within the Everlasting Forest, General Doppelganger had called together a meeting of advisers. The camp was protected by a Stonehenge of massive, intricately balanced mirrors reflecting the sky and forest, an unending vista of foliage and clouds to confuse the
not-quite-all-seeing eye of Redd’s imagination, as well as any of The Cut who happened to be dealt through the forest. The mirrors were not connected to the Crystal Continuum and had been scavenged from labor camps raided in the first year of Alyssian activity. Guards patrolled the perimeter, and a mirror keeper was responsible for maintaining the mirrors’ delicate balance, shifting them here and there according to changes in light, cloud movement, and the bloom and rot of the seasons. To the untrained eye, and unless you were directly in front of a mirror and glimpsed your own reflection-a thing not so likely, considering the complicated overlap of mirrors at myriad angles, the fragmented nature of their reflections-the camp was invisible.
“She’s offering a small portion of Wonderland, probably in Outerwilderbeastia but still to be decided, in exchange for a cessation of all rebel activity,” said a plump fellow wedged into a chair and wearing the long mantle common among young men of suit families. “We will be free to govern ourselves unmolested, but we must give up the name of Alyssians. We won’t have to swear our loyalty to Redd or the ways of Black Imagination, but we won’t be able to practice White Imagination either. She has proposed a summit to work out the details of the agreement.”
“Why’d she pick you to deliver the message?” asked the rook. If he’d been face-to-face with Redd, he would have known how to take advantage of it. Redd would have found the Alyssian response to her offer at the point of his sword.
The plump gentleman adjusted his white powdered wig. He was none other than Jack of Diamonds, now grown into this flabby, overfed man. His prominent rear ballooned out from both sides of his chair, tussocks of flesh swelling from between the armrests and seat cushion.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I was powdering my wig when her image appeared in my looking glass. She must have thought I’d know sense when I heard it, since I come from a ranking family.”
“It sounds suspicious,” the knight said. “Are you sure one of Redd’s seekers didn’t follow you here?” “Please. I’m not new to the ways of subterfuge and secrecy, you know.”