ArchEnemy (33 page)

Dodge let his dagger fly—
wi-wi-wi-thimp!
—and even before it pierced Blister, killing him instantly, The Cat had disappeared.

They splashed from the water and landed on the floor of a vast well—all that remained of the Pool of Tears. Far above: a circle of sky no larger than the mouth of a wine bottle. Alyss immediately tingled with the increase of imagination that came from being in the same world as the Heart Crystal.

“Sit back and hold tight to the rail,” she told Molly.

“Sit back and—?”

Something bumped the girl behind the knees, knocked her to a sitting position. She was next to Alyss in a flying machine for two. A silver rail ran the width of the seats, securing her and the queen in place. Behind them, a shaft rose up, supporting the coptering blades that carried them swiftly out of the crater and into the Wonderland sunshine.

“Look!”

“It’s Alyss Heart!”

The cliff overlooking the crater was still lined with Wonderlanders feeling the loss of loved ones who, without a Pool of Tears, could never return to Wonderland. Alyss landed the flying machine a little way from the cliff’s edge.

“Where did you come from?” some asked.

“How did you . . . ?” asked others, pointing at Alyss and then into the crater.

“Is there really a Pool of Tears?” still others asked.

“There is,” Alyss said in answer to the last.

The news caused the Wonderlanders to cry afresh, not in sadness but joy. Because if the Pool of Tears existed, if inter-world travel was possible, then they might see their loved ones again after all. The Wonderlanders’ happy tears rained down into the crater even as one of them, an admirer of the House of Hearts, expressed dismay that Alyss was not at the Iron Butterfly.

“The Iron . . . ?” Alyss said, directly casting her imaginative eye to that oldest of Wonderland structures, where she saw chessmen and Heart Cards among the welter of clashing soldiers—
Dodge! Bibwit!
—surrounding it. And inside the Butterfly: Redd Heart, Vollrath, the Heart Crystal. She scanned for Arch but couldn’t locate him.

She had an idea, wouldn’t know if it was brilliance or suicide until after she’d brought it to fruition.
If it’s even possible
. She couldn’t allow herself to be seen again. Not yet. Which meant that she couldn’t protect Dodge as he fought at the Iron Butterfly, couldn’t add the strength of her imagination in support of the Alyssians.

Arriving at the land beyond the Whispering Woods with Molly, Alyss imagined her conjured flying machine back into millions of microscopic particles. She needed the Power of Proximity as much as possible and crouched behind a hobblebush, a grenade’s toss from the Iron Butterfly. About to make use of all the imagination she possessed, she noticed Molly’s restlessness. Looking out through drooping branches, the girl’s eyes were skittering from one pocket of fighting to another, her hands active with shadow-moves, hinting of what she’d do were she amid the violence.

“I have something for you,” Alyss said and held out her hand, in which a homburg took shape, solidified.

Molly grabbed it as if it were a long-lost friend, gave it a flick; it flattened into a knife-edged shield.

“You could probably also use . . .” Alyss said, and Molly found herself outfitted with a Millinery backpack.

In front of the hobblebush: a Three of Hearts about to make the ultimate submission to a Four of Clubs’ mauler rifle. Molly sidearmed her homburg shield at the Club soldier and, running after it, shrugged the corkscrews and blades of her backpack to the ready. Alyss watched as the girl saved the Three of Hearts, watched her spin, kick, somersault, tumble, punch, and wing her Millinery weapons at the lesser-skilled, so very like her father in every move she made.

Her father, Hatter Madigan, who’d sighted Molly while twirling with activated belt sabers through a gauntlet of Doomsine warriors. How had she come to be there? his expression seemed to ask. Where had she found her homburg? He and Molly battled their way toward each other, and then—spinning, kicking, somersaulting, tumbling—more than held their own against a too-numerous enemy force.

Seeing father and daughter together, up against this too-numerous enemy, Alyss was reminded of something and . . .

At the limbo coop situated in the remotest of the Clubs’ land holdings, where Mutty P. Dumphy walked through a dirty lane, an Alyss construct appeared.

“Now, Mr. Dumphy,” the queen’s proxy said. “Now is the time for imaginationists to rise up!”

The tinker didn’t need to be told again. Protected in a bubble of deflective energy, he ran from tenement to tenement, calling all imaginationists to take up their arms against imprisonment.

“Rise up and imagine again!” he shouted. “Fight! Live!”

Word spread, and in limbo coops throughout the territories belonging to the House of Clubs, a similar scene played out: Alyss constructs urged the prisoners to rise up, and Club cards not diverted to the Iron Butterfly were overwhelmed by imaginationists fighting their way to freedom.

Alyss, in the land beyond the Whispering Woods, had meanwhile started to concentrate, focusing her thoughts on a pair of objects and devoting all of her power to their creation: High above the Iron Butterfly, obscured by a layer of clouds, two orb generators came into being—generators ten times the size of ordinary ones but imbued with the strength of a hundred. Fully formed, they dropped in a vertical line like falling suns, dropped toward the Iron Butterfly’s inner sanctum, where Redd, carried away with the annihilation of petty beings, wouldn’t have guessed what was coming even if she’d known her niece was in Wonderland. That Her Imperial Viciousness used her imagination to keep Arch’s forces and Alyssians from raiding the Butterfly was a given. That she used it to protect herself and her proximity to the Crystal was also a given. But that she should have been shielding the source of her power itself . . . ? She would not have dreamed that any imaginationist, let alone one as powerful as Alyss, would direct violence at
it
.

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.

T
HE 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.”