Red Queen (26 page)

This magic—not precisely stolen, but not her own either—had lodged inside her own power like a piece of dust inside an oyster. Instead of turning into a pearl, however, it had grown
into an ugly black cancer pulsing at the bottom of her magic, keeping her from reaching her true potential.

The Red Queen's fire torched it out of existence. It was foreign, and there was no room inside Alice for more than her and the Queen.

Suddenly, Alice felt herself swell with magic all through her, magic that tingled in her eyelashes and the tips of her fingers and into her very teeth.

The crown's heat cooled, the fire spent. Alice's lungs seized and she rolled to one side, coughing out black ash. Her mouth and throat were parched from the grit, but her body felt cool and light. She'd carried around quite a load for a long time, it seemed, without ever knowing it.

Alice wiped her mouth with her sleeve and sat up, wishing for a nice, cool glass of water. To her intense surprise, one appeared at her elbow. She drank it down thirstily, looked at the glass and said clearly, “I'd like another, please.”

Immediately the glass refilled with water. She resisted the urge to clap like a child. Magic was wonderful,
wonderful
. If only she'd been able to do this in the scorched plains, she could have saved Hatcher and herself a great deal of suffering.

“I'd like an apple, please. A lovely red, juicy, sweet one.”

The apple popped onto her lap and this time Alice did laugh out loud. She felt giddy, wondering what she might do with all of this magic now that she had it.

Are you quite finished?

Alice frowned. Cheshire sounded so severe, like he was scolding a naughty child.

“I've never had magic properly before,” Alice said, wrinkling her nose. “Can't you let me enjoy it for a moment?”

Not while those children are dying behind you. I, personally, do not care, but I imagine you do, and you will be tiresome if one of them dies while you could have done something about it.

The giggly, giddy feeling washed away in an instant as Alice sobered. She'd forgotten about the children, just for a moment, forgotten where she was and what she was doing and why she was wearing this crown in the first place.

Brynja's knife had fallen while Alice rolled about on the floor. She picked up the knife now, and put down the glass, and placed the apple in her pocket. Then she stood and faced the children again, and this time she knew what to do.

Alice knelt before the first child, a boy of perhaps eight or nine, putting her hands on both of his cheeks. His eyes were very dark and he had dark curly hair, unlike all the other children who were fair and blue-eyed like Brynja and most of the other villagers. This boy was the thinnest of the lot, and when Alice touched his face she was sure his bones would slice through the skin at any moment.

She sent a little of her magic inside the boy, searching for the White Queen the way the magic of the Red Queen's crown had found and destroyed the remnants of the alien magic inside herself. Alice was scared to send too much power inside the boy.
His frail body seemed to be already at the limit of what it could bear.

This magic, though, wasn't hidden like that other power had been inside Alice. It practically waved a flag at Alice and dared her to come for it.

The trick, though, was not to hurt the child. The fire should be cleansing, not killing.

Carefully, Alice touched the White Queen's magic with her own.

To her astonishment, the White Queen's magic recoiled, a living snake afraid of the mongoose. Alice chased after it, through the boy's bone and blood, until she caught it, and set it aflame. It went up like a scrap of paper to a match, gone in seconds.

Far away in the castle there echoed a scream of pain and fury.

The boy closed his eyes and gave a long, long exhalation. Alice thought,
I was too late. He was too weak; the magic was the only thing keeping him alive.

Then he inhaled suddenly, gasping for air like a drowning man finding the shore. His eyes blinked open again, and he croaked out, “Who are you?”

“I'm Alice,” she said, and handed the boy the glass of water. “And who are you?”

“I'm Ake,” he said after he'd taken a long draught of water. “Have you come to take us home? Are you a queen?”

Alice touched the crown on the top of her head. “No, I am not. But a queen is helping me.”

“Is she a good queen or a bad queen?” Ake said, his eyes suddenly fearful.

“A good queen,” Alice said.

She did not add,
At least until she sees her sister again.
Alice had felt the anger in the magic that chased the White Queen from this boy, a suppressed rage that only waited for its proper moment to flower. She hoped that when the time came, the Red Queen would remember that Alice wished to remain Alice, and not only to be a vessel for the Queen.

The magic inside Alice flickered, as if to say,
I remember.

Alice went down the line of children, slowly breaking each from the White Queen's enchantment. She asked each child its name, hoping against hope that one of them would be Eira, but none of them were. They did not know the fate of the other children taken from the village, but they assumed they had died.

Alice expected the White Queen to storm into the room at any moment, to stop her, but she did not. Everything here was not as she'd expected at all. Was the Queen wasted with the magic, as Bjarke had been, and unable to fight Alice? Was she waiting for Alice to come to her instead? Was she simply too frightened to face the woman who had ignored her illusions? Or was the White Queen hiding from the Red, the sister she had murdered so long ago?

With each one Alice not only freed the child but destroyed some of the White Queen's power, so that when Alice finally faced her she would be weakened.

Weakened,
Alice thought,
and wounded, like a bear with a thorn in its paw. And bears are very, very dangerous when they are in pain.

This thought came not from herself but from the consciousness inside the Red Queen's crown. Alice knew nothing of bears, having lived her whole life in the City. She remembered seeing a bear only once, a circus bear that danced when its master whipped at it. Her nurserymaid—one of many, not the one who'd taken her to the zoo nor the one who'd taken her to the docks, but some other one, a silly girl with yellow curls and dimples, who looked rather like a china doll and was about as useful—had taken her for an outing somewhere and they'd stopped to see the bear turn on its hind legs while a boy played a hurdy-gurdy.

The bear had seemed terribly sick and sad to Alice, and she remembered wishing that it would turn on the man who hit it so cruelly. Her nurserymaid had grown bored quickly and tugged Alice away, and a few moments later they'd heard people in the crowd screaming. Alice looked back over her shoulder as they turned the corner but could not see anything.

I did that,
she thought now.
I made that bear turn on its master. I did it with my wish.

Wishes were dangerous things in the hands of Magicians, and that was why her mother had told her to be careful, though she hadn't bothered to tell Alice she was a Magician. Alice had only been a little child, and hadn't known what she could do.

The voice of one of the children brought her back to herself.

“What are we going to do now?” the girl asked. She was a very little one, perhaps five years old, called Alfhild. She appeared relatively healthy next to some of the children who'd been there longer, but her face was pinched into a frown that
made her look very grown-up, with all of the worries and troubles of a grown-up.

“Well,” Alice said, thinking. She couldn't very well take them all along with her while she went to face the Queen. Hatcher was somewhere about too, and she wasn't going to leave without him.

“What if you stayed here for a little while longer and had a lovely picnic, until you felt stronger, and then we can all go together back to the bottom of the mountain to your parents?” Alice asked, trying to present the idea of staying in this dusty room where they'd been left for months as a wonderful treat.

“And what are you going to do?” Alfhild asked.

Her eyes were so serious it made Alice's heart break. Children should not be so sober.

“I have to find a friend here in the castle,” Alice said.

“You can't leave without your friends,” Alfhild said.

“That's right,” Alice said. “But I don't want to put you in danger while I look for him, and I think you'll all be safer if you stay together here.”

“With a picnic,” Alfhild said, and glanced around the room doubtfully, as if to say that a picnic was obviously not in the offing.

“Yes.” Alice smiled, and some of the giddy pleasure of magic came back to her as she waved her fingers behind her back. She stepped aside, sweeping her arm out like a stage performer. “With a picnic.”

Alfhild gasped, and so did the others. It was a very nice picnic, if Alice did say so herself. There was a cold chicken and pickles and eggs and strawberry tarts and slices of thick bread with a slab of golden butter to spread on them. There were several pitchers of lemonade and neat little plates and napkins for all the children, and soon they were all sitting about laughing and eating as though they had not been possessed by the magic of a mad witch only moments before.

Adults, Alice reflected, could learn something from the way children bounced back from horror like little rubber balls. Even Ake already had a pink flush in his face, even if a shadow lingered about the eyes. She hoped—no, she wished, wished with all of the magic in her—that soon he would be home in the arms of his loving mother and father and would never think of this place again. The shadow would pass from his eyes and he would grow up straight and strong, and he would have children of his own and his cheeks and belly would grow round with happiness and love that would endure forever.

This was a powerful wish, and one that she settled on all of the children there. It used up some of her magic for good—she felt that, could feel it leaving her, for happiness and joy are hard things to come by when you have seen the monster in the dark. It was, she thought, worth any loss to her, to give these Lost Ones the thing she had never been able to have herself—peace.

She did not want to break the spell of their joy, so happily were they chattering, so she quietly pulled the door closed and
placed a spell upon it that protected them from the White Queen's vengeance. They would stay in that room, eating and laughing and playing, until Alice returned for them.

Now she must find Hatcher, for Alice was certain that every victory weakened the White Queen more. If Alice could break the spell upon Hatcher, especially after killing the goblin and freeing the children, then the White Queen would surely see that she could not win. Alice wore the Red Queen's crown, but more than that—Alice was herself, and she had power of her own. She'd done so much already without the crown.

Remember that,
she told herself.
Remember that you have succeeded without the crown, and that when this is over (
she had to believe it would end, and that all would end as happily as it could for her and Hatcher; she had to believe that
), you won't need the crown any longer.

Alice opened another door in the passageway, and another and another. There was another stair at the end of the hall, and Alice resigned herself to climbing it. She did not know why she was so certain Hatcher was up instead of down—it was a very large castle, after all, and there were many rooms Alice had not explored—except that she felt drawn there. She'd learned to trust her instincts instead of fighting them. She'd spent so much time in the hospital not trusting her own mind, not believing her own memories. Now her certainty grew with every step—Hatcher was above her, and so was the White Queen.

The stair curved about, and there were little rooms at each
bend. Alice dutifully peered in all of these, finding the usual dusty hangings and abandoned furniture. Had anyone ever lived in this castle with the White Queen? Or had she built this place in hope, hundreds of years ago, expecting a court that never arrived?

It was sad to think of a lonely queen on a lonely throne, looking out over her empty hall. A queen like that might become wild and angry. She might kill her own sister and grow to love cruelty. She might torment a boy with a white deer so she could curse him for her own pleasure. There were so many things she might do, out of loneliness and fear.

But this Queen, the one waiting for Alice at the very top of the castle at the top of the mountain, was not the same as that Queen. Not precisely. It was the same old magic that killed the Red Queen so long ago, but inside a different body.

How had this Queen stolen the magic? Had she drained the blood of the old Queen as Bjarke had done with the man in the woods, taking that blood into her own body and the power along with it? It was a repulsive act, Alice thought, and this Queen had done more than that and worse. After stealing the power for herself, she had stolen children and used them to hide it. Alice should not feel sorry for her, not feel sad for a lonely queen in a tumbledown castle, for this woman was a monster same as any other Alice had encountered.

I have seen,
Alice thought,
more than my fair share of monsters. When I was a child I feared the shadows in the corners and the creaking under the bed, and my mother or my nurserymaid would
always tell me not to be silly, that there was nothing really there. Of course there was nothing really there, because the monsters were out in the wild world, and nobody told me to watch out for them.

Alice opened another door, scanned the room with the expectation of nothing and stopped.

There was a bed in the center of the room, a beautiful bed with a carved headboard and hanging draperies made of silk. Curled up in the center of the blue velvet spread, fast asleep, was a wolf.