Playing Hearts (13 page)

“You’ll what? Tell your
mu–”

“No!” said Jack. “I’ll
make perishing sure you can’t use your lips to say anything else by kissing
you!”

I gazed up at him with my
mouth open for a dumbstruck moment. What was he playing at
now
? At last
I said: “You usually make a lot more sense.”

“I really can’t tell if
you’re deliberately provoking me or if you just want the chance to hit me,”
said Jack. “Never mind– look, supposing you’re right about the hat. What can
you do about it?”

“Don’t know,” I said
again. I didn’t even know if I
could
do something about it. But if I was
the Queen, with her powers and her resources, I would have put Hatter and Hare
into a possible future or past. The odds against anyone except Hatter being
able to fix something like that were very high.

“I’m sure you’ll think of
something,” said Jack. “You seem to see things differently. No, it’s more than
that: you seem to make other people see things differently. I’m still not sure
if that’s a gift or a curse.”

I sucked in a breath
between my teeth, feeling a puzzle piece click into place. I wasn’t sure
whether or not Jack meant to give me the answer—so hard to tell what was truth
and what was illusion with Jack!—but he certainly had given me the answer. I’m
not exactly sure why I did it (that was probably his fault, too) but I said:
“You’re very clever today, Jack,” and kissed his cheek.

Then I slid down onto the
floor with the hat, which made Jack protest: “What are you doing, Mab? Come
back up here at once!”

“Can’t,” I said. “I’m
Seeing things differently.”

The Queen used mirrors,
so as a precaution I used the ripply bit at the top of the hat; the piece I had
always thought of as a tiny, sideways pond. I wanted to make sure I had as
little as possible of her influencing me, and I
was
better with ripples
than with flat reflections, after all. It was just a matter of deciding whether
she would have gone for past or future, and even that wasn’t so hard. The Queen
had a predilection for future and not much affinity for the past, if Jack was
to be believed; but despite that, the easiest thing in the world for her would
have been to make Hatter and Hare themselves look at things differently. For
example, if she had encouraged Hare to think about a time before his front paw
was cut off, it would have been possible—if not exactly easy—to trap them in a
reflection of that. Hatter without his hat wouldn’t have had a hope of
defending himself. It was just a theory, of course, but I thought it was a good
one. I looked into the ripples, changing my focus to what was already past, and
what could have gone differently; and before long I saw them. Hatter and Hare
at the tea table; Hatter with the most enormous cup of tea I had ever seen, and
Hatter with both his paws. I saw myself pop out of a teapot in some surprise,
but of course I had been there that day! This time when the Queen’s carriage
began to approach, however, Hatter and Hare bolted for a hidden passage beneath
the tea-table, the teapot with me in it clutched in Hatter’s arms. It was more
of a hole than a passage, but when they dropped through it they seemed to float
rather than fall; and when at last their feet touched the bottom of the shaft,
the whole scene went back to the beginning. It was looped, playing again and
again, a minute-long clip in Underland colours.

“Hey!” I said. “Wake up,
you two! It’s not real!”

Jack said something in my
ear but I was focused on the hat and it didn’t make sense, so I ignored it.
Hatter and Hare were still proceeding in the same loop, but they looked
puzzled.

“Hey!” I said again. They
leaped into the hole beneath the tea-table despite my voice, and appeared at
the beginning again. This time they looked suspicious and a little bit worried.
At last Hatter patted his head, and finding nothing on it but hair, rather
frantically began to look around. I said “Hey!” a third time, and I thought
that Hare’s ears pricked up slightly.

“You’re not listening to
me!” I said to his twitching ears. “The Queen made you think of a way that you
could keep your paw. Now you’re trapped in a loop of past Could-Have-Been.”

“HATTER,” said Hare; “I
DON’T FEEL QUITE ALL THERE.”

Hatter fixed an intent
look on him and said: “No more do I. I’m shorter than usual, I’m sure of it.”

“WHERE’S YOUR HAT?”

“Well, where’s your paw?”
instantly replied Hatter, and I saw with a
frisson
of excitement that
Hare’s paw was very slowly vanishing. It was working!

Hare said sadly: “I knew
it was too good to be true. She’s been playing tricks again, Hatter.”

“Trick’s on her,” said
Hatter. “That was never your best paw. I suppose we’d better jump again.”

“
Don’t
jump!” I
said indignantly. “You’ll only go back to the beginning again!”

“PISH,” said Hare, almost
as if he’d heard me. “AFTER YOU, HATTER.”

And they jumped.

“YOW!” said Hare,
suddenly present, his breath warm on my face. “HATTER, WE’RE BACK. BACK TO
FRONT. AM I ME OR AM I YOU?”

“Who do you feel like?”
said Hatter, just as delightfully present. “Wait, you can’t feel with that paw,
you haven’t got it. Try feeling with the other one.”

I smiled gladly at them,
and as I did so something chattered sharply behind me. The hairs stood up on
the back of my neck, but before I could move sharp, clawed hands seized me from
behind, digging into my flesh. There were card sharks everywhere—where had they
come from?—another four pouncing on Hatter and Hare. Jack was standing by the
sofa as if he had just leapt to his feet, and the Queen stood framed by the
doorway, her skirts blood red and almost too wide to fit through.

I looked furiously at
Jack but he said swiftly: “I didn’t, Mab!”

“Jack, I’m disappointed
in you, I really am!” said the Queen. “Fraternizing with your fiancée is one
thing: consorting with this sort of scaff and raff is quite another!”

“SCAFF AND RAFF, MADAM?”
bawled Hare at the top of his lungs. “WE ARE THE ARISTOCRATS, MADAM, THE BLUE
BLO–” He stopped, his eyes bulging and his long nose twitching, and continued
with a far greater amount of decorum: “Our apologies, ma’am. We are quite out
of blue blood, but if you would care for a little of the red, we should be
happy to oblige.”

The Queen flicked him a
look of disgust and turned her eyes on me, heavy-lidded with satisfaction. “As
for you, little puddle-jumper,” she said: “I’m glad to see that you’re as
predictable as ever. It’s really much easier to plan on your arrival if I take
the precaution of capturing your friends.”

“Like dissecting frogs,”
I said. “Tweaking nerves and making the leg kick.”

“Indeed.”

“Why not just send a
card?”

“Would you have come?”

“Not for you.”

“I would
really
caution about being so rude when you have ten fingers to spare,” said the Queen
gently. “The rabble wouldn’t care to see your little face ruined, but I doubt
they’d notice a finger or two.”

I met Jack’s eyes and
found nothing comforting there. He was white and narrow-lipped. I curled my
fingers into my palms, feeling the nails press in, and said: “Why am I here?”

“The time has come,” she
said. “You’re a distraction when present and a figurehead when absent, so it
seems wise to begin moulding you as befits the prince’s fiancée. You will
remain at the Heart Castle until Jack’s twenty-fifth birthday–”

“I don’t think so,” I
said.

The Queen’s mouth
remained open for just an instant, a plump red ‘o’. I don’t think she’d
expected me to make a peep after the threat to remove a few of my fingers. Then
her lips pressed together in a squashed little
moue.
“Number Four, hold
out the girl’s hand.”

I fought, of course, but
I wasn’t anything like strong enough to stop my hand being forced out in front
of me. The Queen rustled closer, her knife chiming lightly against the silver
back of the mirror that always hung within the folds of her skirts. I was almost
certain she did it on purpose, and said a mental farewell to one or two of my
fingers, hoping it wouldn’t hurt too much.

Jack, smoothing his tie,
said: “Mother. You
know
I don’t care for mutilation.”

His stride was unhurried
but he kept pace with her just the same. He was being very carefully slow. The Queen
didn’t seem to hear him, but when she lifted the blade it was only to tap it
lightly against my knuckles.

“You’re a very fortunate
girl,” she said. “Jack has his mother’s sensibilities: he hates the ugly and ill-formed.
I don’t feel that it’s appropriate to leave you unpunished, however. Which of
your friends shall die for your insolence?”

“What do you want?” I
said quietly. Neither Hatter nor Hare would die because of me if I could help
it. “You want me to go down on my knees? I will.”

“I want to punish you.
Your bended knee helps me not at all.” She pointed at Hare with the tip of her
blade, and smiled. “This one, I think.”

I gave a strangled cry,
straining against the grip of the card sharks: then Jack, turning elegantly on
his pointy-toed shoes, was between Hare and the Queen. Not beside, or nearby,
but solidly in between them.

“Dear me!” said the Queen.
She sounded amused. “Are you going to stop me, my dear? Do remember yourself,
and do remember the rules before you do anything...
hasty.
”

Jack met her eyes, and I
thought for a bright, kindling moment that he was going to take the dagger from
her. The card sharks that weren’t gripping my arms were engaged in trying to
hold Hatter and Hare down: they fought with the strength of madness, and the
card sharks had no attention to spare for any peril in which the Queen might
stand. She herself looked down at Jack in an indulgent, amused sort of way,
unaware or perhaps unbelieving of her danger. The smile that had blossomed on
my face died in the bud as Jack held her gaze for a fraction of a moment longer
and then, looking away, stepped aside and left Hare to her mercies.

I saw the Queen’s knife
glitter but I thought it was the flash of light on her dangling mirror, and I
didn’t realise what was happening until she plunged it twice into Hare’s neck.
I barely had time to scream before it was over, scarlet arcs of blood flying in
bright relief against the black-and-white room. I felt a wet warmth on my face
that wasn’t salt tears, and my fingers lost all feeling as I strained against the
card sharks’ grip on my arms, my breath panting loud in my ears. It could have
been a gothic tableau: the Queen of Hearts, her blade naked and dripping with
Hare’s blood, standing over his prone body. The card sharks, teeth chattering
in enjoyment. Hatter howling, as mad as I’d ever seen him. And Jack, frozen
white with blood on his face and a stunned look to his eyes.

I saw the reflection of
it all in the Queen’s knife, awash with blood; and I said, savagely: “No.”

Her gaze fell so, so,
slowly, a cold understanding in her eyes, but I was already Seeing Underland
differently in the bloody blade; and in that bloody blade I froze the present
Is
and dragged it back to the past
Was
. I focused on Hatter and Hare—and
almost accidentally on myself and Jack—freezing the card sharks and the Queen
in the other
Is
that was now
May Be.
On the carpet Hare inhaled a
free breath and leapt to his paws with a giant kick of his back legs, sending
his crutch flying. There was somehow still blood all over his fur, but the
wound was gone. Hatter, who was chattering away to himself with a wild look in
his purple eyes, looked around at the others and snatched his hat back from the
frozen Number Seven.

“This is a pretty Was,”
he said, quite calmly. “Oughtn’t you to put it back where you got it from? I’d
hate to break it.”

“Mab,” said Jack, very
quietly: “What have you done?”

“I’m not putting it
back,” I told Hatter, ignoring Jack with as much iciness as if he was frozen
along with his mother. “This isn’t
Was
, it’s
Is
.”

He looked around at the
new present, poking at it with those purple eyes; and he must have been
satisfied, because he said: “A perfect fit! A delightful job of hattery.”

“Maybe not,” I said. I
had thought it was my imagination, but the Queen and the card sharks were still
moving. They were moving almost too slowly to be seen, but I was pretty sure that
they were getting quicker. They were slowly being drawn back to the new Is from
what was now Might-Have-Been. “We’d better go while they’re still too slow to
catch us. I can take us all through the bathtub if you like.”

“One is too cultured to
travel by bathtub,” said Hare, with a fierce glare. I took this to be a thank
you for saving his life and hugged him, which seemed to confuse—though it also
seemed to please—him. He made vague patting motions in the air above my head,
and said, looking perplexed: “One travels via mirror, madam. Your ears are
still too big.”

“You can use Jack’s
dressing mirrors,” I said, giving the Hare one last squeeze before I let him
go.