Playing Hearts (6 page)

“
Engagement
,” I
said bitterly. I still had nightmares about that night. “She took my blood. People
don’t swap blood when they get engaged. They swap rings. Why did she mix our
blood, anyway?”

Jack shrugged easily, his
shoulder briefly revealing and then obscuring the room again. “Just an old
tradition. Nothing important. But it does mean something to her. She’s
determined to see us married.”

“You don’t have to do
what she tells you to do,” I said. “You’re almost grown up.”

“The rules are the rules,”
said Jack. “I have to follow the rules. What I
do
with the rules, now:
that’s a different matter entirely. We’ve got a better chance if we join
forces. You promise that you won’t disappear, promise that you’ll come back to
marry me when it’s time, and I’ll make another distraction so you can get out
before Mother Dearest comes back.”

“You said we could run,”
I said. “I remember. That first time, when she mixed our blood, you said that
we had a lot of time for running.”

“I was wrong,” said Jack,
with something of a grimness in his voice. “There’s no future in running.
Literally. Mother Dearest’s Mirror Hall was quite...
clear
...on that.”

“What if I want to marry
someone else?”

Black-flecked eyes came
to bear on my face. “Who do you want to marry?”

“I don’t know, I’m only
twelve!”

“Well, then! Promise!”

“No,” I said. “You’re not
very nice and if I break my promise later on that means
I’m
not very
nice.”

“I’ve never been very
nice and I’m not likely to begin now,” said Jack. “It’s best if you give up on
that. I am very good at staying alive, however, and that should count for
something.”

“I’m not going to
promise,” I said in dislike.

“Well, I’m not going to
get you out,” said Jack, shrugging elegantly. “You’ll have to find your own way
out.”

“I
will
then!” I
hissed, pulling the door sharply shut. I heard the slight thump and Jack’s
exclamation as he was pulled off balance, and smiled. Serve him right.

Sir Blanc, who was
watching me with some anxiety, said: “Dear child, I am very much afraid that
I’ve led you into a very sticky situation.”

“Can we put your wits
back in?”

“I regret to say that we
cannot. It requires someone in possession of a competent hand with a needle:
perhaps a dressmaker.”

“What,
sew
them
back in?”

“It is the only way,”
said Sir Blanc simply. “A method tried and true for shadows, wits, and
reputations.”

“What about a hatter?
Could a hatter do it?”

“Forsooth, were it
The
Hatter, certainly.”

“All right,” I said,
thinking very quickly. It wouldn’t be long before the Queen joined the party,
and Sir Blanc and I couldn’t still be here when she arrived. “So we just have
to get out of here first.”

“Indeed,” sighed Sir
Blanc. He sat himself down desolately on the Queen’s coffee table, gazed
soulfully around the room, and gave every sign of breaking into a sad song at
any moment.

“I have an idea,” I said
quickly. I had found myself in front of the tiny ice-vent again. “But you’ll
have to be very quiet. It’s trying to wriggle away and I need to grab it while
I can.”

Sir Blanc looked mildly
hopeful. That was good. The more cheerful he was, the less likely he was to
burst into doleful ditties. And I really did have an idea—or at least,
part
of
one—that was doing its best to wriggle away between the cracks of my mind.
Wriggle? No,
ripple
. That was what my mind was catching on. I had watched
the Hatter and his ripply hat somehow change things in Underland, and I had
changed things myself. Somewhere at the back of my mind was the idea that if I
could See Things Differently today, too, perhaps I could use the ripples to
change things again.

“I need water,” I said to
Sir Blanc.

“I myself am a little
parched,” he said. “Unhappily, I see no water here.”

“What about that?” I
asked, pointing the crystal carafe of
Drink Me
.

Sir Blanc’s brow creased.
“I caution against indulging in that libation dear child. Dear me, no! It
declares: ‘drink me’. I have not all my wits about me, but that is a risk I am
not willing to chance.”

“I don’t want to drink
it,” I said, pouring a measure of the clear liquid into a smooth, transparent
glass. I thought I saw Jack’s face briefly in it, but the swirl of liquid did
away with it quickly. I carried it carefully over to the ice-vent and nestled
it into the red carpet while I tore off the grating with my fingertips.

“I hesitate to point this
out, my child, but I fear that you are marginally too large for such a mode of egress.”

“I know,” I said, and
went back to my glass. If I lay on my side in the carpet and looked at the vent
through the liquid, it looked much larger. Perhaps if I could See it
differently, it would
be
different.

“Go through the vent, Sir
Blanc,” I told him, my eyes steadily on the enlarged vent. There was a series
of clankings behind me as he stood again, then a tiny armoured Sir Blanc was
climbing into the vent in front of me.

“Astounding!” he said,
his moustaches quivering with excitement. “Who could have imagined!”

“I’ve seen Hatter do it,”
I said, pink and gruff with embarrassment. “It’s nothing special. Keep going,
Sir Blanc; I’m coming.”

Everything went a bit
wobbly when I got up. For a sick-making moment it was impossible to tell
whether everything had gotten bigger or if Sir Blanc and I had simply gotten
smaller. I seemed to walk past a giant glass of liquid to climb into the vent,
and the carpet was huge and lumpy behind us; but when we dropped back into the
main vent system from the smaller outlet it was no larger than it had been
before. The wits, on the other hand, were still wriggling as vehemently as
before, and their squeaks seemed to echo around the vent as loudly as Sir
Blanc’s clangings. This in turn made Sir Blanc shift uncomfortably, so I sent
him on ahead to see if the mechanical horse was still waiting for us and
explored the vents a little more thoroughly while I was at it. It had occurred
to me that with Sir Blanc’s wits still not available to him, I would have no
one to take me to the Hatter and Hare. It was my fault, of course. I’d assumed
that Sir Blanc’s wits would be able to go right back in—though now I came to
think of it, I did wonder
how
, exactly—and that he would be able to lead
me to Hatter and Hare. Instead, he would need Hatter just to sew his wits back
in, and neither of us had the slightest idea of where to find Hatter. Jack, on
the other hand, almost certainly knew where Hatter and Hare’s tea table was in
relation to the Castle, so I spent some time shuffling about in the vents until
I found his room. The grating I found would be a little more challenging to get
out of: it looked down on the room from a rather high ceiling. It wasn’t
exactly a room, though– it was a whole
lot
of rooms. Jack had a whole
suite to himself. It was bigger than most of the foster homes I’d stayed in. I
had a certain amount of satisfaction in thinking that to exit I would have to
bounce down on Jack’s perfectly made bed. I gazed at it enviously from behind
my grating, taking in the black and white marbled floors, the white rugs
throughout, and the heavy blackness of the plain rectangular bed. There wasn’t
a flash of red to be seen in the entire suite.

A card man came in while
I was still gawking and made me jump, but he was only there to run a bath,
which seemed like a good thing. If Jack was having a bath run, it wouldn’t be
long before he showed up. I’d better return to Sir Blanc while I could. If I
could be sure he was in a safe place, wits and all, it would be easy enough to
wait here until the party was over and Jack returned to his suite. Accordingly,
I made my way swiftly back through the ice-vents, making turn after carefully
remembered turn until my feet were on the rungs of the ladder that led back
down into the ice chamber. Sir Blanc greeted me happily, and as happily agreed
to wait for me outside both castle and city streets. We had left his horse at a
small way-station about half a day’s journey from the gates. It wasn’t much
more than a roof and a bit of straw but it had been comfortable enough to spend
the night in, and both of us knew where to find it again. I repeated my
instructions to Sir Blanc twice anyway, just to be sure, and tucked his
recovered wits into the pocket at the front of his gambeson.

“Don’t let them out!” I
said. “Not even if they squeak.”

“I shall not,” said Sir
Blanc solemnly. “How will you escape, child?”

“I have another way out,”
I told him, hoping as I said it that it was true. I helped him back onto the
mechanical cart just before the horse began to move, and hoped that no one
would notice the dripping ice-water that showed its cargo was still on board.

I climbed more quickly
this time, sure of my way. It wouldn’t help to remember the way after today, of
course: the Queen would make sure no one entered the castle by the ice vents
again when she discovered the missing wits. But I found myself reinforcing the
memories anyway, counting off the turns and the ladders as I went. Jack’s bedroom
suite caught up with me even more quickly than I expected, and soon I was
looking down on his bed again, calculating the jump in my mind. The card
servant was gone, which was convenient: it meant that I could rattle the grate
free without being overheard. I wanted to be ready when Jack came back. When
the grate was out I put it carefully beside me in the vent, rubbing my hands
against each other to ward off the chill in the air. Then I waited.

It wasn’t long before
Jack sauntered into the room, his red suit coat hung over his arm. I leapt as
soon as he carelessly shut the door behind him, landing lightly but bouncing a
bit more than I expected to bounce. I
had
hoped to make him jump.
Instead, Jack merely laid his coat over the back of a plush black chair,
straightened his cuffs, and advanced into the bedroom.

“I thought you might come
back,” he said.

“You’re no fun,” I said
sourly.

“What, because I didn’t
jump through the roof?” He saw me briefly wrinkle my nose in annoyance, and
laughed. “I’ll have to tell Mother to block those vents.”

“Why didn’t she block
them already? If a kid and a witless knight can get in, who can’t?”

“Because she understands
Underland. She knows how people think. No– she
determines
how people
think. She’s very good at it, and she spends a lot of time in the Mirror Hall.”

“She doesn’t determine
how I think!” I said in annoyance. I still saw the Mirror Hall quite often in
my puddle-gazing. In fact, the more I saw of it, the more it seemed to me that
it was somewhere the Queen shouldn’t be allowed. Things were different there.
Seen differently. Made differently. The Queen herself Saw and Made things that
were contrariwise to what actually Was.

“I’m beginning to feel
that the only way she
could
do that would be to tell you to think the
exact opposite. Perhaps she is. She’s incredibly off-putting that way. Shall I
tell you stories of when I was a lad: how she tricked me into punishing
myself?”

I didn’t like the black
look to his eyes, or the unpleasant tilt to his mouth. He was only eighteen. He
shouldn’t look like that.

I said: “If you knew I’d
be here, why did you come back so early? I can still hear the party.”

“It wasn’t for the
pleasure of your company, if that’s what you mean. How did you get out of Mother’s
curio room? I’d have sworn there was no way out but the door.”

“None of your business!”
I said. I was beginning to feel that it was a mistake to come back, but I had
to know how to get to Hatter and Hare.

“Well, that’s rude,” said
Jack. “I suppose you want to know how to get to your other little friends? Or
did you come back because you want to hear me sing again? I didn’t peg you as a
music-lover, Mab!”

“Call
that
music,
do you?” I said scornfully, but Jack’s odiously self-satisfied smile didn’t
even waver. “Sounded like a calf yelling for its mum.”

“Has it ever occurred to
you, Mab, that your method of obtaining help leaves a little something to be
desired?”

After a brief,
exasperated pause, I said: “Yes. But you’re
so annoying
that I just
can’t help myself.”

“That,” said Jack, “Is
the most egregious example of the pot calling the kettle black that I have ever
heard. Do you or do you not want to find your friends?”

“I do.”

“Very well: follow me.
I’ve made preparations.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have
followed him so trustingly, but I did. We didn’t go far: just to the bathroom,
where the drawn bath was waiting.

“Hey!” I said
indignantly. “I might not be as squeaky clean as you, but I don’t need a bath!”

“I could beg to differ,
but I won’t. Whether or not you need a bath is entirely beside the point.”