The Crown (12 page)

Dinah didn’t have time for banter. “Did you bring the breastplate? The uniform?”

“I did.”

Wardley also had a bag. Out of it he pulled a white breastplate with the gray Club symbol etched on it. He slipped the armor over a gray tunic and fastened his black cloak with a tiny glittering Club pin at his right shoulder. “How do I look?” he whispered.

“Like a Club,” Dinah replied. “Me?”

“Like a servant, only cleaner.”

Dinah quickly braided her hair, and then started pushing back the cloaks in the corner of the room. They moved cloak after cloak aside until they saw it: a small wooden door, expertly camouflaged with the wood around it.

“I still can’t believe this is in here,” Dinah whispered, running her hand over the minute cracks.

Wardley nodded. “This was how your Great-Grandfather snuck out of the Great Hall to meet his Yurkei mistress, a serving girl of the King. The tunnels through the castle are well known among the Heart Cards.”

“Except mine,” Dinah said softly.

“Except yours.” Wardley took a deep breath and pushed open the door. “Let out a cry.”

“What?”

“Let out a cry, a loud one.”

Dinah did as she was told.

“That should keep them satisfied for a while,” laughed Wardley. “Let’s go.” They ducked under the door.

The passage—a sort of hallway between wooden wall brackets—led them directly into a niche in the stone that pushed out into the Great Hall. Checking that the massive room was empty, they quickly ran up the steps and past the throne. Dinah led Wardley into the narrow foyer bordering her father’s privy.

“This is the way into the tunnels? Through the privy?”

Dinah didn’t reply. She was too busy turning over tapestries. The last one, an elaborate work of art depicting her father’s victory over Mundoo—the Chief of the Yurkei—showered them with dirt and dead spiders as she yanked it back. There, there was the door—the one she remembered from that terrible day when Vittiore had arrived and her father had led her proudly out like his prized steed. The day Cheshire had shown her the tunnel and she accidentally wove her way beyond the palace gates.

The door inched open with a loud creak. They slipped through it, making sure to leave the door unlocked behind them. Dinah led Wardley down into the damp stone tunnels that ran parallel to the Great Hall and then, with a sudden plunge, down underneath it. The tunnels were dank and cold, much more unpleasant than the last time Dinah had been down here. The buildup of winter snow around Wonderland had turned them into long, wet slabs of frozen mud and cracked rock. Dinah watched her breath freeze and fall to the ground in front of them with a loud tinkle.

Wardley grabbed a torch from the wall and lit it with his flint. Pink flame danced over his face. “We ought to hurry. You could fall asleep down here and never wake up. The cold is just cold enough . . . ,” he trailed off, his lips turning a deep shade of blue.

They ran. The tunnel became deeper and colder the farther they spiraled into the frosty earth. Several times Dinah had to backtrack, trying to remember all the twists and turns she had taken as a hysterical fifteen-year-old. It was nearly impossible; she had been so deeply wounded that day, running blindly through the weaving catacombs. Did she turn here, at that strange cat etching on the wall? Or was it up there, when the tunnel split into four hallways and then returned to itself? She gave a shiver through her cloak.

“We should have grabbed more layers,” Wardley whispered. They had been down in the tunnels for almost an hour by Dinah’s pocket watch, lifted easily off of Harris the day before. “Are we almost there? Maybe we should head back.”

It seemed darker than before, and a sudden rush of panic enveloped Dinah. “I’m not sure. It’s so dark down here.”

“And cold,” added Wardley. “Don’t forget cold.”

Dinah bit her lip as she took in her surroundings. “It’s so much darker because we are deeper underground—the same reason it’s getting colder. Hold the torch up to the ceiling.”

She looked up and trailed her fingers across the dirt. Wardley held the torch above her. The light flickered and jumped against shiny black roots running the length of the tunnel. Every once in a while they gave a tiny pulse, as if alive, and they seemed to move ever closer.

Dinah grinned in the darkness. “Roots! That happened the first time; I remember thinking they looked like black bones. We’re almost there!”

“I pray you are right,” muttered Wardley, his teeth chattering. “Otherwise, we are turning back and I will spend the rest of my day warming my toes by a fire while you feed me tarts.”

The stone walls started to narrow; Dinah and Wardley turned sideways as they squeezed through, their faces damp with sweat. They turned one corner and then another, a maze of barely visible walls and dirt. There was a downward slope and then suddenly they were there. The dirt circle. The collision of the three passageways.

Wardley let out a long breath and waved the torch at the drawings. “Incredible. This is old Dinah, very old. Ancient.”

Dinah ran her fingers over the wavy triangle. “When I was down here before, I thought this was a symbol for the Yurkei Mountains. But it is so clearly the Black Towers.”

Wardley wrapped his hand around her fingers with a friendly squeeze. “You wanted to escape what your father had just done. It makes sense that you wanted it to be the Yurkei Mountains—it was anywhere but where he was.”

Dinah’s black eyes glittered in the darkness. “Do you have the chains?”

Wardley gave his bag a shake. Dinah heard metal clang against metal. “Let’s go, Princess.”

“You can’t call me that anymore,” replied Dinah as she crouched on her hands and knees, and began crawling through the tunnel. “Once we get inside, you can call me any name other than that one. Be as cruel as possible.” She paused to catch her breath. “Pray that this goes to the Black Towers.”

Wardley grunted behind her. “I’m praying that it doesn’t.”

The tunnel sloped upward steeply, the air growing oddly stifling, almost humid. The warm dirt felt good underneath her freezing palms as they began their ascent.

Chapter Nine

Dinah’s knees ached when she rose again; crawling up a steep slope had been much harder than she anticipated. Up ahead, light appeared from a narrow hole at the end of the tunnel. Dinah poked her head out and gave a sigh of relief. The smallest flicker of sunlight leaked in from a single rusted window that seemed to be miles above her. They had come to some sort of stone cylinder, and the tunnel went no farther. She looked down. The almost-vertical shaft ended abruptly with a steep drop into a large pool of ice. Wardley pushed up from behind.

“Stop, stop, we could fall!” whispered Dinah frantically. She glanced at her surroundings and found what she was looking for. Jagged stairs led up and away from the drop: mangled teeth that spiraled up the wall of the concave ring.

Wardley wiped his face. “It’s warmer in here.”

Dinah looked at the ice. “Not warm enough.”

“We must be in a hollowed-out grain silo. There are a number of them around the Towers.”

Wardley went first, climbing over Dinah and pulling himself up against the wall. “Stay close to the wall. Inch by inch. I see a door up there.” He gestured his chin upward. Dinah swallowed. A fall would not kill them, but it would surely break them.

“Don’t look down,” he instructed Dinah. She did, her eyes following a crooked crack in the ice. Buried up to its waist, frozen forever, was a skeleton. Its bony fingers dug into the ice, the claw marks inches deep. The scream on its face was etched there for eternity, the jawbone hanging grotesquely from its hinge.

Dinah gave a shudder. “Was that . . . ?”

Wardley pressed his body against the wall. “Done on purpose? Yes. I told you the Black Towers were a brutal place. Club Cards find many ways of extracting information, mostly by torture.”

“So, that man. . . .”

“So that man was probably put down here in the water before the snow arrived and forced to watch as it froze around him. I would guess he’s chained to the bottom, at the ankles.”

Dinah stared, letting the revulsion wash over her. She shivered. “How is it both humid and cold in here?”

“It’s the Black Towers.”

Dinah stared at the skeleton. Wardley, ever so carefully, reached his fingers under Dinah’s chin and turned her head. “Look away.”

The thrill of finding their way through the tunnels diminished with each pensive step toward the door, ever mindful of the frozen ground. Dinah heard the cry of enormous Wonderland bats, sometimes known to attack horses.
Don’t look up
, she told herself, pressing tighter to the wall.
Don’t look up and don’t look down, just stay steady.
They climbed silently, until they reached a dilapidated, blackened door, eaten away by mold and bat droppings.

Wardley turned to Dinah, the flame casting a pink hue on her dark features. “This is it. We can turn back from here, but after we go through this door, we will have to finish what we have started.”

Dinah looked at the door with a steely resolve, her stomach churning in fear. Regret was beginning to worm its way into her brain. But then she saw the note, unrolled from its tiny vial, and remembered the feeling that overcame her when she read it—that whatever conspiracy swirled through Wonderland Palace was coming for her eventually, whether she accepted it or not. She looked at Wardley, a brown lock of hair sticking to his sweaty forehead. “Faina Baker, the Black Towers. That’s where we are going.”

His face fell as he understood that they would not be turning back. “As Your Highness commands. Stay behind me, and whatever you do, for the love of Wonderland gods, DO NOT SPEAK. You can disguise your face and dress, but you speak like a royal and that cannot be undone.”

Wardley reached into his bag and clamped iron shackles over her wrists. They were heavier than Dinah had anticipated. “You look a mess,” he informed her. Dinah had been purposely careless as she walked and crawled through the tunnels. Her dress was caked with mud. She had soot from the flame smeared across her face and she had let her clean hair run against the tunnel wall. She looked like a commoner, more than a commoner, a criminal. They hadn’t been alone down in the tunnels—Wardley had identified rat and mongoose droppings, as well as a few more with which he wasn’t familiar.

Dinah gave a shudder in the cold, wet air. “I’m ready.”

Wardley drew his eyes to her face and Dinah saw a fear that matched her own. “We stay together, no matter what happens. You brought your crown?”

Dinah nodded and patted her bag. “Just in case things go wrong.” She wrapped her freezing hand around his. The chains gave a slight jangle.

“Here we go,” said Wardley. He gave a hard grunt, and the chain mail on his fist broke the aged lock on the door. It fell to the ground with a loud clang. Together they took a deep breath and stepped inside.

The temperature change was immediate and severe. Whereas before they had been freezing, Dinah was soon covered in sweat. The air was thick, humid, and filthy. Pillars of black smoke rose up from below them. They appeared to be in a giant cocoon—a spiraling black tower, wider at the bottom and consistently narrowing toward the top. They were looking out across a wide chasm filled with heavy, dangling chains that twisted down from the cone’s point. On either side of them stretched endless cells embedded in the circumference of the tower, one after another, smaller and smaller the higher they went. The smell was inhumane, and Dinah gave a loud retch, unable to control herself, followed by another and another. Urine, sweat, human waste, and blood, all mingled together in the thick air.

Wardley bent over her. “Are you going to be alright?”

“I’m your prisoner!” Dinah quietly reminded him in between heaves.

Wardley stood up. “Right. C’mon then.” He gave a yank of her chain and Dinah followed along behind him as they circled their way higher and higher into the tower. High-pitched screams of pain echoed up from below, and Dinah fought the urge to clap her hands over her ears. Wardley yanked her chains so that she walked closer beside him.

“They torture prisoners on the floor of the tower, but the smallest cells are at the top. The worst criminals are kept in the top cells, so that after their torture sessions, they have to crawl back up the spiral until they can rest.” He shook his head. “The crawl is its own form of torture.”

Dinah’s eyes rested with pity upon an old man in a cell they passed, sitting on the floor in his own waste, licking the black slimy wall. He turned as they walked by. Dinah gave him a sad smile from under her hood. Without warning, the man lunged at her from inside the cell, and managed to grab the edge of her cloak. He pulled her violently against the bars, shaking her back and forth as he reached out to grope her.

“The hearts, the hearts, I love my hearts!”

Dinah felt his rotten breath splash across her face, and she fought another rising wave of nausea. Wardley drew his sword and raised it above the man’s gnarled hand. “You will let go of her or you will lose a limb today.”

The prisoner laughed in Dinah’s face. “Lose a limb, lose a limb, we all will lose our limbs and heads today. . . .”

“Quizzer, let that prisoner go!” boomed a very loud voice from behind them. The man let go of Dinah with a final shake of his head and sunk back into his celled cave, hissing, “I’ll be watching you, my dark-eyed Queen, yes I will!”

Dinah stepped back in shock. They turned. A fat man, larger than even her father, waddled up before them. His Club uniform—a thin white tunic overlaid with a gray breastplate and gray wool cape held in place by a club clasp—stretched out to fit his massive girth. Over his breastplate, the Club symbol was encompassed by a much larger skull. She had seen this symbol in a book once or twice; this man was a torturer. Dinah looked at the ground. She felt a slight twitch of fear ripple up Wardley’s hand and through her chains.

“Thank you for your aid. I’m to take this filthy wench to the Women’s Tower, but we must have taken a wrong turn. I apologize.”