Alice stood and shoved her feet into today’s absurd red shoes. Through some magic or machination, this pair had long-lashed eyes that stared and fluttered as if someone were trapped within the shoes. Maybe they were.
“I hate him,” Alice muttered.
I didn’t ask which him. She was the Red Queen, and back in her royal garb, her answers were as likely to be true as to be utter gibberish. The magic of the place changed reality. It changed her. If I pondered the matter, I knew I’d realize it had changed me—but why would I dwell on it? I chose Wonderland, and my choice had led me to her. The rest was immaterial.
I would never leave her.
“My dress,” she prompted me, dropping her robe to the floor. Her voice was imperious, and the gesture matched. Her eyes, however, told me otherwise. My poor, delicate Alice. She was trapped in ways I could only try to fathom.
I picked up the dress for the day. Pale blue. White sprigs. It reminded her subjects that she was once just a girl, facing an irrational queen. No matter that she’d become just as mad. No matter that she was as likely to behead a teapot as her once-trusted allies.
I buttoned it up the back, fingertips lingering long enough to remind her that I was here, that I was hers, but not so long that she’d need to reprimand me. I straightened her full, heavy skirt by reaching under it with the excuse of a twisted fold of cloth.
Alice stood mute as my hands touched her softly.
“That won’t do,” she grumbled. “I have meetings. Lord Hare waits.”
As I made to remove my hand, she added, “Beatrice, really? Dispense with the posture of gentility.”
“Of course, my queen.”
Alice wasn’t born and bred to be a queen. She was once an impulsive girl who ignored the rules. Such traits make for a temperamental queen—and exactly the sort of lover I cherished.
I dispensed with everything gentle until the mad queen was calm again.
When the Red Queen descended to attend her courtiers and disloyal subjects, I followed with the flock of ladies-in-waiting. I was never quite sure what they did now that she claimed that I was the only woman in her bed, but I wasn’t about to ask. My queen would lie, and I would accept it.
“Alice, my dear!” Lord Hare greeted her far too familiarly, and then he turned away from the Red King—who was in attendance suddenly, too—with a meek, “Sire.”
The Red King had no concerns, no worry over Lord Hare’s manner. The king was too interested in the latest rifle he was being presented. If not hunting, the man was off racing. If not racing, he was with his own ladies-in-waiting. The Red King served no purpose. He existed to create the next heir, to procreate. I had no idea if he’d ever achieved such a thing with the other Red Queens.
All I knew for sure was that when Alice was fertile, the Red King felt pulled by a mighty urge to rut with her. My queen initially had endured it. Over time, however, the king’s drink was spiked so he could not inconvenience her.
Briefly, the king smiled in her direction, but his hands were on the hunting rifle.
Lord Hare, however, reached for the queen as if to hug her.
“Bunny,” Alice murmured in seemingly fond greeting, but I knew it was a rebuke for greeting her by name instead of her title.
The pale man flushed red and bowed deeply. “Your Highness. I meant no offense. None.”
He had concerns that he needed to discuss, and to be honest, I had no interest in hearing them. I watched instead as the king waved off drink after drink. I knew there was trouble ahead. I wasn’t sure what was coming, but life in Wonderland taught me to listen to my paranoia and star charts the way I had once watched the news.
My queen was oblivious to the threat, and I was left with a choice.
“Take this to His Highness,” I told a passing maid. I pulled a vial of sleeping medicine from my pocket. I didn’t use it myself, but I had brought over from the Original World a bit of this and that. Admittedly, a few times I had stirred it into Alice’s tea when I had things to do, but I had to protect her—even from herself.
Anyone would’ve done the same in my place.
* * *
“Do you remember before?” the queen asks me suddenly. Her voice and the candle are the only lights in the dungeon.
“Before?”
“Before here, Beatrice.” Her voice is urgent now, and I want to fix it. Fix all of it. Anything. Nothing. Whatever will make her happy. “Do you remember before Wonderland?”
I shrug. I suspect I could recall it if I wanted to try. There was a life there, a place I’d existed. People. Pain. Pills. There were things in my mind best left ignored, though, and I was certain that this was one of them.
“Who were you?”
“No one,” I lie.
We both know I’m lying, though. I’m not good at it here. Before Wonderland I was an excellent liar. My entire world was balanced on the edge of lies, and I felt the end closing in. That’s why I took the chance, why I came here.
“You are the only person I send to the dungeon repeatedly,” Alice confesses. “I have to, you know. It’s a rule. I must send you. I must punish you.”
“A rule?”
“Who were you, Beatrice?” she asks again.
Images clamber to be given voice. A man dead at my feet. A man bleeding. A man with a knife blade in his belly.
“My hand held the knife,” I say quietly.
The Red Queen lacks context, does not see the men—for there are many, not one—whose faces I see. She hears enough, though, to nod.
“Deserving?” she asks.
Alice is, after all, a woman who has shrieked to have the heads of her enemies severed for offenses various and sundry. Spilling blood does not bother her.
I close my eyes and let the stories flow into my mind. Once I was not Beatrice, once I was not in Wonderland—I was a volunteer. Shelters. Hotlines. Hospitals. I watched for men who were not stopped by the law, and I stopped them. No guardian angel. I did it because I wanted to kill, and I had too much religion to kill without cause. Still a murderer. Still a serial killer, if I were to use the words of the Original World.
Without opening my eyes, I nod and declare, “The dead deserved to die.”
Another face looms in my memories, one I shove back. I still hear my father’s voice, telling me how and where to press the tip of the knife while my mother prays on her knees next to the man sprawled out in the leaves. I open my eyes to erase that particular memory. His death is one of the reasons I must be sent to dungeons now.
“All deserving,” I say in a drier voice.
The ones in my childhood don’t count. They never counted because if I hadn’t done it, they’d still have died. They could not count, and so I choose to forget them.
The Red Queen stands and steps closer to the bars of my cell. She reaches out and places both hands on the metal cage. So quietly that no one else—even the ladies-in-waiting—would hear, she tells me, “The Red King deserved it, too.”
* * *
“Beatrice!”
“Beatrice!”
“Beatrice, Beatrice, Beatrice!”
I wake to the strange in-tandem voices that seem to be caught in a call-and-response loop. While it is my name they call, they are not currently interested in my reply. I’m not sure what to do. I could interrupt, but it’s dreadfully dull in the dungeon. The only other alternative is to wait until they notice that I am awake. I sit in my cell and watch.