Page 66 of Wondrous

Chapter 34

Naturally, the Queen kept us waiting for hours.

I adjusted my posture where I sat on the witness stand, trying to get comfortable. The card soldiers had marched me through the woods, along with Maria and Alex—I hadn’t seen what became of Jack, in the confusion—and deposited me on the stand immediately upon our arrival at the castle just before dawn. The place had seemed empty, only a few dots of light shining in one of the turrets, and spectators had trickled in slowly. I’d kept hoping one of them would be Jack, that the card soldiers hadn’t worked out what he was and taken him captive or worse, as I couldn’t stop worrying. Nobody had offered me breakfast, or even tea.

I adjusted positions again, wishing I could quiet my audibly grumbling stomach. I was the hero who had saved Wonderland, and was now being put on trial by a wicked queen; I had higher things to ponder than my stomach.

Another grumble. They could have offered me bread and butter at least.

The throne room had been transformed into a courtroom very much like the one from my first visit to Wonderland. The two thrones were still there, but in place of the tables where the Alices had gathered were rows of benches, which were crowded with Wonderland creatures. Some seemed human, though as always they had some sort of strangeness about them—one man had bulbous eyes on the sides of his head like a frog, while the woman seated beside him with a baby swaddled in her arms was not, in fact, cradling a baby but a bundle of twigs formed into the rough shape of a child. The rest were animals, including several birds I recognized from the caucus race. There were overlarge mice in fine suits; a seal sprawled across an entire bench, ignoring the glares from those around him; a gryphon reading a tattered romance novel; and newly shorn sheep dressed in wool cloaks and sweaters.

Mixed in with the spectators were perhaps two dozen Alices, half as many as we’d started with. I spied Alistair amongst them, which surprised me, and he gave me a resigned sort of wave. Had the other Alices chosen to leave Wonderland through the Long Hall without hunting for the mock dragons, or had they met a darker fate?

I felt terribly lonely up there on the witness stand. It was too much like the last time I’d been put on trial by the Queen of Hearts—back then I’d had only my wits and a few Wonderland mushrooms to defend myself. Now I didn’t even have the mushrooms.

“Alice! Are you all right?”

I turned to find Tobias pushing toward me through the other card soldiers, and I nearly wept with relief. I should have asked him what was going on, but instead the first words out of my mouth were “Tobias! I’m so hungry. Can you bring me some breakfast?”

The concern on his face transformed into a smile. “It seems your friends have already done so. They asked me to bring you this.”

He reached into a fold in his card body—as I often did with Tobias, I tried not to think too much about it—and drew out a parcel wrapped in a tea towel. Within this were several of the Hatter’s cucumber sandwiches.

“But how did you—” I began, and Tobias gestured to the audience, where I found, to my astonishment, the Hatter and Hare seated in the front row. I gave a cry of delight—I’d been so preoccupied with my own misery that I hadn’t seen them come in.

The Hatter waved, beaming at me. The Hare was slouched in his seat with his arms crossed, but I saw worry behind his cantankerous expression. I did cry then, just a little, wiping the tears away before they could fall. My friends had come for me. I wasn’t truly alone.

The sandwiches were even better than I recalled, the crisp cucumber slices like small bites of summer, layered with a soft cheese with just the right balance of cream and herbs, which I knew the Hatter always gathered fresh from his garden. The first sandwich was gone within a matter of seconds.

“Why was I brought here?” I asked Tobias around a mouthful of the second. He politely offered me a handkerchief. “And all the other Alices—how did the Queen of Hearts know that I’d defeated all three mock dragons? Or does she? I suppose it’s also possible I’m being put on trial for something completely unrelated.”

Tobias shook his head. “The card soldiers weren’t in the wood looking for you—the fire the mock dragon started was visible for quite a distance, so they went to put it out, or try to. I don’t know why they arrested you initially—I think they were just upset. Several of them got swept away by that tea river you summoned, and the rest were very wet. But then your friends told them you had defeated the mock dragons, so they brought you here.”

“They did?” I tried to remember, but all had been in confusion after the card soldiers swarmed into the clearing. Everybody had been yelling at one another—I recalled Alex shouting at the soldier who had seemed to be in charge, and Maria and Jack had been yelling at the soldiers who had grabbed me. At some point, one of the soldiers had picked me up and thrown me over his shoulder like a sack of flour. I couldn’t remember much after that, as the effects of the smoke and my exhaustion had finally caught up to me and I had fainted.

A commotion at the other end of the courtroom drew my gaze. The Hatter, red-faced and gesticulating, was standing by the jury box, talking to a lizard in a bonnet and shawl. The lizard’s frill was stiff with displeasure, and the more the Hatter waved his arms about, the more the lizard responded in kind, her bonnet eventually falling off. People in the crowd, bored by the long delay, were muttering excitedly and craning their necks to get a look at the disturbance.

“What’s going on?” I said nervously. I was relieved that the Hatter had come, but a part of me had hoped he’d confine his support to that—being possessed of a one-track mind, that track revolving round the daily tea service, and easily confused to boot, he was not the most persuasive orator.

Tobias shook his head. “He told me he wanted to try to get himself and the Hare on the jury. But I don’t think the bailiff will have it. They have enough jurors already.”

Indeed, the jury box was full—a mixture of animals and humans, including a man who wore his hair and mustache so long he’d braided them together and a surly-looking bear wearing a yellow raincoat. The Hatter, though, was undeterred and kept on arguing with the bailiff, whose frill ballooned progressively larger and larger. I couldn’t hear everything that was said, but it was clear that one point of contention was the fact that the Hatter, as my friend, was too biased to sit on the jury. Eventually, the lizard snatched the umbrella away from the bear and knocked the Hatter’s hat off.

“Oh, no,” I murmured as the Hatter stood frozen in outrage. The Hare gave an angry cry and drew himself to his feet while several in the audience began clapping and shouting at the Hatter to retaliate. The bear roared, his dignity clearly offended. The card soldiers were pounding their lances on the floor, trying to restore order, but nobody seemed to be listening.

Amidst this brewing chaos, the throne room doors flew open, and in marched Jack. People started as the doors slammed dramatically against the stone walls. Another murmur went through the crowd, this one of a more admiring nature. Jack’s purple eyes flashed, his cloak billowed, and his crow-black hair was windblown; in short, he was the most handsome and dashing person I had ever seen, a sentiment which was clearly shared. Not even the stranger details of him, including the tea dress he wore beneath the cloak and his rather dirty bare feet, were enough to distract from the effect of his beauty. Quite a few of the Alices were following Jack with wide-eyed gazes, and the bailiff seemed temporarily stunned into silence.

“Good day, fellow two-handers!” Jack announced, gazing around at the crowd, who gazed back in rapt anticipation. This was clearly the most interesting sequence of events they had witnessed in the Queen’s court in some time. Jack evidently had no idea how things worked in a human court of law, even one as silly as Wonderland’s, and it was equally evident that he didn’t care one bit.

“I’m here to defend my friend, the Alice,” Jack thundered on obliviously. “I demand a place on the jury. You there!” He pointed at the bear, the juror nearest himself. “Move aside, you great hairy brute, or I shall turn you into a rug!”

There was a moment of perfect silence. Then the room erupted into pandemonium.

The pandemonium was such, in fact, that I could barely discern who was fighting whom—or if there was any fighting and not just a lot of shouting and dashing to and fro—let alone which side was winning. Some people were screaming, while others cheered. The card soldiers walloped people with their lances so indiscriminately that, more often than not, they ended up walloping one another. At one point, the bear seemed to be chasing the lizard, before the lizard scampered up a wall and the bear turned his ire on Jack. But Jack, it seemed, had already grown impatient with his rather flimsy pretense of being human and melted into his other form, an event which made all that had preceded it seem as orderly as clockwork. Everybody was screaming now, and though there was a great deal of pushing and shoving, nobody was pushing and shoving in the same direction, which meant nobody really succeeded in their object—namely, getting away from Wonderland’s most fearsome monster, who had somehow found his way into a court of law.

Jack did not attack anybody, nor did he need to; he merely glided from one part of the room to another, deepening the chaos as expertly as a cat unleashed in a crowded chicken coop.

Once the dust eventually settled—which it seemed to do because everyone had worn themselves out running amok, not because anything had actually been resolved—I realized Jack was now seated in the jury box in his boy form, his feet up, looking smug. The other jurors had fled, and the jury now consisted of him, the Hatter, the March Hare, the Dormouse, and a sheep I recognized from the Hatter’s tea parties. The latter were all huddled together on the opposite side of the jury bench, as far away from Jack as they could get.