Bargain price

CHAPTER 48

S HE LANDED gently on her feet in the middle of what appeared to be a prison-a looking glass prison. On every side of her were looking glasses as tall as forever, and no matter what direction she turned, she saw her reflection infinitely repeating into the mirrored distance.

“This is a maze?” she said aloud, but instead of hearing just her voice, she heard a chorus of voices, all of them hers.

Something was wrong-besides that she wasn’t in a maze. I must have found the wrong key but…Odd, that looks like me and yet it doesn’t. The reflection directly in front of Alyss was off somehow, inexact. She reached out toward the looking glass and-Ah!-the reflection grabbed her and pulled her into it.

“We have to hurry,” the reflection said. “Lots to do and many people to see. So little time.” “But…” Alyss couldn’t think what to say.

The reflection wouldn’t let go of her wrist and pulled her at a fast clip past looking glass halls that branched and snaked into the distance, past mirrored alcoves and dead ends. Even the floor was made of looking glass. Being led first one way and then another, Alyss felt sure her reflection was taking this complex route only to confuse her. Better not have to find my way back. Because there was no chance of that; Alyss had lost all sense of direction.

The reflection brought her to a stop in what appeared to be a rest area, a mirrored room wider than the corridors along which they’d passed. “Wait here,” the reflection said. “Someone will be with you shortly.”

“Don’t leave me!” But Alyss was already alone. Or was she? Her likeness looked back at her from every surface.

“Hello?” she said, and again a chorus of voices said it with her-the voices of her reflections. She lifted her hand toward the one closest to her, to take hold of it, but her fingers couldn’t penetrate the looking

glass and stubbed themselves against its cold quicksilver surface.

Maybe I was supposed to follow her? But Alyss could no longer be sure in which direction the reflection had gone. Imagine a way out. That must be what I’m supposed to do. It’s a test. Alyss gathered herself tight for the effort her imaginings required, but between the flicker of her eyelids she saw someone approaching from the distance of a looking glass. Closer and closer the person came, and even before Alyss could make out the woman’s face, she recognized the clothes.

“Mother!” she and her reflections gasped.

Genevieve was dressed as her daughter had last seen her but without the crown. She came right up to the other side of the looking glass.

“Alyss,” Genevieve said, and the wistful, proud smile that formed on the dead queen’s face caused tears to well up in her daughter’s eyes.

“She’s become as beautiful as I imagined,” said a man’s voice.

Alyss turned to see her father, Nolan, beaming at her from one of the looking glasses in place of her reflection.

“Dad!” she said, running to embrace him, wanting to feel the touch of her long-gone father. I don’t care about any maze or about Redd or the Heart Crystal! I want us all to be together again! I want my family back! I WANT MY FAMILY BACK! But Alyss couldn’t pass through the looking glass. “What is this?” she cried. “Where are you?”

“We’re in you, dear,” Nolan said.

Genevieve gave a little sigh. “If we are successful against Redd, no one can say that our success has been without sacrifice. But I sometimes wonder if it has required too much of us.”

“Of all involved who fight for White Imagination,” said Nolan.

“Yes, of course,” said Genevieve. “The path to a victory of this magnitude is doomed to be littered with defeats and failures.”

With a soft look of sympathy, Nolan walked from one looking glass to another to stand next to his wife. He put his arm around her and kissed her on the forehead, which seemed to raise her spirits.

“Alyss,” Genevieve said, “it is good that you have taken it upon yourself to exercise your imagination. You are well on your way to reaching your potential of imaginative power and control. But all you have experienced and discovered about yourself is not enough. Not yet.”

“Look at her.” Nolan chuckled. “She’s an adult. She doesn’t need her parents nagging her. Alyss, my sweet, have half as much faith in yourself as others have in you and you’ll be fine.”

The royal couple turned and began walking off into the distance of the looking glass. “Wait!” Alyss shouted. “Don’t go!”

But Genevieve and Nolan kept walking. “Wa-ait! Will I ever see you again?”

They stopped, apparently surprised by the question.

“Again and again and again,” said Nolan.

“If you know where to look for us,” said Genevieve.

Then they were gone and Alyss’ reflection once again occupied the glass.

All strength left the princess. She fell to her knees and buried her face in her hands. She would never get over the sudden, violent loss of her parents, never be able to accept the absence their deaths had left behind. How can I? How could anyone? Her sobs were magnified tenfold as her reflections cried with her.

The worst of it had passed, and all that was left of Alyss’ swell of unhappiness was the occasional hiccup. Someone touched her shoulder.

“Tag, you’re it.”

Alyss lifted her head and saw a little girl. Is that…? She brushed the hair out of her face and wiped her eyes to be sure. She looks exactly like me.

It was: Alyss Heart, age seven, wearing her birthday dress. “You want me to chase you?” Alyss asked.

The girl clicked her tongue, annoyed. “Haven’t you ever played tag before?”

“Yes, but…not in some time.” The princess got to her feet. It wasn’t every day that you met up with your younger self. Who knew where it might lead? “Okay,” she said. “You’d better run then.”

With a cry of pleasure, the girl sprinted down the corridor. Alyss chased after her, and corridor after corridor of the Looking Glass Maze was briefly visited by the running pair. As much as Alyss had wallowed in the depths of her sorrow moments before, she now entered into the buoyant pleasure of the chase, laughing with each near-tagging of her younger self. She approached a corner in the maze and the younger Alyss jumped out from behind it, teasing the princess with her capture.

“Hah!”

They both laughed so hard that it became difficult to run, and when the girl stopped to catch her breath, Alyss hurried up and took hold of her.

“I’ve got you now!” she said, tickling the girl. “No, don’t! Stop! Stop!”

The younger Alyss squealed in delight because of course the princess knew where she was most ticklish. But the girl suddenly became serious, pushed Alyss’ hands away, and looked off at something. Alyss turned to see what it was. A diamond-encrusted scepter topped with a white crystal heart at the far end of a wide corridor.

“Do you think you can get the scepter?” the girl asked.

It looked easy. Alyss only had to walk down the corridor and take it. “Why not?”

The corridor walls consisted of looking glass panels that lined up perfectly, facing each other. Alyss

stepped between the first pair and her reflections swirled and swirled to form a sort of vortex, and then she was no longer in the Looking Glass Maze. She stood in a featureless Nothing with a tornado of images whipping around her, the words and gestures of the people in them wounding as much as any made by beings of flesh and blood.

“Off with her head! Off with her head!”

Redd swooped toward the princess. Alyss jumped out of the way, her heart thumping when- There was Dodge Anders, as a boy, wearing his guardsman uniform and receiving a lesson in the

etiquette of palace guardsmen from Sir Justice. But like Redd before them, they too vanished. Quigly Gaffer stood before her now, pointing and laughing in her face as if she were the most ridiculous creature he’d ever seen.

“Stop it,” she said.

But Quigly was joined by the rest of the London orphans-Charlie, Andrew, Otis, Francine, Esther, and

Margaret-as well as some of the wardens she’d known at the Charing Cross Foundling Hospital. “Stop! It!” she screamed.

Their laughter continued to echo in her ears even after they’d faded from sight and she was gazing upon a silent but confusing scene: she and Prince Leopold surrounded by what appeared to be their four

children, picnicking in the Everlasting Forest with Dean and Mrs. Liddell. Two of the children were infants, but they had the faces of Genevieve and Nolan. Alyss wanted to call out to her family, but she couldn’t get her voice to work. The Cat stood over her oblivious, picnicking family, licking blood off his paws until a single drop fell to the ground and became a roiling, bloody sea in which her family was drowning. The Alyssians were in it too-Dodge, Bibwit, Hatter, General Doppelganger, the chessmen. All were drowning. But then the sea drained out through an open door, carrying her friends and loved ones with it. Above the door was an illuminated exit sign and next to it stood the walrus-butler.

“Oh my, oh dear,” said the walrus. “It’s only going to get worse, Princess. You don’t have to put yourself through this. It’s not necessary. Please, I beg you to leave while you still can.” With his left flipper, he urged her to use the exit.

But Alyss knew better. The maze had shown her these things to soften her up, to make her more vulnerable for whatever she might face next. She was determined to face it.

She turned her back on the walrus, lifted her foot to step forward into the nothingness before her, and found herself back in the Looking Glass Maze, in the corridor leading to the scepter.

She had made it past the first pair of looking-glass panels.

She moved forward to stand between the next pair of looking glasses, but no sooner had she done so than the maze melted away and she found herself in the South Dining Room of Heart Palace, the scene of Redd’s invasion.

“I don’t need to see this,” she said.

Everyone in the room was staring at the kitten that had begun to morph into The Cat as- “No!” Alyss cried.

Kraaaaawbooosh!

An explosion blew the doors apart and Redd and her rogue soldiers spilled into the room. Alyss was forced to relive the horror of that ungodly hour, to experience all over again Sir Justice’s murder and the destruction of her home, her own near death at Redd’s hands. Once was too much! No one should have to experience such horribleness! She watched with steadily rising anger as her seven-year-old self and Hatter jumped into the palace’s emergency portal (that wrenching, final separation from her mother!) and Genevieve turned to face her sister alone. Then she saw what she had never seen before: her mother bound by Redd’s carnivorous roses, Redd cutting off Genevieve’s head with a single swing of the scarlet energy bolt.

“Aaaah!”

She ran at Redd, fury in her heart. But the way to Redd became long, and suddenly the

twenty-three-year-old Dodge was running alongside her, saying in a voice tight with rage, “Hate makes you strong. Forget restoring White Imagination to power and Wonderland to its past glory. There’s no justice except the justice of revenge. The only way to defeat Redd is to embrace your anger.”

The Cat jumped in front of them and Dodge plunged his sword into the beast again and again. But he seemed no less angry for it, as if his anger would remain no matter how many times he killed Redd’s vicious henchman.

Alyss was almost within striking distance of Redd when her mother’s head, lying in a corner where it had rolled, opened its eyes and spoke.

“Black Imagination feeds on anger, Alyss. Give in to your anger and you merely become a pawn of

Black Imagination, which may triumph for a time but never for eternity.” “But look at what happened to you!” Alyss said.

“Yes, look at me. It should tell you a lot that I’m the one saying this.”

But the pressure of hate in Alyss’ skull was too great. “It tells me that you were weak and that’s why you lost!” she screamed, snatching Redd’s scepter and cutting off her aunt’s head with a single swing, just as she had killed Genevieve.

Redd and the roses faded into the floor and Alyss discovered herself standing in a circular room with walls of telescopic glass that allowed her to see the Chessboard Desert and Wondertropolis in their entirety.

Bibwit rushed into the room with an open book in his hands, reading from it with great urgency, wanting her to understand. “Fleg lubra messingpla gree bono plam,” the tutor read. “Tyjk grrspleenuff rosh ingo.”

“Bibwit?”

“Zixwaquit! Zergl grgl! Fffghurgl grgl!”

The tutor continued spouting gibberish, growing more and more agitated with Alyss’ lack of understanding, which was when she glimpsed herself in a looking glass. Instead of her usual features, she saw Redd looking back at her. She had become Redd.

“No!”

She smashed the glass, and her entire surroundings-the circular room, the nonsensical Bibwit-showered down around her in fragments, leaving her standing before the entrance glass in the maze; on the other side of the glass, the clash between Alyssians and Redd’s soldiers was stopped in

time.

“Why am I here? What does this mean?” “Ahem hum.”

A stream of smoke crossed her vision. She turned and saw the blue caterpillar puffing at his hookah. “It means you failed, Princess.”

“I-?” Can’t fail. The maze is intended for me. “But-”

“You were unable to navigate the maze. It is unfortunate for all of us, but nothing can be done. You must leave through the glass and re-enter the battle.”

Failure’s not an option. She would rather have been anywhere else, but she couldn’t leave yet. Not as a failure. “Unacceptable,” she said. “I don’t accept it.”

And before Blue could blow smoke into her face, she ran deep into the maze. She was quickly lost, but all was not lost so long as she remained here. She could still succeed. She would succeed, other wise what would become of-

A figure strode into the corridor up ahead. “Hatter!”

Oh, she was glad to see him. But the Milliner said nothing, raised a sword and rushed at her. “Wait! What are you-?”

She had to do something quick. She imagined a sword in her hand and, almost before she realized it, she and Hatter were fighting-he the aggressor, she surprising herself with a defense that relied on mirroring his moves.

Hatter at last lowered his weapon and stepped away, approving. “Good.”

So he was assessing her, Alyss understood, developing her warrior skills-or rather, he was training her imagination in the service of her warrior skills. Still, when a second Hatter Madigan appeared…

I have to fight two of them?

In addition to the sword, Alyss armed herself with a Hand of Tyman. She parried with the two Hatters. Clangk! Shwink-ding-shlank! Whenever one of them made a move she had never seen before, she quickly appropriated it-imagined it as part of her own repertoire. But merely conjuring herself into a better swords woman wasn’t going to be enough; she had to employ her imagination in other ways, because a third and fourth Hatter appeared, then a fifth and a sixth. Clashing weapons with one Hatter, she imagined that the others felt it. But this proved insufficient as more Hatters stepped forward, so she conjured her numberless reflections to her aid. They jumped from their looking glasses, swords in hand, and for every Hatter Madigan there was now an Alyss Heart to battle him.

“Excellent,” one of the Hatters said, and at his signal the Milliners gave up their swords and activated their wrist-blades, employed their boomeranging top hats.

Alyss imagined razor-cards shooting from the sleeves of her uniform, but the Hatters batted them down easily enough. Never had she wielded her imaginative powers so precisely, so intensely, or for so long a

time.

Getting tired, not sure how much longer I can…

Sensing her own defeat, she shot wads of a thick, gummy substance from the sleeves of her uniform. The wads hit the Hatters’ weapons and stopped up their rotary workings and, in the same instant, Alyss took a deep breath and exhaled, causing such a wind that the Hatters were blown off their feet, lay sprawled on the floor throughout the combat arena.

The fighting was over. Alyss was alone among the defeated Hatters, her reflections back in their looking glasses.

“Control and power aren’t everything,” one of the Hatters said. “Allow yourself to be the agent by which a cause greater than any single individual triumphs. Then perhaps you’ll be worthy of the Heart Crystal.”

The Hatters picked themselves up, bowed, and backed away down the maze’s various corridors. After a short rest, Alyss felt infused with power and health, better than she had before running into the Hatters.

Better than I have felt in a long, long time-maybe ever.

It was a lot like she used to feel before her seventh birthday, when she thought herself capable of anything and the world was a beautiful place.

What was that?

A creaking sound, like something being hoisted. And voices. Off to the left? Yes, there they are again.

She followed the sounds and, coming to the end of a shallow passage, found Dodge, Bibwit, Hatter, General Doppelganger, the white knight, and the rook kneeling with their hands fastened behind them, their heads locked in an enormous guillotine. Queen Redd and The Cat were standing by the lever that would drop the blade, waiting for her.

“But I killed you,” Alyss said.

“Did you?” Redd turned to The Cat. “Why wasn’t I informed?” The Cat shrugged.

Is this real or a figment? Can’t be real since she’s not dead, so there’s no danger to anyone if I walk away. Just walk away.

But Alyss couldn’t; the sight of the captured Alyssians kept her rooted to the spot. She couldn’t chance it, however much reality the scene might contain. Redd’s (apparent) multiple lives notwithstanding, who could be sure that if one died in the maze, he or she would still be alive on the outside?

“I’ll kill you again if I have to,” Alyss said, stepping forward. “Perhaps,” said Redd, “but that won’t save your friends.”

Alyss again imagined wads of the sticky substance shooting from her sleeves, gumming up the guillotine’s works and keeping its blade from falling.

Nothing.

She imagined the blade turned into water and splashing down on the Alyssians’ heads. Nothing.

Redd laughed. “The lovely thing about being here,” she said, gesturing at the maze, “is that I’m able to imagine your imagination powerless. Ah, if only that were the case on the outside. But enough chitchat. If you’re going to die-which you are-I’m sure you’d like to get it over with. These people are no threat to me without you. There is only one way you can save them: Give yourself up. You might as well. I’ll eventually kill you anyway. Then you and your friends will be dead. However, to save myself some trouble, I’m giving you a choice.”

But how could Alyss be sure that, if she sacrificed herself, Redd would allow her friends to live, let alone live freely? Wasn’t it more likely that once Alyss was dead, Redd would kill the Alyssians because she could? But what if, because of some unknown leniency in Redd, she did allow them to live? They had fought on behalf of White Imagination for thirteen years without Alyss. If, by sacrificing herself, she could secure for them the promise of longer lives, didn’t duty demand her sacrifice? They might yet manage to escape; Hatter might find a way. The spirit of White Imagination would live with them. It lived only so long as they did.

Thinking it the final act in her short, troubled life, Princess Alyss Heart knelt down before her aunt. “Here’s to my legacy,” Redd said, lifting her scepter. But the moment its cold blade touched the tender

back of Alyss’ neck-

Zzzomp!

– the scene vanished and the princess stood directly in front of the white heart scepter. She reached for it and, as her fingers closed around the scepter’s shaft, she was transported by the magic of the maze back into the puzzle shop, amid the chaos of battle once again raging between the Alyssians and Redd’s soldiers.