Bargain price

CHAPTER 9

T RAINING THE soldiers had taken time, effort. It disgusted Redd how many fools claimed to be practitioners of Black Imagination but didn’t realize the amount of work needed to become halfway decent at it. Or they lacked the ambition, the spurs of vengeance and fuming hatred, that helped Black Imagination flower within them. But these had never been the most disciplined members of the queendom. Not only had Redd been banished from Wonderland years ago, forced to live in a grubby fortress on Mount Isolation in the middle of the Chessboard Desert-acres of icy snow alternating with acres of tar and black rock, forming what looked from the air like a giant chessboard-not only this, but

she’d had to piece together a military force out of deserters, mercenaries, cutthroats. A good many of these had been Twos and Threes in the Wonderland Deck, card soldiers who were little more than bodies to be thrown in front of incoming cannonball spiders and generator orbs, doomed to die. Luckily, Redd also had Fours, Fives, and Sixes at her disposal, and a ragtag group of ex-Wonderlanders who’d never been part of the Deck at all but who hadn’t felt at home living in bright, happy Wonderland.

But how many times in the past fistful of years had she toured her training camps in the hope of witnessing the glory of a budding war machine with ranks of well-trained soldiers eager for bloodshed? 347. And how many times had she been disappointed, seeing only misfits engaged in sloppy, inefficient military maneuvers? 346. She once came upon a Six Card, a lieutenant, yelling at some idiot Two who was cradling a cute, fuzzy guinea pig.

“I tell you to think black thoughts and you come up with that!?” the lieutenant had screamed. “Is a guinea pig bad? Do you consider a guinea pig the representation of all that’s evil?”

“Maybe…if it’s an evil guinea pig?”

The lieutenant and Two Card had eyed the animal, which sat in the soldier’s folded arm, twitching its nose, oblivious.

“That is not an evil guinea pig!” the lieutenant had shouted.

Even though she needed every able body she could get, Redd ordered the lieutenant to kill the soldier. By the force of her vindictive will, as much as by the training the soldiers endured for ten hours of every

lunar cycle, her army was at last ready. She decided upon Alyss’ seventh birthday as the occasion of attack. Wonderland would be celebrating its future queen. What better time to wrench back what was hers? She would give Wonderland its future queen all right, but it wouldn’t be the one citizens were expecting.

She sent out seekers-deadly creatures with vulture bodies and fly heads-for aerial reconnaissance. She had bred and trained them herself. Her troops suited up, sharpened blades, loaded crystal shooters and orbs. Redd stood before them on the jagged promontory of Mount Isolation. She spread out her arms as if to embrace all that was bad and threw her voice into the wind.

“Years ago I was told to leave the comforts of home by my own family. I was removed from the power to which I’d been born. All of you have had to leave your homes for one reason or another, and together we have suffered through our lives in this barren land. But all that’s over now. Today we will return to our birthplace and remake it in our image-which is to say, my image. Today we will make history. But…” And here she scowled down at her troops massed before her at the foot of the mountain. “If there be any doubters among you, any who are unsure of their willingness to die for my cause, let them step forward now. They will be excused from this day’s battle until they are ready to fight, and they can enjoy a nice cup of tea.”

Redd then did an extraordinary thing: She smiled. But her facial muscles weren’t accustomed to being used in this way, and the soldiers thought they had never seen her look more fierce. They knew better than to step forward.

“To victory then!” Redd shouted.

She had to give her rogue soldiers credit: They might not have been the most imaginative, they might have

been novices in Black Imagination, but every single one of them had learned well how to kill. Equally good with swords, knives, spiked clubs, spears, orbs, crystal shooters, they had little trouble getting past the guards that patrolled the edges of the Chessboard Desert, meant to contain her and her kind. And Redd herself made sure that no warning dispatch made it to the palace, rerouting it to oblivion by the power of her imagination. They had little trouble butchering the interior guards. They marched into Wondertropolis, hardly the worse for wear, trailing bloodred clouds and howling winds. At the sight of them, Wonderlanders, who had been celebrating only moments before, abandoned their games and ran off to what security their homes afforded. Every Wonderlander over the age of twelve remembered the devastation of the civil war between Redd and Genevieve. They knew why Redd had come.

The palace appeared in view, the Heart Crystal the only bright light in the gloom Redd had brought with her. She ordered her troops to surround the place. In her imagination’s eye she saw her most formidable henchman, in the form of a kitten, padding silently along heart-shaped halls, past watch-posts where guardsmen said, “Hey, look at the cute cat,” and, “Here, kitty, kitty.” But the kitty was on a mission and didn’t stop. He approached the Security Oversight Room and transformed himself from feline to assassin. The Cat smashed through the locked door, surprising the five guards lounging by the controls and monitoring crystals. With a few swings of his powerful arms, he flung them down like so many rag dolls, leaving them slumped and bleeding on the floor. He ripped the master key from the waistband of the highest-ranking guard and inserted it into the security console. He turned the key and flipped release switch after release switch; all over Heart Palace, bolts unlocked, doors and gates swung open, and Redd’s troops stormed in. The Cat turned back into a kitten and bounded toward the South Dining Room, where the Hearts and their guests still had no idea what was happening.

Redd entered the palace for the first time since she was a girl-the palace in which she’d been born and spent most of her young life, her palace-and all the hurt and resentment she’d tried to keep in check for so many years started to boil over. With every step she took toward her sister, she grew angrier and angrier. So what if she’d been a “bad girl”? So what if she’d experimented with artificial crystal and imagination stimulants? So what if she’d never cared for justice, love, duty to the people, blah blah blah? She was her own person. Why couldn’t her parents have respected that and left her alone instead of trying to turn her into the princess she could never be? Why couldn’t they have loved her for who she was?

The time she was removed from succession to the throne came back to Redd with the full force of its heart-stopping gall…

The ever wise Queen Theodora announced that she could not allow such an unruly daughter to have queenly power. Genevieve was to be queen instead of her! Redd’s features immediately began to change, to twist and sharpen, so potent was the fury within her. She had always been prone to jealousy, rage, and bitter hatred, but now she had fuel for all three to last a lifetime, and she cultivated them until-

Abandoning herself to her wrath, she slipped into her mother’s dressing room.

“Even you cannot take away what is mine by birthright,” she snarled and placed a deadly pink mushroom on her mother’s tongue. Fed by the queen’s saliva, the roots of the fungus worked their way down the sleeping sovereign’s throat and strangled her heart. The mushroom cap poked out of her mouth to signify that the heart had stopped beating.

As for her father, she let him live-weak, useless man that he’d always been. After the murder of his beloved Theodora, Tyman went insane, chatting to his dead wife and shuffling aimlessly through the palace. And Redd would have been queen-she would have ruled with all the innate power she possessed-if not for the presumption of her sister. It was almost laughable: Goody-Two-Shoes Genevieve actually believed that she should be queen. Redd armed her followers and Genevieve

organized hers. They clashed. People died and homes were destroyed. Redd knew her imagination to be stronger than Genevieve’s, but her forces were outnumbered and she didn’t have anyone from the Millinery on her side, no one to rival Hatter Madigan. But now she had The Cat. And the seekers. Still, the sting of being roundly defeated and banished from Wonderland by her younger sister had been an embarrassment impossible to live down.

Seething with anger, Redd strode toward the South Dining Room, paying no attention to the explosions going off to the left and right of her, the palace guardsmen falling dead at the hands of her soldiers. An orb generator detonated directly in front of her but, without slowing her pace, she walked through the smoke and flames. She stood in the ruins, face-to-face with her sister at last, and screamed her head off.

She would kill them all.