Of Roses and Kings Read online

  “Beatrice, truly?” She laughed as if I were ludicrous. “I need cleaning and dressing. Are you or are you not my maid?”

  Even then, I was not so unaware of her reputation. The queen’s madness was legendary. Her temper, however, was more so. I wasn’t about to risk my life if I misunderstood the way she was watching me.

  “Will I be sent back to the dungeon for touching you?” I asked.

  “Not today.”

  “For not touching you?”

  “No.” She offered me a rare, almost honest moment. “I would like you to please me, Beatrice. I selected you to do so, but there are plenty willing to look after my needs if you’re not so inclined.”

  She glanced toward the curtains behind which her ladies-in-waiting stood or sat expectantly. “I have people who exist to take care of everything I seek. All volunteers. I don’t see the point in bedding the unwilling.”

  I didn’t ask questions. Not about them. Not about the king. Not about anything. I simply set about doing as the queen desired. I bathed her, and I dried her. I knelt in awe as she stretched out before me on the floor. There—amidst satins and silks, diamonds and rubies, dresses and crowns—the Red Queen asked, “Love me?”

  And so, I did.

  Afterward, she asked, “Would you do anything I wanted?”

  “No,” I lied.

  She smiled, and I felt my soul shudder in fear.

  “That will change,” she warned me.

  I said nothing.

  “You may never leave me, Beatrice.” The Red Queen gripped my hands in hers. “Even when I tell you to go, you must not leave me.”

  And then she sent me to wait with the other ladies-in-waiting and summoned the king.

  * * *

  “I didn’t hate him,” the Red Queen says.

  I’m not sure if she’s lying. I suspect this is one of the strange, precious moments of honesty that can too often be overlooked in the maze of lies and madness that make up my beloved Alice.

  It doesn’t matter, though.

  “Will I be finishing my days in your dungeon or meeting the executioner?” I ask.

  “Must you be difficult, Beatrice?”

  I smile. She only wants me because I am difficult. The hardest task in my life is finding ways to be so. If I am complacent, if she knows I’d sell my soul at her whim, she’d be bored. Alice never meant to be a queen. She chose it over expulsion from Wonderland. In essence, she chose madness over death.

  The power, on the other hand, she enjoys far too much to surrender.

  “Were you after my crown?” She touches her head. Today’s crown is blood ruby and onyx. Like the rest of her crowns, it’s a small circlet, so simple it could be mistaken for a headband.

  No mere citizen of Wonderland may wear a crown. A “crown” is any metal or jeweled ornament that rests atop one’s head. It’s one of the gentlest rules enacted by Her Mad Majesty.

  “I do not want your crown, Alice.” I keep my voice soft as we talk. The darkness makes it hard to be loud. “Nor the weight of it.”

  “I see.”

  “If I wanted your crown, I’d have killed you, not the king,” I point out.

  “True,” she muses. “But a queen must have a king. That is a rule.”

  To this, I have no answer. Wonderland is still a mystery to me. We strangers arrive here with no clue as to what it means, why us, why any of it.

  “If I break the rules, I have to go back,” Alice whispers. “I can’t go back, Beatrice. I can’t. I remember enough to know that I would rather die here than return to the Original World.”

  I want to hold her. When Alice is like this, lost and more frightened than mad, I want to be the knight who rescues her, the person who saves her. I killed the king. I’d do far worse for love of her.

  * * *

  “I hate him,” the queen told me as we were having the required afternoon tea. “I eat the little cakes and smoke the flowers to bear it.”

  I brushed her hair as she spoke. It was an excuse, not the task of a maid. No one really could overrule her, though—except him. I often thought she hated him simply for that.

  “He smells.” She paused and folded her hands. “He goes off to do who knows what, and I am in charge. I make all the choices. I rule. He … I’m not sure what a Red King does, but it certainly isn’t helpful.”

  “Do you need help?”

  I watched in the looking glass as the queen pouted. Her reflection did so sooner than the queen herself, who was sitting between my legs on the floor in a very un-royal way. Even now, however, I knew there was a level of dishonesty in her. My beloved Alice was rarely truthful unless we were both naked. Without her royal clothes, without the Red Queen’s crown, she was nearly sane. She was even honest in the way of regular folks sometimes.

  “I don’t need help with anything,” Alice lied. “I can do it all myself.”

  We were interrupted by the arrival of Lord Hare, which was what the pale, red-eyed man called himself these days. One of the myriad guards that roamed the Red Castle stood beyond the curtains and announced, loudly, that Lord Hare had arrived.

  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.

  “We’ll miss teatime,” Mark Hare says as he stares into his teacup.

  “Hush, dear. It’s always a grand time to have tea!” His companion, oddly, is a stranger to me—or at least I think he is. A ridiculous hat, oversized and garish, perches on his head and obscures his face. In the dim light of the dungeon, I would venture to say that the hat is puce, but I suppose it might be eggplant. I’m certain it’s not brown. Nothing quite so ordinary as brown will do for any of the natives of Wonderland.

  Mark, whom I only know because he is a lesser cousin of Lord Hare and has been lingering around the palace far too often, leans on the wall beside my cell and tosses his teacup over his shoulder. “Clean cup, if you please.”

  From the shadows a pale, shaking hand reaches out with a cup of tea in a saucer. Tea sloshes over the sides of the cup.

  “Without any biscuits?” his hatted companion asks in a tone that can only be called scandalized. “You barbarian! You … you … animal.”

  Mark flashes teeth in the sort of smile that is more feral than not and says, “Hop, hop.”

  The hatted man tsks at him—and then at me. “Eavesdropping. Quite the worst sort of behavior, you know.”

  “Worse than lacking biscuits?” I ask.

  The men both hum and mutter, lost easily in a curious sort of riddling that the Wonderlandians are prone to. Mark taps a finger on the teacup, sloshing the liquid over the edges in a rhythmic way. The hatted man paces and has a little chat with himself. Suddenly, as if responding to signal that I missed, they both say in unison, “Quite so!”

  I nod. Really, what else could I do? For all the ways that being here changes a woman, at the heart of it all, I am still me. I see no need to engage more nonsense or nuisance than necessary. Mark and the hatted man are not rational; few of the inhabitants of this place are. In truth, I rather like it. A bit of madness makes the things that one must do seem sane sometimes.

  At least that’s my theory.

  Mark watches me as he holds out a hand and demands, “Biscuit!”

  The same pale, quivering hand as before extends. This time it holds a biscuit. A key-shaped biscuit is placed gently onto his open palm.

  Mark extends the key-biscuit to me almost the moment it touches his palm. “Will you have tea with us, Beatrice?”

  “Indeed,” I murmur with as much enthusiasm as I can.

  He hands me the key-biscuit and … waits. No instructions. No anything.

  “What do I do with a biscuit?”

  “Marvelous riddle!” the hatted man exclaims with a clap. He claps several more times, muttering a series of queries that my question has sparked as he begins to pace. “A biscuit … What does a biscuit do? What is a biscuit?”

  “Does it signify?” Mark asks.

  “A biscuit?”

  “A biscuit,” Mark confirms with a nod.

  As they pace and ponder, I decide that there are—as happens regularly in this weird world—only a few choices. One, I eat the biscuit. Two, I see if the biscuit is a key. Three, I do nothing. I’m not great at nothing, and I have been starving since I was left to rot in Alice’s dungeon. On the other hand, if it failed as a key, I could eat the rest.

  “Key it is.”

  I reach between the bars of my cell with the biscuit key, shove it in the lock as carefully as one can with a biscuit, and try to turn it. Baked brown pastry flakes to the ground. Inside the key-biscuit is an actu
al key, solid, metal, and effectively granting my freedom. The lock turns.

  “She said you’d know!” the hatted man exclaims. “She said it true.”

  Mark looks at me, shrugs, and smiles.

  I shove the door open with a squeak and screech—not the door’s sounds, mind you. Mark Hare and his awkward hat-wearing companion provide sound effects as the door opens.

  The dilemma, unfortunately, is what to do next. Leaving the cell or-- No, there is no dilemma. I love Alice, cherish her in a way that a fish loves water or an oyster hides a pearl or any number of explanations. The point is that she is both essential and my treasure.

  But I do not want to die. I’ve held on to my head despite everything. This time, perhaps, I will not evade the executioner unless I leave. Then I might literally evade him. It is my best hope.

  * * *

  The king is a pig. Some days I thought he might become so in form. He is a bore, a vulgar, rutting thing, voracious in appetite. In so many ways, the Red King is porcine. Yet Alice titters and laughs when he makes crude jokes. She pats his cheeks. She ruffles his hair.

  I hate him.

  “I don’t want a brat,” Alice exclaims as I rub oil into her skin. “If he continues as he does, I’ll be fat and mad.”

  “Plenty of women—”

  “What if I get sent back?” Alice asks softly. She is prone under me, belly down on her bed, naked but for another pair of absurd shoes and a jagged crown crookedly affixed atop her head. “What if I have a child, a native of this place, and I get sent home?”

  I cannot tell her she won’t. None of us who’ve fallen into this world know when our time will suddenly end. In full truth, I wonder sometimes if we are all in a shared coma, or if we are dead, or highly medicated. There have been times in my life when injury, death, and medication were all likely.

  “I don’t want him to touch me,” Alice admits. “Even if I wanted a squalling infant, I wouldn’t want him to touch me.”

  “He’s the king. Shouldn’t you … want him, or whatever?” I’m not completely clear on how the Wonderland things work, but if he wants the queen—every queen regardless of the woman under the crown—shouldn’t she want him, too?