Chapter 17
“Your High Timenesses, and ladies and gentlemen—the day has finally come! It is my great honor to welcome you to the Labyrinth to witness our Hands playing in the second Turning Trial!”
Screams. Cheers. Applause.
I was counting. Seconds and minutes and hours, I was counting in my head, and sometimes it helped, and sometimes it didn’t.
Regardless—we were already here. The help had woken us up at six in the morning to get an early breakfast and to get ready. To put on our suits—no more dresses and tuxedos for us, it seemed. But that did not make me feel any better.
The suit covered my legs completely, went all the way up my neck and down to my wrists.
White suede mixed with black and purple at the seams, and it had these black leather pieces on the chest as well—to clearly indicate that I was a Spade.
The suits of the Hearts were detailed with red, and the Clubs with green, the Diamonds with silver—all to more easily identify us.
When Lida first pulled up the zipper on my back, I thought I was going to find it too suffocating, but it wasn’t.
The fabric was soft against my skin, even though it was tight and hugged my shape everywhere.
I could still move in it perfectly, and it even had a pocket especially designed for my Life Clock.
When Calren came to pick us up, he seemed to like how we looked in the suits. Everything was prepared, he said. The audience was here. The queens were here. The Labyrinth was ready for us to play again.
I thought I might be sick as we made our way outside, to the back of the palace again, but not in the same place as we had been last time.
He took us beyond the oak trees at the back of the arena, closer to the tower of the Great Clock that stood proudly over our heads.
There was a field that I hadn’t realized even existed, and a large structure that rose in the middle of the grass, almost parallel with the Great Clock tower just beyond the Labyrinth’s golden fence.
The strangest structure I’d ever seen, half tower and half tree, made of massive gray stone blocks on one side, and branches so thick, falling all the way to the ground on the other, so that we couldn’t even see where the trunk sprung out of the soil.
I had no word for it, and I doubted any of the others did. We kept looking at one another, all of us pale, all of us shaking.
Meanwhile Calren pretended to be calm, though the way he tapped his foot against the ground said he wasn’t.
Behind us, there were no seats this time, only velvet ropes and soldier upon soldier separating the area where the audience was standing, a few feet to the sides of a box on the ground where the queens sat.
They were closer here than they had been in the first trial, and the White Queen waved at us whenever we looked back, while the Red one watched with her arms crossed in front of her chest, never even cracking a smile.
I don’t know why I felt so…betrayed by them. I don’t know why I felt they should have been here with us, talking to us, helping us.
Maybe it was just the uncertainty speaking. I had no right to expect help from the queens…did I?
At least the people couldn’t get to us. Clockfolk and Timekeepers were everywhere behind those soldiers, screaming and cheering and clapping, too.
There were no screens here, either, which made me feel a little better.
I didn’t want to see my face projected a hundred times its true size for all to see right now. Or ever.
Johnny the speaker continued.
“Allow me to present to you this beautiful creation that is called the Tree of Years.”
Like always, Johnny was nowhere to be seen, yet his voice came at us from all sides at the same time.
Three hundred and ten, three hundred and eleven, three hundred and twelve…
“Quite a beaut, isn’t it,” said Johnny, and the audience clapped a little bit.
“Quite a special creation. It remembers everything that has passed through it, and very little of what leaves.” I didn’t understand what that meant, nor did I want to at this point.
“Your objective is simple, dearest Hands. All you have to do is reach the top.”
Another pause.
I looked to the side, at March who was standing right next to me today. Silas and Cook were on my other side, and Levana and Helen were on his. Our hands almost touched, and he brushed his knuckles against mine every now and again, for which I was thankful.
I just wished neither of us was here right now.
Or…I just wished all of us would be excited to play these games, that this whole thing had felt less wrong.
“You may climb at your own speed. You may wait. You may choose to help one another—or not. The Tree will accommodate all approaches equally,” Johnny continued in that sharp voice.
“You will be given a…helping hand, if I may say so myself, he-he-he.” I tried hard not to cringe and still failed.
“And the last courtesy I am willing to extend to our Hands—if you happen to feel lost, fear not, for you are exactly where you should be.”
More applause. The rest of us exchanged dreadful looks. We knew we weren’t meant to understand the cryptic messages of the speaker, at least not until we were inside the game, but I doubted we would find anything he said today helpful in there.
“Ready?” Calren said a moment later, and every instinct in my body screamed at me to run.
I nodded anyway, together with the others. “Ready,” we lied in unison.
“You will be all right. Remember your training. Think before you act,” he said, his eyes stopping on all our faces for a tick. “You will be all right.”
Except he sounded more like he was talking to himself than to us.
Regardless. When he guided us toward the tower and the tree, I took one last look back at the audience, at the queens, and followed. The time to regret coming to Neverwhen was long gone. Now, I went through.
Soldiers in their shiny silver armors were there to open a large wooden door on the side of the tower, just inches before it met the thick roots of the tree it was attached to. The inside was dark. No windows anywhere on the walls, but there were fires burning on top of torches.
“The tower only exists to support the Tree of Years,” Calren said from the side where he’d stopped, holding his cane in both hands, his knuckles white. “Your challenges will be in there until the last level.” And he looked up at the tree part of the structure.
None of us said anything.
“Good-timing to all of you.” His voice shook a little. I pretended I couldn’t tell.
When the soldiers stepped to the sides, we all walked ahead and into the open door of the tower.
Cold. Dark, like we were suddenly in a different world. And once we were all inside the round hallway, the heavy wooden door closed.
The sound of it was so final. If there was a ceiling over us, it was too far up and the light from the torches couldn’t reach it. The second of silence that followed felt and tasted like dread to me.
Then Helen cleared her throat. “I don’t know about you, but I’m eager to get to the top of that tree.
So…” She nodded her head to the left. An archway that curved to the right a few feet in was the only way from here—there was nothing else in the tower, no other doors or stairs or anything. “Off we go.”
We were all eager to get to the top of that tree, too, so nobody argued.
“You okay?” March whispered as we went through the archway, and the air shifted yet again. Became…heavier and infused with the scent of wet wood.
“Yes,” I said, even if I wasn’t entirely sure of it. But I was standing. Walking. Perfectly aware of my surroundings. “You?”
A smile that only reached half of its potential. “I think so.” We were all as okay as we could be, considering.
“Stairs,” Helen said as she followed the narrow corridor the archway led us to. “There’s stairs there—C’mon.”
Up the stairs we went—and then the tower merged into the tree in the strangest way I’d ever seen.
“This was built by a Club,” Seth said as we approached the hole on the stone wall that seemed to have been made by the tree itself. Its roots and branches and vines had spread to this side of the tower, too, slithering across the ceiling and crawling on the walls and the floor like tentacles.
“Do the towers in your court look like this?” Cook asked, and I knew he was just trying to keep himself distracted as we went through that hole. No more stone blocks beneath our feet, only thick wood made of roots and vines, branches, leaves, moss—which led us to a whole other world.
“Wow,” I breathed when I looked up and saw the magnitude of the inside of the Tree of Years.
“Absolutely not,” Mimi said. “Nothing in our court looks quite like this.”
We all stopped to admire the view for a moment. I doubted any place in the realm came close to this. This was pure magic, and it buzzed in the air like electricity. It smelled of flowers in here, too, not just wet wood. It smelled green.
I’d call it a forest, except it was indoors somehow.
An indoor forest that stretched farther than my eye could see, with a canopy on the side too thick to make out anything beyond.
It went up forever, it seemed, and the way the branches and the roots and the ropes and the vines were twisted and intertwined together, you’d think it was all a big network.
Leaves as big as my entire body, and ones as small as the palm of my hand.
Flowers and mushrooms everywhere on what I assumed were branches that rose from the floor and extended from the sides—or maybe they could be trees on their own.
They were thick enough to be considered trunks—some bigger than any real trunk I’d ever seen in my life. It was all connected.