Chapter 52
Blinkem had been awake since before the birds.
This was not unusual. What was unusual was that he had stopped pretending otherwise. He had dressed in the dark, gone down through the sleeping palace, and walked out to stand over the wells.
There were four on the grounds of Palace North.
He knew each one by its sound. The kitchen well ticked as its rope dried.
The garden well held its breath. He stood over every one of them in turn and listened for gargling, for claws on brick, for anything at all moving under the water.
The wells only held the sounds he had always known.
He thanked them with a tap of his palm on their stone, still cool from night.
However, he never trusted wells. It had been a well that took his boyhood, and now it was a well that fed the gnomes into Munchkin Country, and he privately considered the entirety of wells to be on probation.
The guards at the north wall straightened when he passed.
He set the next watch with them, doubled the pair nearest the labyrinth, and asked after a soldier whose brother had been at the flooded port.
He was good at this part. Tattypoo had seen to that.
A prince who will not take a throne can still walk a wall, she liked to say, and Blinkem had walked this one for so many years now that the wall would likely have missed him.
The night watch had nothing to report. No lights in the tree line.
No fresh earth. No old woman at the gates.
He made them say it twice, the way Tattypoo had taught him—the second telling is where either the forgotten things or the truth is found—and the second telling matched the first, and so he let them go to their breakfast.
Below the wall, where the lawn ran down toward the tree line, the grass still showed the seams of their digging—the places they had opened, looking for tunnels, and filled in again.
He walked the seam of it end to end, watching for any sag, any softness.
Mombi was in the wind. Roquat was under the earth.
Between the two of them, asleep in a tower, was Alice.
Blinkem had been asked to guard her long before he had been asked anything else, and he no longer knew where the assignment ended and the rest of him began, and he had stopped expecting to.
The night before last, he had told Alice that he loved her.
He had used the words “the very essence of my being,” which he had carried for years in dreams and never once said out loud. Said aloud, in the open air, to her face, the words had left him the way a tooth flees you as a child—all at once, with a socket behind.
She had not said it back.
She had said, “Yes, you may,” which was a better answer than most, and not the one he kept listening for.
Since then, he had turned the picnic over in his mind so many times that the sandwiches were worn thin.
She had giggled before the kiss. Did she find him foolish?
He negotiated with his vulnerability as he remembered the way she had steadied herself afterward, head bowed, not performing anything at all.
But Alice was rare in that sense. Though she did not yet know herself entirely, she was only ever just herself. It made him feel…
He stopped for a moment. This was important.
It made him feel—safe. But could he offer her any safety?
They had not spoken since, except once, in a corridor, in front of two maids and a suit of armor.
She had asked whether he had slept well.
He had said that he had, which was untrue, and asked it back, and she had said she was comfortable but sleep was evasive.
Another example of her ability to only access what was true in her.
Not until this moment did Blinkem realize that her ability to do so made him feel entirely inadequate.
Tattypoo had warned him, in her way. “You have loved her since you were a boy,” she had said, “and she has known you a matter of weeks. Mind your arithmetic, dear.” This was Tattypoo’s famous way of addressing the practical when confronted with matters of emotions.
He had minded it. The arithmetic was terrible.
To him, Alice was the whole of the map. To Alice, he was a stretch of new country—pleasant, perhaps, but unsurveyed.
Every kindness she showed him had to be weighed twice, once as it was, and once against years of dreaming it.
He did not tell Tattypoo how the sums came out.
He suspected she knew. He had never cared for the practicality of numbers or arithmetic.
There was also the matter of what he had to offer, which he had begun, privately, to inventory.
A palace he did not live in like a king.
A title he kept wrapped in tissue. A body that came apart under difficulty.
Whatever Alice was—and the list of what Alice was grew by the week—she was not a woman to whom he could offer half things.
He would have to decide, and soon, which of his halves to make whole.
On his way back across the east lawn, he passed the place where the picnic had been.
The staff had taken up the quilt and the lanterns.
The cucumber sandwiches he had left in the grass were gone, every crumb.
He stood a moment over the pressed patch of lawn where the quilt had lain.
And there he was again reliving the kiss.
He had kissed her, and her giggle had been the best part, which he understood was not what the poets promised.
The poets had not met Alice. She laughed at the door of enormous things.
He had watched her do it at the mouth of a dragon’s cave.
And he intended, if permitted, to spend a great many years watching her do it everywhere else.
Then, a sound like a sail being pulled taut surrounded him, as the dragon crossed over him once, high up, on set wings, bound for the tree line where the hunting was.
The sun cleared the trees. Somewhere on the veranda side of the palace, the dragon screamed once—the short scream, the morning one, the one that meant nothing but I am here, and so is the sun. He buttoned his coat. Day had finally arrived, and he went to find Alice.
Alice stood beside Nimmie, who sat upon one of the large pillars on the grand veranda that overlooked the labyrinth at Palace North.
They watched as the dragon swooped and dove in and out of the tree lines in the distance.
“At’a Dragon be huntin’. She protecting ya’ as a dragon kin.
Jus’ as I do as Munchkin folk. You got many a soldier, Miss Alice,” Nimmie said, squinting against the sun as she popped a sunflower seed into her mouth from a pouch she had tied to her waist. Alice smiled.
Nimmie was right. How fortunate she was in so many ways.
Nimmie worked the drawstring of her pouch with two fingers, picking the little knot loose without looking at it. Alice watched her do it. It was nothing. Fingers, a cord, a bag pulled open. She did not know why it turned her stomach inside out and pulled it up into her throat.
Alice put her hand flat on the veranda stone. It was warm from the sun, and it stayed warm, and she kept it there until her stomach came back to where stomachs are kept.
“Seed?” Nimmie held out the pouch.
“No. Thank you.” Her voice came out level, which she counted as a small victory, and she did not say one word more, because there was no way to begin.
“Alice, dear, a moment,” Tattypoo said from the entry of the veranda. Alice turned, surprised. She’d thought Tattypoo was away at Thorncrest. Tattypoo must have used her wand to travel between palaces instantly. Nimmie hopped up, and Alice held out her hand to help Nimmie from the rail.
“I’ma help the dragon hunt!” Nimmie said with a wink, then bounded down the palace steps as Tattypoo approached. Something in her manner made Alice uneasy as Tattypoo took in a shallow breath.
“There’s something I need to discuss with you,” Tattypoo said, now observing the dragon as Alice and Nimmie had.
“Is it about Wendy?” Alice asked, hoping desperately that Tattypoo’s somber state didn’t mean something was wrong. “Have you discovered something?”
“No, not yet.” Tattypoo stuttered slightly. “I will. But this is about your powers.”
“My powers?” Alice turned fully to Tattypoo. Blinkem had said she held the answers. Was Alice finally going to get one?
“Someone has cast a spell on me?” Alice asked. It sounded almost like a fairytale, but considering there was a dragon flying overhead, that made sense. “Who would do that?” She could not help but feel pique, as she had so often felt, in her life, entirely powerless.
“It’s hard to say,” Tattypoo said, seeming somewhat evasive on the topic. “Alice, your gifts are tremendous, and with that comes so much danger. We need to teach you how to wield them immediately.”
“Can you remove the spell, then?” Alice asked, for what would be the point in learning magic if she couldn’t access it?
“I can, but I fear, because it will all be so new to you, it could have devastating consequences. You must commit to learning the craft, and then I will unbind you.”
“Of course,” Alice said, and part of her felt excitement, the excitement that comes when you realize you can be more than what you are.
Tattypoo must have sensed it, and she placed her hand firmly on Alice’s. “This is about protecting you, Alice. This is life or death. That is how important it is that you do this.”
“I understand,” Alice said quickly, and the fear the words brought was enough to ebb the joy from her heart. Could she trust Tattypoo, really, after all the lies the woman had told, after all she’d kept hidden? Even now, she had seemingly done so little to try to find Wendy!
But Blinkem trusted Tattypoo. And what other choice did Alice have?
“Thank you, Tattypoo,” she said. “I will do my utmost to learn.”