Chapter 55
Alice quickly tore down the steps of the Palace North to the labyrinth of roses. She hoped Tattypoo wouldn’t follow her, but Alice didn’t need turn around to know that she did. She knew everyone did. She knew and could feel Tattypoo perched atop the grand staircase, watching her.
Tattypoo watched the world around her collapse in on itself as dark clouds raged overhead. She couldn’t protect Alice—or anyone. She had only done harm. This had to end.
With trembling hands, she drew her wand. Gripping it tightly, she pointed it toward Alice, who ran in a maze—who had always been running in a maze.
“Intelligo te, Alice, a vinculo tuo,” Tattypoo whispered, her voice steady as the unbearable weight of using her magic to restrain Alice’s power fell away and the spell released.
With it, the pearl tip of Tattypoo’s wand shattered.
The tether that had begun in Tattypoo and wound itself around Alice, the bind that had held them together as grandmother and granddaughter, was severed.
“You are free now,” Tattypoo said as the weight of her words lifted and her heart broke. “I’m so sorry, my sweet girl.”
Alice’s chest filled with a sudden swell of air, and she began to run faster, and a flood of emotions that had been kept in a well deep inside her began to rush free.
Lifting her skirts, she raced as hard as her legs could go, slamming into patches of unkempt earth, the pounding of her feet sending dull throbs into her skull.
The maze began to grow darker as the sky grew heavy above the towering walls of rose-covered stone.
The cloud that hung over her began to open as her broken heart did, and down came the rain.
Alice knew Tattypoo watched; who else watched Alice run? If the rain that fell upon her were to come in buckets, in sheets of blowing water, she would not be seen; it would send them inside. Who else must watch Alice, running in a maze, searching for the finish that would never come?
The rain came harder. As Alice rounded a corner, she saw Tattypoo watching, the others joining her atop the palace steps that overlooked the maze.
She wished to be alone as her chest began to burn from the air she heaved.
Alice wished no one could see her, and a pang in her chest struck, and thunder clapped, and a bolt of lightning hit so close to the maze that she felt the electricity radiate in her teeth as wild bolts of light soared erratically overhead.
Faster, she ran around hedges, under rose-covered arches, past a bench, and then another.
Was she back where she had started? She wondered, seeing a familiar patch of weeds below her foot.
The rain came in buckets now. Alice could hardly see around the corners that she approached.
As the stone walls began retaining the water dumped from above, the maze filled quickly to her ankles.
And still, the water did not stop. It filled at a speed that wasn’t possible.
Alice, however, finally did stop. The water surged, and with it, a memory—the cave, and the goddess’s voice floating to her, saying, ‘You are the tide.’ Alice’s breath hitched.
The storm wasn’t chance; it roared from her fury, her fear. She’d torn the sky open.
A low wave quickly rushed in from around a corner, as if a dam had broken somewhere outside and set its current free into the maze.
The stream gave way to a deluge as water came flooding from another corner she attempted to round.
There was a howling noise in the distance, and above her the screech of the dragon came.
She looked up and saw Dinah circling below the clouds. Something came for her.
“Does anyone see Alice? What’s gotten into the dragon?
” Nimmie said as they all watched through sheets of rain, getting drenched, as Dinah, who had seemingly appeared out of the cloud cover, now circled the labyrinth.
Somewhere beyond the labyrinth, the dragon dove, and there was a sharp, echoing cry.
Blinkem climbed up to stand on the stone rail for a better vantage point.
Tattypoo couldn’t see Alice, but she had to fight the instinct to run into the maze, as her instinct to protect her was wrong, flawed.
“I see nothing. This isn’t right. I’m going in,” he shouted over the howling wind, wiping the rain from his eyes.
“No! Not until we see her. We are protected on three sides. Lorelei, enact a threshold!” Tattypoo said. A threshold would keep Blinkem back so that Alice could find what it was she ran to.
“Of course.” Lorelei raised her wand, bracing against the diagonal rain, and rose the shield.
Nimmie stepped up on Tinkerton’s knee to get up onto the rail with Blinkem.
“Is it a hundra’ year storm, ya reckon?” she shouted to Tattypoo, her face squinting against the sheets of water, her distress as evident as Tattypoo’s must have been.
Tattypoo looked to the skies. Far in the distance, light could be seen streaming down onto hazy fields and forest, but the clouds billowed from within, blacking out the furthest reaches of the horizon.
This was no storm. Alice was the eye of the black clouds that raged like a cyclone above her.
The rush of water slowed for a moment as Alice pulled herself upright against the hedge fern; the dragon screeched again, this time much closer to the labyrinth, and it was the only sound that broke through the howl of the wind.
Alice felt eyes upon her, eyes that felt as though they were tethered to her back.
The air was humid and close. A rotten smell wafted toward her. Someone lurked behind her.
There was a sudden splashing, like an animal, though she knew what it truly was and took off in an attempt to run in the waist-deep water.
The splashing behind her was followed by a gargling, grunting sound; the creature, a gnome, was in pursuit, pulling itself in and out of the water by the hedge wall they skirted.
Alice’s chest pounded as she rounded a corner looking for an alcove or anything to duck into. Then, on the hedge beside which she was plowing through the water, the leaves and roses began to shake, and the gargling sounds increased. More gnomes!
She pumped her legs faster, and then the dragon slammed down into the water before her, with its mouth wide, a low flame deep in its throat.
Alice read it in an instant. This was the mouth she had seen over the well, the killing mouth, and it hung open directly before her.
The thought arrived whole and terrible: The storm has taken her, too.
It made a dreadful kind of sense. Everything else that loved her had been bent crooked today. Why not this?
Alice turned and floundered back the way she had come.
It cost her. A gnome came off the hedge wall with its arms spread, and its claws found her forearm and raked it open, wrist to elbow, before the world went blue. Fire poured over her head—over her, past her—and the gnome was gone, and the wall where it had clung was burning.
Then Alice knew. The open mouth had never been for her. The flame had been waiting for her to move, and she had moved the wrong way. The arm announced itself with every stroke after that, a hot wire keeping the count of her mistake.
Alice dove to her knees, her arm trailing red in the water, and crawled beneath the dragon’s breast, and then came the howling screams of the gnomes at her back.
She struggled to turn and kick herself beneath Dinah’s stomach in the rushing water as the dragon began to lift, flapping wings fanning, sending heat all around Alice.
At her back, a fire of roses had begun to climb the walls, the smoke whirling with the rancid scent of burning gnome.
Alice, in a half-swim-half-run, moved from the fire, back in the direction from which she had come.
If she could make it to a perimeter, she could climb.
This would be her only way out. Climbing wanted two arms. She would have to manage on one and the memory of the other.
Dinah climbed high into the sky once again, and this time she began a torrent of blue fire high in the air. As she dove, the flames poured over the trees and earth surrounding the labyrinth. The booming sound of heat muffled the heinous sounds of gnomes being burnt alive.
“Tattypoo!” Nimmie shouted. “The Kingdom will be burnt ta’ the ground.”
“Just wait!” Tattypoo yelled, watching the labyrinth as the fire grew from within and on all sides, the burning orange light flickering in her eyes.
Blinkem’s heart raced. “No! Alice!” he shouted to Tattypoo. “Lorelei, drop the barrier now!” he yelled, jumping down from the rail.
“Hold a tick!” Nimmie shouted, pointing to where, from around the labyrinth, bodies both grey and black, covered in burns and blood, splashed and bounded over one another toward the steps.
All but Tattypoo stepped back as the gnomes’ grinning teeth and claws scratched and chomped at them from just beyond the barrier, like wolves pressed to glass.
They came, more and more came, trying to escape the flames.
“There! Alice!” Nimmie screamed. Beyond the barricade, beyond the feral gnomes, within the growing fires of the maze, Alice climbed. Then, her silhouette perched above the maze on a hedge, with a wall of fire and smoke at her back, searching.
“Lorelei! On my mark, you’ll drop the barrier!” Tattypoo shouted.