Chapter 2
“The Turning Trials were a massive success. Four trials, all played, all completed, all won,” the White Queen started. “And when it ended, it did not end at all! We had a traitor among us, little tickers, and we never even knew.”
More gasps. More wide eyes and parted lips.
All but the guy with the curly hair. The one I almost knew but didn’t. His eyes were hard, his hands fisted. He looked at the queen and it was clear to see that he did not believe her.
Such a curious thing to not believe a queen.
Maybe this was a dream after all.
“The twelfth Hand?” someone asked.
“The twelfth Hand,” the queen confirmed with a nod. “He was a Timekeeper in part, and—”
This time she could not continue from the gasp and even the little scream that left the girl sitting next to her on my side of the table.
A Timekeeper in the trials? That was unheard of.
You see, only the four courts of the Clockrealm played in the trials. The Timekeepers were…timekeepers. They did not play with the rest of us. They kept time and built clocks.
“Hush now, tickers—hush. He wasn’t all Timekeeper. He was half Spade, too. Six hours this and six hours that.” The queen looked at me again, then at the boy sitting to my right, the last in line on this side of the table.
A Spade. Easy to tell as our hair was usually pretty light, our eyes some shade of blue. His were as bright as the sky outside.
The boy recognized me, too. We were both from the Court of Spades, and apparently, so was the traitor.
“And so, he carried a Timekeeper Clock with him, and he cast the curse upon us with it. Cursed Time itself to wither and die in all the realm.”
My eyes closed as the information rushed through my mind.
A Timekeeper Clock was the most powerful magical item we had. Only Timekeepers could build and control them, and they amplified every second and minute and hour, and some said they pulled energy from the Great Clock itself. Limitless. More than enough to cast curses, but…
Why would a Spade want the realm to wither?
Why would a Timekeeper want to curse Time?
Why would a Spade and a Timekeeper ever be together—to create life?
Unheard of. Perfectly absurd.
There were four courts in the realm—The Court of Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds—and ours. Most of the Clockfolk lived and married and died within their courts, but there were times when people from different courts married one another, too. Created life together. Not common, but it had been done.
Never with Timekeepers, though. Because they were Timekeepers. They were not like us.
Madness, the others said.
Ridiculous!
Outrageous, indeed!
Yet in my head spun another word: impossible. Which was mad and ridiculous and outrageous all on its own because we all knew that there was no such thing as impossible.
“Silence—focus—sip-sip-sip!”
We took three sips each.
The tea never ran out in our cups. It never cooled. The magic that sustained it was stable still.
My eyes drifted back to the boy. Tried to read the strange look in his eyes. Tried to see all the colors in them that I knew to be there, when I didn’t.
What a strange morning.
“Now.” The White Queen cleared her throat. “He did manage to cast the curse with his clock. And I got there as fast as I could, my little tickers. My heart near exploded, thinking you would be in danger.”
The weight of his attention had me looking at the boy again instead of the queen. That same expression was still there on his face—disbelief.
“Alas, you were all fine, and all of us were in danger instead! What a sad, sad night.” The queen moved her hands about, but I wasn’t looking at her yet.
Night, she said, and those flashes came before me again—teeth and clocks, grass and blood. The sound of those beasts growling was so real I looked behind me because I could have sworn one was coming for me.
Nothing there but the marble floor and the walls, though.
“Everything okay there, little Spade?”
The queen was once again looking at me.
“Fine,” I muttered, but my flesh was still raised, and there was something about the look in the boy’s eyes when I met them that almost promised me he felt it, too.
“Wonderful!” said the queen. “Just as wonderful as I was, if I do say so myself, because I arrived just in time for the traitor to finish the curse.”
“Did you undo it?” asked the girl on her right.
“Oh, no, I did not. I tried to. I could not,” said the queen.
I could have been made of gears and cogs, and right now they were twisting violently in my stomach.
“It was done, gone already—done, I tell you! I couldn’t undo it, but I did create a counter-curse, my little tickers.
That’s how wonderful it all turned out.”
She clapped her hands, smiled. None of us joined.
“I understand, I understand,” the queen said. “You must all be so eager to know how I saved us all—I understand.” She grabbed the napkins she’d folded into triangles and began to fold them now into rectangles as she spoke.
If I didn’t know any better, I could have sworn the queen was nervous like Jinx sometimes was. She fidgeted a lot when she was nervous.
“So—as I said, when the curse was cast to wither all Time in the realm, I tried to take it back, tried to stop it, tried to undo it. It did not work—how sad. And so, I thought and thought and tried to find a solution—and I did! Lucky or unlucky for us, the traitor was only able to cast that curse because of the time he won in the trials.” She grabbed the next triangle-shaped napkin, spread it over her empty plate, and began to roll it like a piece of scroll.
“Therefore, I magicked the trials to turn backward in time.”
Laughter. Claps. It had all become so very natural to watch her do these things by now that I hardly noticed.
“Your Excellency,” I said, and I could not tell you how I knew to call her that. “What do you mean, backward?”
“Exactly that—I magicked the trials to be repeated, only this time backward. Isn’t it brilliant? Isn’t it wonderful?!”
The rest of us looked at one another, stunned.
The queen said, “Anyhour, the magic took effect. The trials were altered. Now all you have to do is play again.”
Those strange gears in my stomach groaned like they’d run all out of oil. I considered I might throw up any minute—and I didn’t seem to be the only one.
“But…but you said we won,” said the boy sitting next to me—the Spade. I didn’t know him, which wasn’t a surprise. It was by design—they chose three Hands from three different quadrants of each court to make sure there would be no alliances and no favoring one player over the other.
But had I known the other, I wondered? The traitor?
“You did,” the queen answered with a nod.
“So…what are we playing for now?” asked another from across the table.
“Why, to unwin, of course!”
Unwin the trials.
My head was spinning—maybe backward, too.
“It’s simple, I assure you. All you have to do is go backward through the trials, and unwin every game you won.
Easy,” the queen said. “Until then, time in the realm will be moving backward, too. If you look at your Life Clocks again, I’m sure you’ll notice.
In fact, the sun is unrising and night will fall shortly. ” And she waved at the windows.
Unrise?
Indeed, the sun was lowering toward the horizon, and had I not known this, I’d have thought I mistook the morning for afternoon, and the west from the east. But the sky was getting darker, and we were looking east here, not west.
A few of them did check their Life Clocks, and the look on their faces was enough confirmation for me. We hadn’t noticed the hands moving backward when we first looked because it would have never occurred to us that a clock could do that in the first place. Not even a broken one.
I swallowed hard.
“I still don’t understand, Your Excellency,” said one of the girls—I didn’t care to look. “There has to be another way, I don’t—”
“There is no other way,” the queen cut her off, her napkin rolled all the way, and she twisted it between her hands as she spoke. “You either unwin the trials, little ticker, or you die.”
Time seemed to skip a second just then.
“We all die,” the queen added.
The boy with the curly hair still didn’t believe her. Easy to see the suspicion in his eyes.
But this was the queen. The White Queen, one of the two rulers of the Clockrealm. She had no reason to lie. She’d saved us from a traitor and a curse. She’d done the only thing she could do to save us.
“How will we do that? How can we unwin? How did we win, and why don’t we remember?” asked the boy, and again, at the sound of him my heart skipped beats and beats and beats. So familiar, yet a perfectly foreign voice.
Curiouser and curiouser, this morning.
“Part of the curse, I’m afraid,” said the queen, looking down at her hands as she now unrolled her napkin slowly. “The curse took your memory of the trials from the very beginning, even before you entered Neverwhen.”
“So, how will we know how we won?”
“You won’t!” said the queen. “But you will begin each trial from the end, and you will finish it in the beginning, when the game has been unwon. It’s simple, really.
As simple as a tick.” She waved a hand and steam appeared over the table, in it a clock and a hand that turned a minute.
Magic came so easy to her, but I couldn’t find it in me to even be impressed.
The sound of that tick echoed eternally, either in the hall or in my head.
“I’d suggest you go off to bed now, little tickers, and rest. For your trial begins tomorrow, just as the sun starts to unset.”
An unsetting sun.
The White Queen stood up. We all jumped to our feet with her, and if it weren’t for the table, half of us would have fallen. We were disoriented, dizzy, unable to make out which side was up for a second. But the table was there to hold our weight, and the queen smiled and nodded her head toward us.
We all nodded ours toward her instinctively, like we’d done it a thousand times before. Like our bodies knew to do it, even if our minds didn’t.