Chapter 4 #2
I wondered which one of them I’d traded my room with, if any of this was even true.
Because Lida the maid was right—they did need to move constantly, couldn’t stay in one place for long.
We were taught little about the other courts, but everybody knew that about Clubs.
Their entire court was built in spiraling towers almost as big as the Great Clock because they needed to be moving physically.
Running, fighting, sleeping for only a few hours at a time.
So very chaotic, but they were the ones who kept Time moving—a very necessary thing.
“I think we shouldn’t touch the food at all,” said the Heart girl sitting near March.
Levana was her name, and it fit the sharp edges of her beautiful face, the chestnut brown of her hair, the look in her forever-squinted eyes.
“I think we should refuse to be a part of this until someone tells us the truth—because I do not believe we’ve already completed the trials for a second. ”
“If we did,” said Erith, no longer holding hands with Anika. “We would be champions. Victors. We would be famous, and-and-and rich, and we wouldn’t be…”
Her voice trailed off. I looked at March—again, after my eyes traveled to anyone else for a second, they always came back to him like he was home.
Which was absurd, considering he was a stranger—a stranger who loves to create shapes out of glass and feels pure, raw happiness when they reflect the light in the right way…
The whole world came to a halt.
The words popped in my head one after the other, and while they did, my limbs froze, my lungs emptied. I couldn’t breathe at all because I was too busy seeing.
With eyes that were not my own, I saw fire, and a long rod, and glass at the end of it, molten like liquid amber.
The heat coming off the furnace was almost unbearable, yet the rod turned steadily in these big, strong hands—not mine—the weight of it shifting with every subtle motion.
The fire kissed the edges of the molten glass at the end, keeping it soft as the hands continued to rotate the rod to stretch its form.
With a nose that wasn’t mine I smelled the ashes and the almost acidic scent in the air.
With ears that weren’t mine I heard the spin-spin-spin of whatever that rod was attached to—maybe a chain rattling against the floor?—as well as the buzz of magic.
“Stuck in time and forced to unwin a trial?”
Time Himself must have spit me back out there at that table—or maybe it was just that voice. March’s voice that some part of me insisted I’d heard before.
I breathed and air slid down my throat with ease, and my mind was divided between what I saw now and what I saw then, those hands that spun the rod. They were his hands—I knew because I’d seen them in the morning while he fisted them so hard his knuckles remained white. They were the same hands.
Curiouser and curiouser.
I’d never seen fire burning the way it did in that furnace. I’d never seen spinning rods or melting glass. I’d never seen or smelled or heard—yet the visuals in my head were so crisp I could have been there right now.
But I wasn’t. I was here.
“Did any of you consider that this might be the actual trial?” asked Russ the Diamond.
“The Turning Trials were never played backward,” said Levana the Heart.
“But this time could be different. This time, they could be trying out new things. Maybe they designed the trials that way, and they are only calling it unwinning to confuse us. Maybe it’s all part of the game,” Russ continued with his mouth half-full of peas.
Reluctantly, I reached for some food because my body demanded it. I feared I wouldn’t be able to function for much longer if my stomach kept growling like a beast.
“I asked my maid. She said it’s all real, and that the entire realm is in panic,” Levana said. “If we don’t unwin, in two weeks the Great Clock will lose order.”
My heart skipped a beat. I filled my mouth with vegetables again.
The Great Clock losing order meant the end, indeed.
“And you believe her? She could be in on it,” Russ insisted. “I say it’s all part of their plan.”
“What if it isn’t, though?” Mimi the Club asked, and the way she was moving her hands up and down like she was trying to shake something off her fingers turned them into a blur.
“Holy Hour, what if it really is all real? My maid said the same—that they don’t remember how, but the trials are over, that we completed them.
Guys…” She stopped, grabbed the edge of the table and leaned closer, looked at all of us with those wide green eyes.
“I’ve never-ever-reven met any of you before. I swear it on Time.”
Shivers rushed down my body, just because I could have sworn I’d never met her, either.
Did I believe her or Lida or anyone? That was the real question. Did I believe in any of this?
It wasn’t a dream, that was for sure. But was this part of the trials, like Russ insisted?
“We don’t know for sure,” said a boy—not March. I stared at my plate as I chewed and chewed, the food perfectly tasteless to me.
“We do,” said someone else.
“We do not,” said a girl—could have been Helen the Heart.
“We—”
“The queen.”
The two words slipped my lips when I could have sworn I’d locked them in my head tightly, had thrown away the key. Yet they were there now, out of me, in the room, in their ears.
The Hands stopped. Looked at me.
Nuisance. But I might as well finish the thought now since it was already out there.
“Does the queen have any reason to lie to us?” Because I, for one, couldn’t think of such a thing.
Neither could they.
“Part of the trial,” Russ said, drinking all his lemonade in one swig. He was very noisy when he swallowed, and licked his lips, and slammed the glass back onto the table. “It’s all part of this year’s trials.”
Except those words stank worse than rotten seconds.
“It isn’t.” March. My eyes moved up from my plate—he was looking at Russ for once.
“How do you know?” the Diamond asked.
“Because the Great Clock cannot be altered for anyone. They wouldn’t mess with it for anything, let alone the trials.”
Those words, the way he pronounced them. So…precisely.
That voice, the way it remained neutral, like he was incapable of feeling.
But he was. I’d felt it myself while he spun that rod in his hands. Happiness. Pride. Joy. He’d felt all of that—over glass.
“The Great Clock is stuck. We all saw it. The curse happened,” March said.
I looked at him again. What kind of magic could the Labyrinth possess to make people see through another’s eyes, experience their very emotions the way I had his?
How could that be real?
Or was this, after all, just a very long, very strange dream?
And if so, how could I dream of something I’d never seen or thought about before, so vividly?
“So…what now?” Could have been Reggie or Seth who asked.
“Now?” Anika said, arching a thin brow. “We unwin the trials.”
Panicked whispers and movements. The three Clubs stood up and paced around the table.
When they returned to their seats, they each took the other’s.
The rest of us remained in our places, forcing food down our throats. I still couldn’t taste anything, and my mind wouldn’t stop spinning, and March wouldn’t stop looking at me when he thought I couldn’t see.
I could. His attention had physical weight on me.
Why did I make up that visual of him working with glass? How did I imagine what his happiness felt like?
Was it a spell? Had I been magicked?
Why was the Great Clock stuck? What kind of a curse could make the very center of our realm just…stop?
Why would a Spade or a Timekeeper or anyone at all want to curse Time?!
“Relax, everyone,” said Helen, leaning back on her chair with her arms crossed casually. “It’s no big deal, okay? Even if we really have to play the trials backward—so what? We won them forward, didn’t we? How much harder could unwinning really be?”
That brought all my thoughts to a sudden pause.
Hmm.
We had already won the trials, according to the White Queen. We were here—and my clothes were somehow in that room, and my sister’s picture and my sketchbook I never go anywhere without were on the nightstand. My skin was raw red in places, like it had been recently healed by a medic.
And the third Spade…
“I am absolutely, undeniably, almost twelve-hours certain that winning would be more difficult than unwinning,” Seth said, deep in thought, yet his fingers tapped against the edge of his plate relentlessly.
“Precisely,” said Helen. “And they will tell us how we won. They have to—it would be terribly inconvenient for them if we fail.”
Except if they were going to, they would have by now. They’d be here, right here, because if the Great Clock stopped at eight-thirteen, we only had about thirty minutes left.
All of us turned and stared at the polished doors for a beat. Then another.
Neither opened.
“We won’t fail,” Anika insisted, and there was red on her cheeks now, like she’d finally forced herself to snap out of the terror she was feeling until a moment ago.
“The White Queen wouldn’t lie to us, and we’ve been here before, and we won.
Do you understand?” She even smiled a little, and it looked genuine enough. “We won once! We can win again.”
“Unwin,” said March, and the hair on my forearms rose. “And there’s only eleven of us now.”
Just like we’d looked at the doors, we turned to the empty chair right next to him, where the Spade would have been sitting if he were still alive.
Dead.
A dead Hand in the Turning Trials.
That had never happened before. For as long as the Trials had existed, some a hundred and fifty years ago, nobody had ever died.
The games could be dangerous, but never life-threatening.
The point was to give and take, and to create connections between the people of the Clockrealm, because the more different kinds of magics interacted in the same place, the more Sparetime was released in the air.
That was the whole point of the trials. Always had been. Not death.
Yet the chair remained empty, and we remained eleven.
“Who was he?” someone whispered.
“How could we have just…forgotten?”
“Was he nice, I wonder?”
“Was he evil?”
“How can one possibly be both a Timekeeper and a Spade?! Madness, I tell you…”
But for me, the most important question remained, “Why?”
So confusing.
We looked at our plates, the table, ourselves. We looked, but we didn’t see an answer anywhere.
That’s when the doors opened all of a sudden, and the sharp laughter of the White Queen sounded from somewhere close by. My stomach turned and my hands fisted, and all of us were on our feet in a second.
That feeling of dread returned, even when I told myself that everything was going to be okay. Even when I reminded myself that I was still me, no matter how strange I felt—I’d seen it in the mirror with my own eyes. I will be okay.
Still, the empty chair on the other side of the table mocked me: no, you’re not.