Chapter 5
“Stand still, the lot of you. Stop fidgeting.” A look back over her shoulder, white lashes batting. “My dearest little tickers,” the White Queen cooed.
My hands were shaking.
My entire body was shaking.
“Your Excellency, why are we here?” asked Reggie, and his voice shook, too. Broke halfway.
The queen didn’t turn her head a second time.
She looked flawless again, with her hair in the same style, moving as if it were a single piece and not hair at all, white as snow.
Her dress was white and silver, as if the edges were made of glass, and she still moved her hands about just slightly, which made me wonder if she was maybe a Club before she was crowned queen.
Such information wasn’t public knowledge, was it?
Or maybe I hadn’t paid attention since the current queens had been queens ever since I could remember.
She seemed to be always moving, even when she told us to stop fidgeting.
“I don’t feel so good…”
This from Erith standing somewhere to my right. I looked—we all did, but my eyes first found March who stood at the front of the line, shoulders wide, hands fisted tightly, eyes on me.
Why are you always watching me? I wondered. Who are you?
Erith was pale enough that the color of her skin resembled the hair of the White Queen. Her wide dark eyes were consumed with the fear we all felt charging our bodies like jolts of electricity.
“I don’t…I don’t…”
“Breathe, Erith,” said Anika from her side. Russ, who stood between her and me, kept his eyes forward and tried his best to pretend he wasn’t as afraid as the rest of us. He wasn’t shaking. He believed we would win, that this was all part of the game. It was only the trials.
And what did I believe?
“I can’t do it,” Erith insisted. “I can’t…I can’t do it. I don’t know where I am and how I got here, and I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m not prepared—I’m not!”
I wasn’t prepared, either.
I didn’t know where I was or how I got here, either.
That’s what I believed in. Reality as I was witnessing it.
Breathe, Ora, I told myself when Anika repeated the same to Erith. I breathed and I tried to distract myself with our surroundings, even tried to pretend, like Russ was doing.
Meanwhile Cook was next to me, the only other Spade here, and his shoulder vibrated against mine.
The Great Clock loomed over us, as big as a small sun, stuck still at eight-thirteen.
The whole realm is in panic, Levana’s maid had told her. I was in panic, too.
A broken clock meant no time.
A broken Great Clock meant no Clockrealm.
Being terrified of that thought right now was almost funny to me because, up until I woke up at a table with the White Queen, I’d been certain death didn’t frighten me. I’d been certain that I welcomed it with arms wide open.
But when I pictured death, I pictured it to be…quiet. Peaceful, yet dark and alluring—even soothing.
This was anything but.
The sky was dark but there were so many lights from fires and lanterns burning everywhere around us that we saw everything in detail. We saw the railings, and the tiered seats of the arena filled with people in the distance, and the large projections of the four court emblems on either side.
Maybe the arena went all around, but we couldn’t see the sides of it from down here because the trees of the forest in front of us were large. Dark. Whispering.
“My little ticker—keep your head up and remember: you must only unwin. There is no reason to be afraid.” The White Queen was in front of Erith in a blink, her hand almost touching her cheek, but instead she only traced the shape of her face with her fingers in the air. Like she was trying to memorize it.
“If you could tell us, Your Excellency. If you could tell us how we won,” said Anika from her side. “That would make it easier for all of us, wouldn’t it?”
The queen didn’t miss a beat. “Oh, I’m afraid we can’t do that.”
“Why not? If we fail, we all—” This from Levana, but the queen cut her off.
“You will not fail, little ticker. That is not an option,” she said, her voice suddenly as cold and as sharp as a shard. “And you forget—I cannot tell you because I cannot remember. Nobody does. The counter-curse I cast has wiped all the memories of the forward trials.”
“I thought it was the curse.” Sneaky words, slipping out of me all on their own.
But wasn’t that what Lida the maid had said? That the curse had wiped all our memories?
The queen’s black eyes stopped on mine. The gears in my chest paused.
She smiled. “That, too.” Then she turned to Erith again. “But don’t you worry because the Labyrinth remembers, and that is all that matters.”
The Labyrinth not remembering wouldn’t be on my list of worries right now, but this time I made sure to keep my lips sealed. I didn’t want those eyes on me again—and the queen wouldn’t care. Neither would her sister.
The Red Queen sat in a box of glass in the middle of the seats behind us. We couldn’t see her from this distance—the seats began some fifty feet away—but we did see red. She was there, and I knew it in my bones that she was watching.
Meanwhile the White Queen moved forward and back, a silver watch in her hand that could have materialized out of thin air.
“Tick-tock—only three more minutes!”
Three minutes.
My heart beat like it was a prisoner inside my body, and it had decided to rebel against me this very second.
My brain was a mess of thoughts, some real, most not, and of memories, including ones that weren’t mine. Of rods and glass and fire. Of teeth and grass and night.
Time’s Teeth, how had I ended up in this position? What in the Everstill is going on here?
Or had I died and I was in the actual Everstill? It was the place we all went to when we died, with as much or as little time to spare depending on our deeds during our lifetimes. Some could live forever in the Everstill; some could perish within minutes if they had done such awful deeds in life.
I’d never actually believed in it, to be honest, but this didn’t look like the afterlife. Just the Turning Trials.
I’d decided to apply because of Jinx. She’d been the one who’d always wanted to go, but since the trials took place once every five years, and applicants could only be eighteen-to-twenty years old, she never made it to even apply.
I thought each year they announced we were closer to the next (these) Turning Trials, it broke her heart because she would have been twenty-one, no longer eligible.
Little did I know her heart was way into the future, and it had no time for breaking.
But when she died, and I turned eighteen, I thought it would be a way to honor her memory if I played in this year’s trials. For Jinx, I’d told my parents. I’d told myself.
And that was definitely a truth, at least a part of it.
But if I searched deeper for the most truthful answer, I’d find the need to give myself a break from the real world and lose myself into a different life for a little while, one where I would be too busy playing silly games to think. I’d find the desire to run.
Funny, because here I was now, thinking too much too fast, unable to shake the dread off my body, unable to stop this strange voice in the back of my head that insisted that I was going to die, too.
Soon. Very soon.
I should have never applied.
Breathe-breathe-breathe.
“Here.”
My eyes opened and there were people coming closer to us.
Soldiers dressed in silver armor, with clubs and spades etched onto their chest plates, and swords hanging around their hips.
Four of them came with these boxes in their hands, and they stopped in front of the queen and threw them on the ground—on the grass, green grass beneath our feet.
They bowed to the queen who waved her hand like she was telling them to get up and move already, and they did.
They kneeled and they pulled the lids open, and they showed us what was inside the boxes.
Weapons.
Knives. Bows. Arrows. Swords. Axes.
“Go on, my little tickers! Grab your favorite weapons. I just know all of you are good with them!” Laughter.
How would you know that, if you don’t remember?
How would you know when I never even touched a weapon in Neverwhen…had I?
I was the first to reach the second box for a bow and the biggest knives I could find, because the queen was right.
I was very good with weapons. I’d been very good with weapons since I was a girl, because my father had never quite gotten over being a soldier before he met my mother.
He still lived for war strategies and fighting techniques.
Sparring was his favorite hobby, and it had become mine, too.
Pretty sure that’s why I’d been accepted into the trials when I’d competed with about fifty other Spades just in our quadrant, and over two hundred in all our court.
The others didn’t hesitate, either. They were all eager to get their hands on whatever weapon they could find.
When I stepped back, I had two big knives in the pockets of the suit on the sides of my ribcage, like they were made exactly for them. I had another smaller one in a tiny pocket on my outer thigh, and I strapped the bow and arrows across my chest, too.
Half the fear, if not more, disappeared by the time I double-checked that everything was secured on my person. I had weapons, even if I’d only ever sparred with my father and Jinx. Fake fights, but fights, nonetheless. Father never held back. That’s what he always said.
Eyes on the side of my face.
March’s attention was still physical, even through the chaos going on in my head.
He’d stood up, too, and the others were still going through the boxes.
He had a spear in one hand—long and wooden, just like that rod that had been spinning in that strange visual I’d seen in my head.
In the other he held a blade that was too big to be called a knife, and too short to be considered a sword.
A dagger with a handle decorated with rhinestones.