Chapter 9
Spoons don’t grow on trees. This much we knew, all of us.
Yet the closer we got to that tree, the clearer we saw the spoons hanging on its branches like fruit, their stems brown—like an apple’s or a pear’s. Curiouser still were the forks that were hanging on the branches of a smaller tree behind the spoons. Knives, too, a little farther.
Silverware, everywhere.
“Are you sure this is the right way?” said one Hand or the other.
“You said it was, you minute-minded nitwit.”
“We all came through this side—where is the arena?!” someone else continued.
“I knew it was the wrong way, I knew-knew-knew it!” That sounded a lot like Reggie.
“Then why didn’t you say-say-say so, you gear-jammed moron?!”
“Stop.” This was definitely Russ.
He’d stepped forward, held up his arms to the sides as he looked up at the spoons and forks and knives hanging on trees.
Then came the napkins, white and small, flying together, flapping their edges.
Napkins that fly.
“It’s the trial,” Russ whispered. “It’s not over yet.”
The gears in my stomach twisted. We all moved forward at the same time, too, touched the bark, the spoons we could reach—and a few even plucked them from their stems. Spoons. Actual, metal spoons, crisp and clean and shiny.
“But we unkilled the clockbeasts,” said Helen.
“Unless it was wrong…” said Cook.
“Unless we were never supposed to unkill them in the first place,” said Mimi.
“Unless there’s more to the first trial than the unkilling…” This from March.
My heart beat faster than charged seconds. “The last trial is always the hardest,” I whispered without really meaning to.
But they all knew this. We all knew this—we’d read on the trials before entering. There were plenty of resources, records, books and old newspaper articles to read from—and they always said that the last trial was the hardest.
“So, what now?” asked Reggie, who’d been the happiest to be done with the trial, to be going back. “What do we do now?!”
“If we go back, would they let us?” asked Cook—and he was looking right at me, like he thought I might have the answer. I didn’t.
“They won’t. This was the way back to the arena, and if the arena isn’t here, that means the trial isn’t over,” said Russ.
He was absolutely right. Nothing was over yet. There was more to the trial than unkilling the clockbeasts.
“I guess we keep on moving,” said March, and he started forward. The rest followed.
So did I.
Only three and a half minutes later did I understand exactly what the leftover voice of the Cheshire in my head had meant.
The forest had brought us to a tea party.
Waking up, sitting at a table last evening had been strange—because the last memory I had was far, far away from this whole place, and I’d been sure I would find myself covered in blood, yet I’d been clean and wearing a pretty dress, no less.
But this was different.
The table was twisted like the body of an overgrown, dead snake. The teacups and teapots and bowls on it were twisted, too, and there were clocks scattered all around, cracks everywhere—on the wood of the table where the white cloth had been torn or burned, on the cups, the saucers, the pots.
Especially the teapot in the middle, sitting higher on a wooden box, at its side a white bowl full of sugar.
“Honor the host and undo the hour,” March said, and shivers rushed down my back when I realized he was reading from the brass-colored plaque at one end of the table. It had stains, sticky ones, the kind tea full of sugar leaves on shiny surfaces, but the letters were there, written in cursive.
The problem was, there was no host to honor that we could see.
“Twelve teacups. Twelve saucers. One teapot and one bowl of sugar,” said Erith as she counted with her finger in the air.
“For twelve players. But we’re only eleven,” said Seth as he went around the entire table for the second time, looking.
I didn’t move, only analyzed the crooked legs and the mismatched chairs, some bigger and some smaller. Thirteen in total.
“And there is no host,” said Erith, then turned around to look at the trees.
Daylight had turned this whole place into a different world—or maybe it was just this part of the forest, with smaller trees, farther away from one another, and silverware on the branches catching and throwing light everywhere, and napkin birds fluttering along fast, like they were shy and didn’t want to be seen.
“What should we do without a host?” asked Mimi.
“There was a host here before,” said Anika, who had stopped at the other end of the long table, possibly some fifteen feet away. She was looking at the chair at the head of it—empty, just like the rest of them.
“Well, if there was, he isn’t here anymore,” said Russ. “Should we sit, then, and get on with it?” He pulled the first chair on the left side and sat down.
Nothing happened.
Then Reggie said, “I have a very bad feeling about this…”
His bad feeling fell like a thick coat of dust right over mine.
“It’ll be fine. We’ll unwin this, too—c’mon, sit down,” Seth told him, and patted him on the back.
They sat together side by side. I chose the last chair on the left and did the same.
“Okay, so. Anybody have any bright ideas on how we should undo the hour?” Helen asked from the other side, but my mind was half on March, who slowly dragged himself to my side of the table.
Cook had already sat next to me, but the chair next to him was free, so March sat there.
I could reach his hand with mine from this distance, even though my chair’s legs were shorter than most.
“All these clocks here are stuck at seven,” said Mimi, and the others grabbed the clocks from around the table to double-check. There were at least twenty of them, big and small, shaped like squares, triangles, a few like circles, and indeed they were all stuck at seven o’clock.
“Does that mean we need to undo all hours, or just one?” asked Levana.
“The sign says undo the hour, sandbrain,” Russ shot from the head of the table. “All we need to do is to bring these clocks to six.”
“Tick off, little rock,” Levana told him with a wave, and she reached for the pieces of paper that were folded near the teapot and the sugar bowl on the wooden box.
“Drink me.” She looked up—straight at March who sat across from her.
“It says, drink me.” She showed us the piece of paper, and the two words written in the same cursive as the sign.
“Eat me,” said Anika, who’d unfolded the other piece of paper near the sugar bowl. She showed us—identical cursive letters.
“So, we drink tea, and…just undo the hour?” Again, these words kept slipping from me by accident, like some part of me was so sure that it was okay to say them, that I even wanted to be part of the conversation, when I didn’t. I could think better locked in my head.
But so far, I had nothing.
I wasn’t sure how one could undo an hour, but my best guess was that we’d somehow created it when we first came to this trial in the past.
Or was it the future?
My head was starting to ache—but based on that calculation, we should absolutely be able to undo what we did. Just like with the clockbeasts.
“Maybe you could undo it—you’re Spades,” said Anika, and she was looking at Cook, then at me.
“We can undo anomalies and loops and bad magics, not hours,” said Cook, and of course, he was right.
“Maybe we can all use magic and just pull these hands to six o’clock,” Helen thought out loud. “You know, since we can do magic well, apparently…”
“Maybe we could—” Mimi stopped mid-sentence when the first tick of a tock sounded in the air all of a sudden, and it came from the teapot standing on the wooden box in the middle of the table.
Steam began to rise from a crack on the lid, and from the long, curvy spout.
The clocks all began to tick-tock, and the thin hands that showed seconds were moving, but the minutes weren’t turning.
Instead, every time sixty seconds were done, the longer hands vibrated like they wanted to move forward, but then crashed and stayed in place instead.
“I think the game has officially started,” said Seth from March’s other side, and he pointed his finger to the back of the teapot. “And the hours are in here.”
Turns out, the tea in the old, cracked teapot held minutes, and we could see it when it started to steam.
A narrow piece of glass was near the handle, revealing the liquid inside, and to the side of it were the markings shimmering on the porcelain—10, 50, 100…
A measuring unit, and the word minutes was written at the top near the lid.
The teapot was full of gold colored liquid, and in total, it had four hundred and twenty minutes—exactly seven hours.
The hour we needed to undo was just in the pot.
Relief fell over me like a soft breeze. I almost volunteered to get up and do the pouring myself, but luckily Levana was the first to make it to her feet.
“I got this. I’ve got a Life Clock full of minutes to use.” She took the golden clock from her pocket and put it over the table. “I’ve got the tea-time, and the cup. I will pour exactly sixty minutes, and we will get out of here,” she proudly exclaimed, and another wave of relief came over me.
“Are you sure this is the right way?” March asked when she grabbed the handle with a steady hand and lowered the spout near her cup.
Even though I could only see his profile, I knew he had the same suspicion in his eyes as with everything—even the queen. Maybe he felt something smelled like rotten seconds here, too.
“Of course. There’s seven hours in this kettle, and there need to only be six,” Anika, who was sitting near Levana, said.
“Just–just get on with it. Just–just finish it. Finish it,” Reggie said, and he looked pale as a ghost.
In fact, now that I looked at him closely, his forehead was covered in beads of sweat, too. He really did not look good at all.
“Hey, breathe, Reggie,” Seth and Mimi said at the same time, and Anika waved for Levana to continue.
“Go ahead and go slowly. We’ll watch the units together.”
Finally, Levana began to pour.
The tea spilled into the cup, hot and golden, but the smell of it was wrong. Tea didn’t smell like dead fish, no matter what herbs you used. The scent was strong, too, so that a minute in, we all had our hands in front of our noses to try to block it, but it was useless.
With a green face, Levana set the teapot down. The tea inside now reached only up to 360, which was exactly sixty minutes poured.
“Ugh, that smell—what is it?” said Erith, trying to pull the collar of her suit over her nose, but it was too tight.
“Who cares—just finish it already!” said Russ from across the table.
“But how?” Levana sat down, hands still in the air like she expected to need to grab the pot again at a second’s notice. We all held our breaths as we watched the steaming tea. “It’s not doing anything. It’s not—”
The table began to vibrate.
My heart near stopped, skipped a minute altogether. Finally, finally, finally, ove—
The tea in the cup spilled in the air, stopped over the rim for a beat as if it wanted us all to see it, then fell all the way up toward the canopy.
Levana’s scream pierced the air as she looked at her own hands, shaking, vibrating, and then Erith and Mimi screamed, too, when we saw her face.
Wrinkles on her skin. Gray on her hair. The hands on her Life Clock were spinning so fast they’d turned to a blur.
“Stop it! Somebody stop it! Somebody—”
The table stopped shaking.
The teapot ticked once, then began to steam again. The tea had filled back to 420 minutes.
Levana looked like an old woman.