Chapter 10
Enjoy the tea party, the Cheshire had said. I almost heard his voice repeating in my mind over and over as I eyed the teapot.
It wasn’t it.
Pouring sixty minutes out of the teapot wasn’t it. Levana’s Life Clock had started with sixty minutes, she said, and it was now down to thirty-one.
Almost thirty minutes gone, together with her youth. She’d aged so fast.
“Even we don’t age so suddenly if we sleep eight hours straight,” Mimi muttered from my side of the table, and that earned her a look from everyone.
Not me.
“Okay, okay, sorry,” she said with her hands out in surrender.
I thought I was going to throw up.
Not because Levana was old and she was still crying, but because I was itching to reach for that teapot, to do something, but I knew I was going to age just the same if I tried to pour the hour out.
That was not the answer at all, and so my eyes wandered to the spoons and forks and knives hanging on trees around us, and the napkins that flapped their edges like birds did their wings as they rushed by.
No Cheshire grin anywhere.
“The sugar.”
We all turned to Russ.
“Look—the sugar is on that box with the teapot. The note near it said eat me, didn’t it?” Anika raised that same piece of paper to show him—yes, it did. “The tea has to have sugar in it.”
“Do it, do it, do it, do it…” Reggie chanted from next to Levana, whose shoulders were still shaking as she cried and looked at her wrinkled hands.
Time’s Teeth, Reggie looked even worse than before. Like he was genuinely going to be sick.
Russ leaned in and grabbed the bowl, his hands visibly shaking. He didn’t grow old as he analyzed the outside of the bowl—no markings—and then tilted it so the sugar moved and he could see the inside.
“There,” he said, and my heart jumped again. “Spoons. They’ve drawn spoons!”
In an instant, we were all on our feet and standing behind him, trying to see.
Indeed, spoons were drawn on both sides of the inner bowl—one bigger, one smaller.
The first was followed by = 5m, and the second by = 2m.
We took it to mean that the big spoon held five minutes’ worth of sugar, and the smaller one only two.
“There are no spoons on the table,” Cook said.
“But there are plenty on the trees,” Mimi said, and she was already climbing on her chair to reach a spoon on the nearest branch, then two, then three.
We sat around the table again, so hopeful we had red on our cheeks. All except Levana and Reggie, who hadn’t even bothered to get up and look at the markings.
“Are you going to be sick?” I asked him because the table wasn’t too wide, and he sat close enough to me that I might need to move away if he did.
But he looked at me, and it suddenly felt like I was sitting on flames.
His eyes were glossy and red, full of unshed tears, and his chin was trembling—what an awful, awful sight.
“I think…I’m going to be dead.”
I read the words on his lips because his whisper was too low to hear it properly.
Something inside me threatened to break—or rather, my body remembered something that had been in me before, that would have broken this very second.
The sound of it echoed in the empty space it had left behind, along with fear.
Because if this guy thought he was going to be dead, what about me? And what about March?
“One heaped big spoon makes five minutes.” Both our heads snapped back to Russ, and most were still standing behind him, March and Seth and Helen. “I’ll do six spoons, and fill the rest with tea-minutes,” he claimed, and proceeded to fill his cup with sugar.
Too much. It looked like way too much sugar, but it did make an hour.
Russ was brave, I’d give him that. Levana was still old, and still crying, and he picked up the teapot anyway, and carefully poured half of what she’d used into his own cup.
We all held our breaths again.
“Thirty minutes worth of sugar, thirty minutes worth of tea,” Russ whispered to himself. When he put the teapot down, it had 390 minutes worth of tea left inside. He’d indeed poured thirty minutes exactly.
Please work, please work, please work…
“Sparetime save me…” Mimi whispered, and I just knew that I wasn’t going to like the next second.
Blood dripped down Russ’s nose. Screams and shouts and curses in Time’s name. The wrinkles that appeared on him were just as deep as Levana’s, and I couldn’t see his Life Clock from where I sat, but I was willing to bet the hands were spinning too fast to see.
He was losing minutes.
We were all losing minutes.
And no Cheshire Cat had come to grin and speak sensible nonsense to any of us yet.
“Perhaps we need to find the host.”
“Yes, yes, that could be part of the game.”
“The host would know—he’d tell us what to do.”
“Yes, the host, the host!”
Reggie was crying in silence. He was a big guy, and he’d been so happy before we came in here.
Now he had his hands in front of his face and his shoulders were shaking, and they were all going to him to pat his back, to ask him why he was crying—he hadn’t aged a minute—but he never said. I doubted he knew himself.
Meanwhile, I continued to scratch the tabletop with my fingernails, trying to make calculations.
The others moved around, deeper into the forest on all sides, tried calling for help, for clues, but nobody came. Nobody was coming. Whatever nightmare we were stuck in, we were the only ones who could get us out. We were the only ones who could undo this hour.
If only we knew how we’d actually made it.
My eyes moved to the chair near Reggie. It was empty. Had the Spade traitor sat there?
The same questions filled my mind again. How had he managed to get into the trials if he was part Timekeeper? Which Spade in the history of the Clockrealm would ever bed a Timekeeper?
Who was he? What was he like?
Why-why-why?
Maybe we knew before. Maybe he told us, or maybe we just noticed.
After all, we were all in this together, weren’t we?
And it had taken us unkilling all of the clockbeasts for the forest to let us leave that clearing.
I knew because I’d tried to slip away to see the arena while the others had worked.
I hadn’t found it—but back then I’d just thought we were farther than I’d realized.
And that was why I was scratching the surface of the table with all my might as the numbers in my head spun.
“Blood on your hands.”
I stopped. Looked up at March who towered over me from behind my chair. His eyes were focused on my hands.
“I said, your hand is bleeding.”
Suddenly he grabbed my wrist, and brought my hand in front of my face when I refused to look away from him. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, just that I couldn’t.
But my thumb was indeed bleeding right under my nail—it seemed I’d pulled at it more than I realized, and I hadn’t even noticed.
“Oh.” I took my hand back down and he let me, but again, his fingers remained imprinted just below my wrist where he’d touched my skin round the sleeve of the suit.
Who are you?
“What do you have there?”
He hadn’t moved away. In fact, he stepped to the other side, to the edge of the crooked table, put those large hands over the corners, and released half his weight.
Like that, his shoulders looked even bigger. Like that, he smelled even better.
I looked up at him again, eyes wide and lips parted, three ticks until I got myself together.
“Nothing.”
His thick dark brows arched a little. “You don’t want to share?”
“I said, it’s nothing.” And no, I didn’t want to share, but that was beside the point.
“You did figure out to set those clocks into the future,” said Anika from the other side.
She and Erith were holding hands tightly as they looked at Levana, still crying, then at Russ, bent over the table like he couldn’t bear to sit up straight anymore.
All his hair was as silver as the spoons over our heads.
“She did,” March said.
Because a grinning, talking cat gave me a clue. Of course, I said no such thing, mostly because the Cheshire wasn’t here anymore, and chances were none of them had seen it.
“So, tell me. What have you got there?” He looked down at the lines I’d scratched on the table again.
Some words begged to be kept inside. Others were already out of my lips in a rush.
“There’s twelve cups and only one teapot and one bowl of sugar. I don’t think the hour can be undone if we jam all the minutes together in a single cup. I think if we divide it more…” My voice trailed off.
“The hour will be so broken that it can’t be used anymore,” said March in wonder.
Who-who-who are you?! were the next words on my tongue that I successfully held back. It was just the question he’d asked me, anyway.
“Correct,” I said instead. “But I don’t know if it’s true.”
The others watched us, watched him.
“There’s a way to find out.”
March straightened his shoulders, went to the other side of the table, behind Levana, and reached for the teapot.
I jumped to my feet. “No.”
“Yes. We’ll divide the hour and see what happens. We’re not getting out of here otherwise, are we?”
“Do it, do it, do it,” Reggie whispered under his breath. “Home, I want to go home, I want to go home…”
Again, that echo of something breaking shook me from the inside. It irritated me, but I was already moving toward the middle on my side of the table and stopped behind Seth to look at March.
“There’s a chance it won’t work.”
“Then I’ll just gain a couple wrinkles,” he said.
Below him, Levana wailed under her hands.
“March,” I said, his name familiar on my tongue, sliding easily as if it had spent a whole lifetime there.
He paused for a split-second, and I noticed. It wasn’t my imagination—he paused.
Then he poured the tea.
He moved to the sides and poured that smelly tea in his own cup, in Reggie’s, Anika’s and Erith’s. They all pushed theirs closer, and when he was done, he grabbed the sugar, a small spoon, and poured two spoonfuls in, too.