Chapter 2
Not enough seconds to breathe all the way. Half of what went on around me was lost, my mind almost glitching, unable to properly store memories just now.
So many things.
So many people.
And both queens of the Clockrealm were here.
Here. In the same space as me. Barely thirty feet away, beyond the glass of whatever building they’d brought us to.
“Uh…hi.”
I blinked. Turned to the side, and though it was a girl’s voice I’d heard, my eyes landed on a pair that had been on me already—those of a boy to my right, who had his hands in the pockets of his jacket, and who’d stolen all the best colors of the world for his own eyes.
Unreal. Red and brown and everything in between, the colors so vivid I touched them with my mind.
Seconds passed without air, but I didn’t really mind this time, so long as I got to see more of those colors…
A hand waved in my peripheral. Impossible not to look—it was the girl who had spoken.
“I’m Mimi Montes,” she said. “Court of Clubs. Nice to meet you all.” She smiled. She grinned.
She was absolutely breathtaking with her dark skin and moss-green eyes, hair done so well her braids looked polished. She was taller than me, taller than most of us, and she wore green, just like the two boys at her sides. They must have been Clubs, too.
The boy next to them with all those vivid colors in his eyes wore red—from the Court of Hearts. The curls of his rich, reddish-brown hair looked effortlessly perfect, too, and his skin smooth, his shoulders wide, and his lips…smiling. Just a corner slightly curled up to perfection.
I released a breath I’d been holding unknowingly. The gears and cogs in my stomach must have malfunctioned because it felt like I was coming undone from the inside.
All because of colors—and half a smile.
“I’m Helen Pears,” said the girl standing by his side, dark hair cropped close to her head, revealing the near-perfect heart shape of her face. The one next to her said, “Levana,” with a dramatic wave of her thick, long hair. Definitely Hearts judging by the red of their dresses.
“Russell Gere—Russ to my friends,” said the boy at the very end of the row with a wave of his hand. His dark blond hair had a silver streak on the right side, and he wore silver and grey on his clothes, just like the girls in front of him. Diamonds.
“Erith Sanders,” said one of them.
“Anika Lowe,” said her friend, her cheeks slightly flushed.
“Arthur Cook,” the boy next to me said—the Spade who’d been in the first carriage. “Everybody calls me Cook.”
Cook. What a strange name, especially since he didn’t much look like a cook. Far too young to be anything, really. All of us were—you had to be between the ages of eighteen and twenty to apply for the Turning Trials.
“Seth Goodwill,” said the boy wearing green on the left of the girl who spoke first. He had a scar down the middle of his left brow that he tried to hide with his hair, and he didn’t even make eye contact with anyone when he spoke.
Or maybe he did—my eyes were too busy going back to the red ones of the Heart boy who had yet to look away from me.
Were my cheeks red, I wondered?
Because my cheeks felt very red, and if I lost focus for a second, I was going to smile all the way.
“Reggor Green,” said the other Club boy, and he was big, bigger than all the others, wider shoulders, muscular arms, dark hair—but his eyes were soft. There was something about them when he grinned, skipped me, and looked at the Spade boy standing last in line behind me. “Call me Reggie.”
“Silas,” said the Spade boy, and I had to turn to look at him—his voice was unlike others I’d heard. Very rich. Deeper than most boys our age. “Silas Sear.”
Silas was the one who’d waved at me first from the carriage behind mine.
He was the tallest among us. He wore black from head to toe, and his hair was on the longer side, combed behind his head.
It wasn’t just his voice. He looked older, too, possibly twenty.
Might have been his perfectly square jaw and hollow cheeks, or the expression in his light gray eyes that almost looked like smoke or mist, or something in between.
He—and everyone else—was looking right at me, now. Waiting.
Time’s Teeth, how was I going to hold back a smile when I spoke?
“Ora Reese,” I said, my voice lighter than usual, higher. Must have been the nerves.
And just like I suspected, I was smiling ear to ear.
Then again, so was everybody else—except the Heart boy.
He had but a crooked, half-smile on his face when he said, “March Ruvane.”
The name wrote itself on my bones with my own blood.
Something about this Heart boy.
Was it him, I wondered? They said you never really knew with Hearts.
They could manipulate emotions with their magic.
Not create ones from scratch, but amplify existing ones or even make them fade.
Back in school kids talked about how there were no true feelings among Hearts simply because there was no guarantee that the feeling was true and nobody had meddled with it, whether a bad one or a good one.
Of course, none of the kids who spun these rumors had ever actually met a Heart, so…
But I doubted this boy was doing anything, for the simple reason that he couldn’t. Even if he was twenty, you needed a lot of studying and practice to actually do that kind of magic.
Which meant it was just me. The flush on my cheeks, the stupid smile that was impossible to kill on my lips—all of it a genuine reaction of mine.
“Time’s Teacups, we’re really here,” said the girl who’d spoken first—Mimi. “It’s great meeting you all. And it’s so good to be here!”
Her energy was something else. She radiated positivity, and the others felt it, too. They were all talking, nodding, shaking hands—and a hand appeared in front of me, too.
“Ora. A beautiful name for a beautiful girl,” said the Spade boy who’d been behind me—Silas was his name.
I shook his hand with a wide grin. “Thank you, kind sir,” I joked with a curtsy. “You’re awfully…tall yourself.”
Laughter—both from him and the other Spade boy. Cook, who didn’t look like a cook, shook Silas’s hand with both his, before he shook mine.
“Whereas I am awfully short, if I do say so myself,” he offered with a grin. Red stained his cheeks as we chuckled. He was indeed a bit shorter than me, but no more than an inch.
“So, the beautiful girl, the tall boy, and the short boy,” said Silas. “That’s it. I think we have everything we need. We’ll come out first at the end of these trials—no discussion.”
“Except I’ve got a feeling you’ll be too distracted,” said someone behind me—a giant of a guy. Reggie, the Club. “Isn’t that what they say about Spades? You’re too distracted partying to do much of anything?”
More laughter. Reggie grinned, and Silas laughed, and others did, too.
“That’s the only thing you’ve never heard about Spades,” said Seth. “They’re boring.” And he flinched, looked at me. “No disrespect, of course.”
“Yes, yes, only rumors,” said Mimi next to him, nudging him with her elbow.
“Well, we’re supposed to be boring,” Silas said. “We’re the accountants of Time, are we not?”
Rumor had it that we were. When the Great White Rabbit first stole from Time and created the Clockrealm, it was said that Time sent his four sentinels to make sure that His time wasn’t misused.
Those sentinels were the creators of our courts, and we were their descendants.
The Timekeepers were descendants of the Great White Rabbit, it was said, and everybody insisted that the Spade sentinel was indeed Time’s original accountant because of our magic.
Spade magic served balance, craved it. Our magic ruled endings—it closed loops, shut down magic gone wrong, sealed unbreakable deals. Our symbol—the spade—illustrated our belief that all that ends must be planted to begin again.
However, I was never one to believe these rumors, as I didn’t feel like an accountant. Maybe it was just me, but I didn’t really crave balance. I didn’t know what that even meant at this point.
“We’ll come ahead of all of you—we’re Clubs,” said Mimi. “We’re on the move while you sleep. Literally.”
Laughter—that was true, too. If Clubs stood still for longer than four hours, they aged and died within minutes. Movement was how they stayed alive—we keep time moving was their mantra, as far as we learned in our court.
“But where’s your heart, green ones?” said the Heart girl who flipped her hair again—Levana. “That’s right—we have all the heart. Of course we’ll come first. We always do.” And she batted her impossibly long lashes at us.
“You guys are forgetting one thing, though,” said the tall Diamond girl—Erith—as she pretended to clean her fingernails.
“We’re the reason the Clockrealm runs the way it does.
We’re the reason you can do magic and keep your time.
So…” She shrugged while the girl next to her giggled, and the boy—Russ—grinned.
“Safe to say we’re the ones at the head. Always,” he said.
More laughter—and they began to bicker playfully, mostly Hearts and Clubs and Diamonds, but Erith wasn’t wrong. The Diamonds were the harvesters—they literally created the energy that allowed us to do magic; otherwise, doing magic required minutes and hours off our own time, our own lives.
“All right, all right everyone!” someone suddenly called as they came from our right.
It was the Timekeeper. The Royal Timekeeper—Calren Hock.
Two men came in behind him, too, holding pads in their hands and frozen smiles on their lips that looked all too painful to maintain.
Calren stopped before us and raised his hands. “Let me see you—fall in line please. Fall in line, everyone.”
We did.
I noticed how everyone looked at him with the same awe and confusion and hesitation as I did, even though I knew him better than them, apparently. He’d been the one to come pick me up at home, and he’d brought me food and drinks and smiles all the way here.