“Right, of course. Now what?”
After surveying the area, I got my bearings. “We need to head up that hill.”
“What fresh horrors await us there?”
“That should be where the March Hare’s house is,” I said. “Can you handle it?”
“For you, yes. Only you.”
“All right, this way.”
We followed a path that passed through a small garden. Daffodils and daisies, all nice and normal. I decided not to remind Duke that the flowers could likely talk too.
“This is better,” he said, taking a deep breath. “This…this is my childhood. Summers in the country with my grandparents. Long before the War. Before I even knew there was such a thing as war. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was with the real world when you brought me into it the first time, and I discovered the Great War wasn’t merely something awful that had happened in my books.”
“Unfortunately not,” I said.
He turned his face from the sun and met my eyes. “Do you ever wish you could stay here?”
“In Wonderland? No, it’s terrifying. Giant talking animals are only cute in theory—”
“Not Wonderland, of course. I mean…in a book? Do you ever wish you could stay in a story? Hop in like we have, but never hop out?”
“Like one of your books?” I teased. “That’s what got us into trouble last time.”
“Not mine,” he said. “A book without wars. Without suffering. A book with sunlit meadows and no darkness?”
“Sometimes,” I admitted. “But I can’t think of a single book worth reading where nothing bad happens. Even in Wonderland, a mad queen threatens to chop off heads every other page.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Duke said. “It seems different in books somehow. In stories the suffering leads somewhere, it means something. Remember when you took me to meet your friend Edmond Dantès?”
“I wouldn’t say the Count of Monte Cristo and I are friends,” I said. “But only because I’m afraid of him.”
The year Duke and I were together, he tagged along with me on my mission to get a Burner out of French author Alexandre Dumas’s masterpiece of revenge,The Count of Monte Cristo.For the Burner’s own sake, actually. Anyone who’s read the book knows you do not want to get on the Count’s bad side.
“Well, that’s neither here nor there,” Duke said. “My point is the Count spends ten years in a hellish prison, escapes, finds a massive treasure, and gets poetic revenge on his betrayers. In the real world, a man who spends years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit gets…what?”
“Traumatized,” I said.
“Precisely. In your world, suffering means nothing. Nothing good comes from it,” Duke said. “One thing fiction has over real life.”
I stopped and looked at him.
“Of course good things come from suffering in the real world. You know what good comes out of suffering?”
“What?” he asked, clearly skeptical.
“Stories,” I said. “Art. Songs. The Duke of Chicago books. That’s the good that comes from suffering. Years before we met, you were helping me get through the loneliest days of my life. Doesn’t that mean something?”
He raised his hand to my face and stroked my cheek. “I’d kiss you for the next ten hours, but I think I’ve spotted a house with rabbit ears.”
—
When Duke saidthe house had rabbit ears, he wasn’t referring to a television antenna or anything so logical or normal. No, the enormous house had a thatched roof, and the thatching had been stacked to resemble two large actual rabbit ears.
“Mad as a March Hare,” I said, staring at the bizarre dwelling.
“Let’s hope he’s in a good mood today,” Duke said.
