If we really were in the Labyrinth, which was home to the Turning Trials, it wasmuchfancier than anything I’d ever seen—but again, I was a Spade. Our court didn’t much care for luxury. Neither did Clubs, as far as I knew.
Diamonds did, though. And Hearts lived for it.
Back home, people said that to enter the Court of Hearts was to enter a land of dreams. However, I didn’t much care about entering lands of dreams right now, and this one here didn’t seem to be one, either.
I’d really hoped it would be. So much easier if none of this was real.
“Wow,”the others breathed when we stepped into a large hall, possibly three times bigger than the one where we woke up. Half of the round room had a wall made out of curved glass. On it, small figures made of colors and lights movedaround as if pulled by invisible strings. The sky beyond was already dark, so we saw every detail clearly.
We stopped to admire the work for a second, a few others with their breaths held, and I was simply curious to know how they’d made the light move so precisely. Possibly the work of Diamonds. Manipulating light came as easy as breathing to them.
The story unfolding on the glass was that of the creation of our realm, which was a story we all knew since birth. The White Rabbit alone in the universe, and across from him Time—a vicious current swirling and twisting in on itself, unstable, wild, untamable at first. Before our eyes, the White Rabbit jumped closer and closer, moved about and watched carefully, until he learned how to manage the stopping and slowing and speeding of Time. Until he could touch it, cut off a piece of it, steal a small fraction—all the while Time was none the wiser, continuously twisting and spinning around Himself.
The White Rabbit then learned to manipulate the time he stole, forced it into order, and to do that he created the first clock—the Great Clock—and trapped the time inside it forever.
He was the original Timekeeper.
The creator—and the thief.
When Time realized He’d been stolen from and saw what the White Rabbit had created with a part of Him, he couldn’t bear to destroy it.
Instead, to ensure that his stolen time was always accounted for, he sent four of his Hands to guard it, sentinels with enough power to guarantee the Great Clock remained intact and nobody could abuse the time it contained. Nobody could steal it, either, like the White Rabbit did at first.
And thus, the four Hands created the four courts around the land of the Great Clock, and that’s how the Clockrealmcame to be. Full of time and magic and sensible strangeness, with a perfectly working ecosystem, and a perfectly flowing time (for the most part).
Until, apparently, a traitor somehow made it into the Turning Trials and used the hours he’d gained to cast a curse.
Why-why-why would a Spade—and why wouldanyone?
Spades craved balance. We were often called the accountants of Timeby the other courts.
And Timekeepers kept time.They kept the Great Clock running.
So why would anyone want our time to wither and die?
“Look!” said one of the others, who’d gotten closer to the glass wall, pointing to the far right. “It’s the Great Clock!”
It was indeed. There, just next to whatever building we were in, was the tower underneath it.
I’d seen pictures, drawings, paintings. I’d even seen the silhouette of it from atop the Peir, the highest mountain in our court, every time we went hiking. Nothing could have prepared me for the real thing, though.
The tower was made of stone blocks, each more than twice the size of my body, if not more. It had glassless windows on the sides, and it stretched higher than anything else in the entire realm, including the mountains. It was built by the Timekeepers to get as close as they could to the actual Great Clock, which was suspended in the air at the very heart of our realm—a gigantic round clock that showed you its face and the time from any angle you looked. We could see it from here, and if the people on the other side of Neverwhen were looking, they would see the face of it from there, too. It was huge and it was shiny, its hands bigger than the largest trees, and it never stopped ticking. Not ever.
That is what we all knew. That is what we all learned our whole lives.
Except…
“It’s not moving,” someone said. “The Great Clock isnot ticking.”
The Great Clock was not ticking. The hands were stuck at eight, thirteen.
“Come along now, don’t straggle,” said someone—the help. A maid pulled me back, away from the glass wall, from the sight of the Great Clock that was stuck.
My mind was spinning. My legs moved on instinct, but I couldn’t really see where I was going, until I bumped right onto the back of someone taller than me. And wider.
He turned, looked down at me, and I froze.
Curls over his forehead, messy but smooth. Eyes made of a million shades of rust, enough to keep one exploring for a lifetime to identify all of them. I’d create a pallet with those shades, I thought, which was entirely too strange a thought to have.
