The voice was soft, crystal clear, pitched high. It really came from those lips painted with frost. Her black eyes moved all around the table, and her hands were raised to the sides, nails painted as though that same frost of her lips had touched the pointy tips of them. She wore white, too, the queen, a perfect contrast to the color of her eyes, but almost identical to the color of her short hair, the tips turned outward just over her shoulders. The crystal crown on her head glistened under the sunlight slipping in through the windows.
The White Queen of the Clockrealm was indeed here.
That’s when I realized I was inside a dream.
A long breath escaped me—the blood and the grass and the broken clocks would be there when I woke up. For now, it seemed I would be dreaming.
And what a beautiful dream I was in.
Ten others were sitting around me at the long table—strangers who looked about my age, not a day older than eighteen. Their faces were pale and their eyes wide, their lips parted, just like mine before I realized I was dreaming. They would soon figure it out, too.
For now, they looked at themselves, the clean clothes on their bodies, all white. The set table and the steaming tea in beautiful teacups engraved with clocks in the faintest golden shimmer. The chandelier over the table in this eating hall my dream had taken me to was made of tiny crystals shaped like hearts and roses, and the windows around half the roomwere wide open, letting in the sunlight, showing us the pale blue of the sky outside.
But of course, nothing was more curious to me than the White Queen.
I wasnotroyalty. I was only a girl from the Court of Spades, and I’d never before set foot in Neverwhen, the capital city of the Clockrealm where the queens lived. I never even knew the leaders of my own court—or others—and I had no business sitting at a table with one of the queens.
Before. Before the blood and the night and the beasts, before…
What?!
What came before the blood and the night and the beasts?
Such a curious dream because I couldn’t remember.
In fact, if I thought hard enough, the last thing I remembered was watching a royal carriage traveling down the hill across from my house, coming to take me to Neverwhen for the Turning Trials, and then…nothing.
Which made me wonder if I’d fallen asleep on the way.
“Where…where am I?”
This question was mine, but it came out of the lips of a guy sitting on the other side of the table.
I looked at his face.
Every part of me froze for a second and a half. What a strange dream because I had never seen that face before, and yet Ialmostremembered it. I almost knew it in detail, knew the curls of that dark hair, knew exactly how smooth they were; knew the up-tilted shape of those eyes, and every shade of red and brown in them; knew the shape of his nose and the curve of his jaw—when Ididn’t.
I didn’t know any of these things, and I didn’t know his voice, yet I could have sworn that it had whispered in my ears many times.
Curious, curious dream.
“You’re in Neverwhen, of course. You’re in the Labyrinth—where else?” said the White Queen with her soft voice and her smile. She picked up her cup and brought it to her lips. “Drink three sips at once, and you shall feel better. Come, come—drink!”
We did.
Because she was queen and we should always listen to our queens. Wasn’t that what Jinx used to say?
The tea was heavenly, chamomile and honey, and something else I had almost tastedbefore. My eyes remained on the boy sitting on the other side of the table, with the mess of reddish-brown curls over his head, his hands shaking as he brought the cup down onto the saucer again.
Then he looked at me, too.
He froze for that same second and a half, and then his eyes were moving all over my face and hair and dress and hands still wrapped around my teacup.
I know you.
But I didn’t.
He didn’t know me, either, but his lips parted and his eyes resisted blinking as he drank me in the same way his mouth had drank the tea. Not sure why that made me want to release another breath. Not sure why that expression on his face put me at ease.
