But wasn’t that what Lida the maid had said? Thatthe cursehad wiped all our memories?
The queen’s black eyes stopped on mine. The gears in my chest paused.
She smiled. “That, too.” Then she turned to Erith again. “But don’t you worry becausethe Labyrinthremembers, and that is all that matters.”
The Labyrinth not remembering wouldn’t be on my list of worries right now, but this time I made sure to keep my lips sealed. I didn’t want those eyes on me again—and the queen wouldn’t care. Neither would her sister.
The Red Queen sat in a box of glass in the middle of the seats behind us. We couldn’t see her from this distance—the seats began some fifty feet away—but we did see red. She was there, and I knew it in my bones that she was watching.
Meanwhile the White Queen moved forward and back, a silver watch in her hand that could have materialized out of thin air.
“Tick-tock—only three more minutes!”
Three minutes.
My heart beat like it was a prisoner inside my body, and it had decided to rebel against me this very second.
My brain was a mess of thoughts, some real, most not, and of memories, including ones that weren’t mine. Of rods and glass and fire. Of teeth and grass and night.
Time’s Teeth, how had I ended up in this position?What in the Everstill is going on here?
Or had I died and Iwasin the actual Everstill? It was the place we all went to when we died, with as much or as little time to spare depending on our deeds during our lifetimes. Some could live forever in the Everstill; some could perish within minutes if they had donesuchawful deeds in life.
I’d never actually believed in it, to be honest, but this didn’t look like the afterlife. Just the Turning Trials.
I’d decided to apply because of Jinx.She’dbeen the one who’d always wanted to go, but since the trials took place once every five years, and applicants could only be eighteen-to-twenty years old, she never made it to even apply. I thought each year they announced we were closer to the next (these)Turning Trials, it broke her heart because she would have been twenty-one, no longer eligible.
Little did I know her heart was way into the future, and it had no time for breaking.
But when she died, and I turned eighteen, I thought it would be a way to honor her memory if I played in this year’s trials.For Jinx,I’d told my parents. I’d told myself.
And that was definitely a truth, at least a part of it. But if I searched deeper for the most truthful answer, I’d find the need to give myself a break from the real world and lose myself into a different life for a little while, one where I would be too busy playing silly games to think.I’d find the desire torun.
Funny, because here I was now, thinking too much too fast, unable to shake the dread off my body, unable to stop this strange voice in the back of my head that insisted that I was going to die, too.
Soon. Very soon.
I should have never applied.
Breathe-breathe-breathe.
“Here.”
My eyes opened and there were people coming closer to us. Soldiers dressed in silver armor, with clubs and spades etched onto their chest plates, and swords hanging around their hips. Four of them came with these boxes in their hands, and they stopped in front of the queen and threw them on the ground—on the grass, green grass beneath our feet.They bowed to the queen who waved her hand like she was telling them to get up and move already, and they did.
They kneeled and they pulled the lids open, and they showed us what was inside the boxes.
Weapons.
Knives. Bows. Arrows. Swords. Axes.
“Go on, my little tickers! Grab your favorite weapons. I justknowall of you are good with them!” Laughter.
How would you know that, if you don’t remember?
How would you know when I never even touched a weapon in Neverwhen…had I?
I was the first to reach the second box for a bow and the biggest knives I could find, because the queen was right. I was very good with weapons. I’d been very good with weapons since I was a girl, because my father had never quite gotten over being a soldier before he met my mother. He still lived for war strategies and fighting techniques. Sparring was his favorite hobby, and it had become mine, too. Pretty sure that’s why I’d been accepted into the trials when I’d competed with about fifty other Spades just in our quadrant, and over two hundred in all our court.
