They cheered. They clapped their hands, and a few even hugged one another.
March and I just stood there, a few feet apart, eyes locked.
I wondered, how many freckles were on my face? I’d never really thought to count.
Then we were finally on our way back.
Over.
The first—last?—trial was over, and we’d unwon. We’d unkilled all the clockbeasts in the forest, and the sky over us was blue, and it was finished. Now, all I had to do was walk out of here, and make sure Inevercame back.
My spirits were high. I didn’t care to smile with the others, but I was alive, and I had some answers—yes, this was real, and yes, I didn’t want to have any part of it anymore, and to the Everstill with whatever had happened in the forward trials.I also had more questions—who was March, and why did I feel I had the right to claim him, and how was I in his head, and was he whom the Cheshire warned me to forget properly this time? Just how much had I forgotten, really?
It didn’t matter, though, did it? It was already forgotten, and that was that. It was over, our first trial backward. And soon we were going to be back in the arena, back at the palace, away from the forest.
“Hey…guys?” someone said as the laughter among the Hands died down quietly. “What isthat?”
Levana was pointing her finger forward, slightly up, at a branch.
My heart jumped, thinking it was the Cheshire.
Instead, it was a silver spoon that had grown on a tree.
9
Spoons don’t grow on trees. This much we knew, all of us.
Yet the closer we got to that tree, the clearer we saw the spoons hanging on its branches like fruit, their stems brown—like an apple’s or a pear’s. Curiouser still were the forks that were hanging on the branches of a smaller tree behind the spoons. Knives, too, a little farther.
Silverware, everywhere.
“Are you sure this is the right way?” said one Hand or the other.
“You said it was, you minute-minded nitwit.”
“We all came through this side—where is the arena?!” someone else continued.
“I knew it was the wrong way, I knew-knew-knew it!” That sounded a lot like Reggie.
“Then why didn’t yousay-say-sayso, you gear-jammed moron?!”
“Stop.” This was definitely Russ.
He’d stepped forward, held up his arms to the sides as helooked up at the spoons and forks and knives hanging on trees.
Then came the napkins, white and small, flying together, flapping their edges.
Napkins that fly.
“It’s the trial,” Russ whispered. “It’s not over yet.”
The gears in my stomach twisted. We all moved forward at the same time, too, touched the bark, the spoons we could reach—and a few even plucked them from their stems.Spoons.Actual, metal spoons, crisp and clean and shiny.
“But we unkilled the clockbeasts,” said Helen.
“Unless it was wrong…” said Cook.
“Unless we were never supposed to unkill them in the first place,” said Mimi.
