What a strange morning.
“Now.” The White Queen cleared her throat. “He did manage to cast the curse with his clock. And I got there as fast as I could, my little tickers. My heart near exploded, thinking you would be in danger.”
The weight ofhisattention had me looking at the boy again instead of the queen. That same expression was still there on his face—disbelief.
“Alas, you were all fine, andall of uswere in danger instead! What a sad, sad night.” The queen moved her hands about, but I wasn’t looking at her yet.
Night,she said, and those flashes came before me again—teeth and clocks, grass and blood. The sound of those beasts growling was so real I looked behind me because I could have sworn one was coming for me.
Nothing there but the marble floor and the walls, though.
“Everything okay there, little Spade?”
The queen was once again looking at me.
“Fine,” I muttered, but my flesh was still raised, and there was something about the look in the boy’s eyes when I met them that almost promised me he felt it, too.
“Wonderful!” said the queen. “Just as wonderful asIwas, if I do say so myself, because I arrived just in time for the traitor to finish the curse.”
“Did you undo it?” asked the girl on her right.
“Oh, no, I did not. I tried to. Icouldnot,” said the queen. I could have been made of gears and cogs, and right now they were twisting violently in my stomach. “It was done, gone already—done,I tell you! I couldn’t undo it, but I did create a counter-curse, my little tickers. That’s howwonderfulit all turned out.”
She clapped her hands, smiled. None of us joined.
“I understand, I understand,” the queen said. “You must all be so eager to know how I saved us all—I understand.” She grabbed the napkins she’d folded into triangles and began to fold them now into rectangles as she spoke.
If I didn’t know any better, I could have sworn the queen wasnervouslike Jinx sometimes was. She fidgeted a lot when she was nervous.
“So—as I said, when the curse was cast to wither all Time in the realm, I tried to take it back, tried to stop it, tried to undo it. It did not work—how sad.And so, I thought and thought and tried to find a solution—and I did! Lucky orunlucky for us, the traitor was only able to cast that curse because of the time he won in the trials.” She grabbed the next triangle-shaped napkin, spread it over her empty plate, and began to roll it like a piece of scroll.
“Therefore, I magicked the trialsto turnbackwardin time.”
Laughter. Claps. It had all become so very natural to watch her do these things by now that I hardly noticed.
“Your Excellency,” I said, and I could not tell you how I knew to call her that. “What do you mean,backward?”
“Exactly that—I magicked the trials to be repeated, only this time backward.Isn’t it brilliant? Isn’t itwonderful?!”
The rest of us looked at one another, stunned.
The queen said, “Anyhour, the magic took effect. The trials were altered. Now all you have to do is play again.”
Those strange gears in my stomach groaned like they’d run all out of oil. I considered I might throw up any minute—and I didn’t seem to be the only one.
“But…but you said we won,” said the boy sitting next to me—the Spade. I didn’t know him, which wasn’t a surprise. It was by design—they chose three Hands from three different quadrants of each court to make sure there would be no alliances and no favoring one player over the other.
But had I known the other, I wondered? Thetraitor?
“You did,” the queen answered with a nod.
“So…what are we playing for now?” asked another from across the table.
“Why, tounwin,of course!”
Unwin the trials.
My head was spinning—maybe backward, too.
