CHAPTER 39

R EDD WOULD have preferred to be in the Chessboard Desert, within sight of Mount Isolation, the better to recall that long-ago day in all its heart-twisting gall. But every moment she remained in Wonderland without an army to support her was a risk; Alyss could sight her at any time. So she made use of the corrupt border guard introduced to her by Jack of Diamonds, and led Vollrath, The Cat, Siren, and Alistaire back into Arch’s kingdom.

She wanted a location unexposed to elements and enemies alike, a refuge where she would not be bothered with present threats or concerns. Half a lunar hour’s walk from the demarcation barrier, she found it: a natural sculpture of heavy granite slabs and boulders thrown up by the land’s shifting tectonic plates.

“No one had better disturb me,” Redd warned. “No one will,” said The Cat.

“We’ll be standing watch, Your Imperial Viciousness,” Vollrath promised. “You’ll have all the time and peace you need.”

Redd slipped between a pair of boulders into a sort of room-roofless, with walls of pockmarked rock. She sat on the ground and closed her eyes. It took awhile; to forget or mentally shunt aside all thoughts of the present, the now, was not so easy. But after a few superficial dips into the well of memory, she was there again, living it-a seventeen-year-old princess, wild-eyed and tipsy from indulging in artificial

crystal, sneaking home from forbidden fun with young Arch of Boarderland. Her parents, Queen

Theodora and King Tyman, were waiting for her in her bedroom. “It’s late, Rose,” Theodora sighed.

“It’s so late, it’s early,” said Tyman as he pulled back a curtain to let in the morning sun.

“Always so quick with the blatantly obvious, aren’t you, father?” Redd began to undress, turning away from her parents to avoid having to explain her bloodshot eyes.

“Rose,” Theodora said to her backside, “I don’t know if we’ve somehow failed you as parents or if your behavior comes from chemical imbalances brought on by your ferocious decadence. But your constant disobedience-not only of me and your father but of the queendom’s most basic laws, as if these should apply to everybody else but not to you-your disregard of even common civilities, and your utter lack of respect for how government works…you’re far beyond merely alienating those you would need to help you govern effectively.”

“It is they who’ve alienated me!” Redd shouted, spinning round. “Raising your voice will accomplish nothing.”

“Rose, have you been…ingesting artificial crystal?” Tyman asked. “Don’t be stupid, father.”

“In any case,” Theodora went on, “I don’t see how you can effectively govern a nation when you are unable to govern yourself. I’m sorry. But you’re not to be queen.”

Redd laughed. “Of course I am, mother. I’m the eldest; I’m the heir. Nothing can change that.”

“I can change it. Your imagination might be as powerful as you believe-certainly you would have made

a formidable monarch. But partaking more of Black Imagination than White as you do, I’m removing you from succession. Genevieve is to be queen.”

“Genevieve!”

Objects in the room became suddenly kinetic-jewelry cases, books, holo-crystals, and end tables shot from their usual places and smashed against one another.

“And we think it best,” Tyman said, ducking to avoid a flying lamp that shattered against a wardrobe, “if you live on Mount Isolation for a time.”

“That rotten old place?”

“We’re hopeful that living in relative isolation will have a sobering effect on you,” Theodora explained. “You will not have the same amenities there as you enjoy here and, we hope, less opportunity to indulge your ruder appetites.”

A phalanx of chessmen marched into the room.

“What’s this, an escort to my new home?” Redd jeered. “I could send these mediocrities to oblivion with a single strike of my imagination.”

“You forget, Rose, that I have powers of imagination too,” Theodora warned. “And I am more practiced in the use of them. You will kill no one, though if you so much as try, I assure you, for all intents and purposes, you will be as good as dead to your father and me.”

“This hurts us as much as it hurts you,” Tyman said.

“Not yet it doesn’t, my dear dim father. But it will. It will hurt you both much worse, I swear.”

Redd threw her clothes back on and was about to stomp out of the room and through the palace halls, exploding bookcases, vases, statuettes, candelabra-everything she passed-with her imagination. This was what she’d done in actuality, but now, reliving the scene in her memory, she turned and saw, past the chessmen waiting to escort her from the premises, a door where no door had ever been. It was

connected to no wall-to nothing, in fact-and the top of it reached only as high as her bosom. She elbowed through the chessmen and approached it. She pushed it open, unable to see what lay beyond. No matter. Her whole future was staked on stepping through…

Most gardens are recognizable by their array of flowers and other plantings, but whoever or whatever had named the Garden of Uncompleted Mazes obviously hadn’t set foot in it. What passed for sky was blackness, void. The ground was as smooth as some never-seen-before gemstone and resembled the surface of a petrified sea. Eleven crystal cubes, identical to the key to Alyss’ Looking Glass Maze in everything except size, were rooted in the curious ground, each at a single point so that they seemed to be balancing precariously. Even the smallest of the cubes was taller than Redd.

Her Imperial Viciousness approached the one nearest her, reached toward its glossy surfaces and- Plink! Her fingers came up against its cold solidity. She punched and knocked at the cube’s six sides.

Nothing. It would not let her in. At the next four cubes, she did the same-pressed and knocked on their

sides, explored every sparkling cranny, every luminescent crevice in search of the lever or button that would provide access to her maze.

Then she realized: Her impatience had made her dim. Her key would be the smallest of the eleven, the one that had had the least time to grow.

It was several spirit-dane-lengths in front of her. She started to run. Not knowing why or what she planned to do, she ran directly toward the cube.

Fssst!

She was standing in her maze, her own face sneering back at her from the countless, dust-filmed looking glasses that surrounded her.

“I’ve come!” she yelled, the words ricocheting off the cloudy glasses without cease or loss of volume. Consonants jarred, vowels overlapped. The noise pained her ears, but what did she care? She would endure anything. She had made it this far. She would not leave until she had found what she’d come for.

In every direction, mirrored corridors branched off into the maze’s dusky reaches. She tried to locate the scepter in her imagination’s eye, but her powers were useless. She would have to find it the