Frank Beddor - Seeing Redd

She should have been disoriented, her image sneering back at her from the countless dust-filmed looking glasses that surrounded her, but she was too consumed with the quest that had brought her to this maze whose time had passed, its purpose unfulfilled.

“I’ve come!” she yelled, the words ricocheting off the cloudy looking glasses without cease or loss of volume. The noise pained Redd’s 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 dusky reaches of the maze. She tried to locate the scepter in her imagination’s eye, but her powers were apparently useless. She would have to find it the old-fashioned way, by systematically walking every corridor, seeking the scepter as might a blind, rudderless fool.

“Not much of a maze, are you?” she muttered, because she discovered that she could pass from one corridor to another merely by walking through the looking glass walls. Hers was a phantom maze, the ghostly residue of what it had once been. A sudden, hissing sound at her back.

She spun, ready for anything. The dust of a looking glass had lifted and formed into the figure of a female:

the teenage girl she used to be, before she had allowed corruption to gnarl and ravage her features, before her transformative passage through the Heart Crystal: bratty, intractable and vindictive Rose Heart.

“How dare you show your face, when I’m smarter and more imaginative than you,” the dust-figure whispered, then faded into nothing.

Redd continued on, and half-formed images flitted past the periphery of her vision, apparitions pointing and ogling in disbelief that the maze’s intended had arrived so long after she’d been expected. Whenever she turned to look directly at them, they shifted and remained at the edge of her sight.

Only one image let itself be seen, and it gave Redd pause: that of her slinking into her mother’s bedroom, so soon after being removed from succession to the throne, to place the fatal mushroom on Queen Theodora’s tongue. She felt no remorse-her mother had deserved an untimely end-but that night had been the last time she’d employed a lethal mushroom in her nasty doings.

The scepter lay on the floor up ahead as if it were nothing, a useless stick someone had dropped in her hurry to leave. No doubt it had once been vibrant with color, a gleaming, crystalline staff with elaborate, gem-encrusted filigree awaiting the first touch of its intended’s hands. But now, the heart at its top was shriveled and gray. What gems still remained had turned black. The filigree was rusted and, in parts, had completely flaked off. But had it been otherwise, had she found a scepter as glorious and pulsating as Alyss Heart’s, she would have thought it a trick, a setup. The scepter at her feet, so elaborate in its decay-this was beauty. Yet here it lay, abandoned, discarded, just as she had been by her family.

“And they had the impudence to blame me!” she yelled. Again, her words reverberated until they became noise.

“It’s your own fault, Rose,” Theodora had said. “I cannot allow you to become queen. You refuse to listen to anyone’s counsel but your own, and you insist on being so undisciplined, disregarding the most basic principles of White Imagination.”

“Perhaps I have discipline in other things!” she had spat.

“That’s what I’m afraid of. You’ve already scared a number of important Wonderlanders.”

Redd had made it her life’s work to scare so-called important Wonderlanders. She had scared a great many of them during her all-too-brief time on the throne. But whatever fears she had instilled, whatever terrors inflicted, were nothing compared to what she would accomplish now that she had navigated her own Looking Glass Maze.

Her fingers closed around the scepter, giving her access to the full potential of her imaginative powers. She was the strongest Heart alive. She would recapture the Heart Crystal, and no one, not even prissy

Alyss Heart, would be able to wrench it away from her. Ever.

W ONDERLAND ’S FINEST architects had designed it and overseen its fabrication. The most skilled glaziers, carpenters, masons, and gemologists had worked tirelessly to ensure that even its smallest details were built according to plan: Heart Palace, imagined anew on the site of the former palace, which had stood for generations until being cruelly decimated by Redd.

“The artisans labored with such great effort in tribute to you, Alyss,” said Bibwit Harte as he escorted the queen and her personal bodyguard, Homburg Molly, through the palace for the first time.

The tips of Bibwit’s oversized ears crimped forward. The blue-green veins beneath the translucent skin of his bald head seemed to swell. He was amused by something.

“I need no tribute,” Alyss said.

Bibwit’s eyebrows leaped up and his eyes widened in pleasure.

So that was it. He had just wanted to hear her say it aloud. Why he never tired of hearing her expressions of selflessness, Alyss couldn’t understand. It was as if he thought they proved the kind of queen she was and always would be. But if he only knew, I am far from selfless.

“You might not need a tribute, my dear Alyss,” Bibwit went on, “but the citizenry does, and those responsible for this magnificent palace-”

“Hmmph!” Molly said, shrugging open her Millinery backpack, its various blades and corkscrews snapping to the ready.

“-have vowed that it should serve as a monument to White Imagination, a declaration of your ascendancy over the-how shall we say?-more sooty machinations of Black Imagination. The palace is an emblem of hope that you will-”

“Yenh!” Molly grunted, retracting the weapons of her backpack with a shrug.

“-return our nation to the peace and contentment of your great-grandmother’s reign, when it is supposed the queendom had never heard of dissension. Here we have the ancestral chamber.”

Bibwit guided Alyss and her bodyguard into a room whose vaulted, bejeweled ceiling twinkled purple and gold. In marbled crystal frames around the room hung screens of Alyss’ parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents-the generations of Hearts who had ruled in the service of White Imagination.

“Hyah!”

“Molly, please,” Alyss said.

“Sorry.” Molly shrugged a last time, the knives of her backpack folding shut.

The Millinery, Wonderland’s elite security force, had been officially re-established, and the girl had taken

to dressing in the uniform of its former leader, Hatter Madigan: the long coat that flared out behind her like a cape when she ran; the deadly belt that, with a punch of its buckle, sprouted a series of sabers along its surface; the bracelets that could snap open and become propeller blades on the outward side of her wrists; the backpack.

“I haven’t seen this much optimism since I was a young albino graduating from the Tutor Corps,” Bibwit sighed as they left the ancestral chamber and continued down the passage. “But it’s best to tell you now, Alyss, that Queen Issa’s reign was not as peaceful as Wonderlanders believe. There will always be those who unfavorably compare the present with a past they suppose happier than it was, not having lived through it, as I have.”

“I can’t imagine you as young, Bibwit,” Alyss said.

He was being quite the chatterbox today. She would have thought her tutor had attended too many royal festivities to get excited by them any longer. But didn’t she know better? It wasn’t the gala itself that had raised his spirits so much as it was her first official function as Wonderland’s queen.