Frank Beddor - Looking Glass Wars 03 by ArchEnemy

Author:ArchEnemy
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-01-09T09:25:36+00:00

CHAPTER 30

Oxford, England. 1875.

ON UNSEASONABLY warm, sunny days, streets from Longwell to Mill, Thames to St. Giles, filled with open carriages bearing leisurely men and women, with bicyclists and strollers and window-shoppers; the green expanses of Christ Church Meadow, Merton Field, and Magellan Grove crowded with picnickers, footballers, cricket players, and countless others. Revelers in nature, enthusiasts of every manner of outdoor activity—all emerged from the confines of four walls and a roof to partake of al fresco pleasures. But on one unseasonably fine day in 1875, along with this variegated lot, a certain trio were enticed to a certain sycamore tree on High Street between All Souls and Queen’s College, though not by the sun and breeze, nor by the tree itself, however closely Reverend Dodgson seemed to study its bark.

“It’s not that I doubt the validity of w-what you’ve told me in toto,” the reverend explained to Hatter and Molly, “so much as … as there is a point or two that could use c-c-clarification, the foremost of which … if Alyss is in Wonderland, housed in a prison or some such, how do you explain her.”

Dodgson poked his head around the tree and with a darting bird-like jerk of the neck indicated a group of ladies congregating before a tea shop. The ladies were similarly dressed in ankle-length skirts, in flouncy blouses ruffling out at cuffs and collar from beneath short-waisted jackets, yet Hatter and Molly instantly recognized one of them as Wonderland’s queen.

“That’s Alice Liddell,” Dodgson said, noting their reactions, “the same young lady who told me of her Wonderland trials so many years ago.”

“Not the same,” Hatter said, catching his daughter’s eye.

“It is, I t-tell you,” the reverend sputtered. “She’s no longer as young as she was, of course. N-none of us is.”

How to explain to this timid, squeamish fellow the aftermath of Redd Heart’s leap into the Heart Crystal? How to describe in believable detail the post-battle lull inside Mount Isolation, with Hatter, Molly, Bibwit, Dodge, General Doppelgänger, the white knight and the white rook as witnesses to Alyss’ immediate assumption of Wonderland’s crown? Could Reverend Dodgson, already beyond the limits of what he’d grown up believing, credit an account of Bibwit Harte suggesting that Alyss conjure a double of herself to occupy her place in the Liddell family—the place she’d rightly vacated to be Wonderland’s sovereign? Would the reverend empathize with Alyss’ self-doubt as she questioned whether her powers were strong enough to birth a double even as she reached out to the Heart Crystal with both arms and—popzzzzlllpipipopzzzx!—caused the room to disappear in a wash of light?

It was an unprecedented feat—the conjuring of a live, independent being—but Hatter had never doubted the queen’s ability to perform it, though he was only now seeing the result: a young woman in front of a High Street tea shop who’d never been anyone other than Alice Liddell. And if it was strange for the Milliner and his daughter to palpably confront the existence of this

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