War of the Cards by Colleen Oakes

Author:Colleen Oakes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

Eleven

Dinah looked at herself in the gilded mirror, preparing for the coronation that would crown her queen. She frowned at the thought. It seemed like a lifetime ago that she had killed the king, and yet it had only been four days since the end of the war. The barrage of events that had followed had occurred with such urgency that time had passed quickly.

As soon as peace had been declared and the fighting stopped, Dinah had sent the Yurkei just outside the palace walls to await their release back to Hu-Yuhar. Mundoo remained in the palace, to make sure that Dinah kept her promises and to see her through the coronation, just in case some faction of leftover Cards attempted a revolt.

It was all for naught—there was not a whisper of discontent. The Yurkei and the Spades outnumbered the Cards two to one, and any talk of insurgency would have been a swift walk down the road to death.

Dinah was amazed at and grateful for how quickly Cheshire was able to organize everything—laws, ordinances, titles, and land were all distributed within two days of Dinah declaring herself queen. The result was a sigh of relief from both the people and the Yurkei, who longed to return to their peaceful lives at Hu-Yuhar. Part of Dinah wished she could go with them, live out her life at Hu-Yuhar under the watchful eye of the cranes and Mundoo, who was the kind of leader that Dinah aspired to be. It wouldn’t be the same without Bah-kan, though, and Dinah knew that her soul belonged here, in the palace.

She clutched her hands together, feeling her nerves getting the better of her. Overthrow and kill a king? Fine.

Stand in front of all her new subjects in a dress? Terrifying.

The entirety of Wonderland proper had been invited to the coronation. People stretched out through the Great Hall and into the hallways and stairwells of Wonderland Palace. The high-born members of the court and the low farmhands, the famous and the decorated, spilled out into the courtyard. All longed to see the Queen of Hearts, who had gone from an embodiment of terror to the hero of the people. Their fickle hearts made Dinah uneasy, but Cheshire had explained their motivations away as he helped prepare her for the coronation.

She turned back to him now as he sat in the queen’s reading chair across the room, his dazzling new purple cloak a burst of color against the soft brown leather. He lazily twirled his dagger in his right hand.

Dinah’s bedroom was in shambles, but pieces of her old life remained: a trinket here, a music box or book there. Eventually, these chambers would be glorious, but right now they were little more than a makeshift dressing room.

“Are you listening, Your Majesty?”

Dinah turned back. “Yes. I’m just . . . thinking.”

Cheshire cleared his throat and continued on with his lecture about the coronation. “Remember this. Peasants and regular townspeople care not for the business of kings and queens.

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