War of the Cards Read online

  “We can’t help him! He’s gone!”

  They ran into two Clubs, and Wardley dispatched one easily enough, while Dinah plunged her recovered sword through the remaining Card’s thigh. To her right, she saw a Diamond Card raise his hand to throw his dagger at Wardley, but in the second that he measured his aim, she buried her own dagger in his neck. His eyes went wide with surprise before he fell facedown into the ground.

  With a cry, Dinah ripped the cape off from around her neck and leaped free of its weight, her sword out in front of her. She beckoned to the Cards who approached.

  She fought in time with Wardley now, a mirror image of the dance they had perfected years ago. Only this time, it wasn’t a game. Fighting for their lives, they slashed through the men as they moved through the crowd toward Corning, who was whinnying for his master, two arrows poking out of his flank.

  They had almost made it to him when Dinah heard a strange grinding sound, like chains being dragged over stony ground. The sound chugged slowly up the palace wall and echoed off the turrets, the high-pitched ringing deafening to all below.

  “The Jabberwocky!” screamed Wardley. “Move!”

  Together, they ran as quickly as they could. Dinah heard the whistling overhead and increased her speed, her lungs and side aching with each raw breath.

  “Get down!” Wardley screamed at his men as he ran. “Get down, swords up!”

  Wardley slammed to a stop and pulled Dinah beside him. She could see that they were safely out of range, but almost worse, they could now watch the Jabberwocky inflict its carnage.

  The weapon came spinning out from behind one of the turrets, vaulted from a catapult inside the walls of the palace. Dinah watched as the whirling thirty-foot iron sphere was launched over the walls and spun faster and faster, gaining speed as it hurtled down on Cards and Yurkei alike. Wardley was screaming and Dinah joined him, their voices easily lost in the cacophony of battle. She watched in horror as it untangled, wider and wider, until its true form took shape: a large net made of crumpled metal, covered with curled iron spikes. It soared high into the air before it began its plummet toward the ground, its gigantic width encompassing a quarter of the battlefield. Men ran, screaming, but it was too late. The Jabberwocky careened down from the sky like a metal blanket.

  Oh gods.

  “Get down! Swords up!” Dinah’s eyes found Sir Gorrann, just as he finished off a decorated Heart Card. “Get down!” she screamed, waving her arms frantically. He looked up just in time to see an agonizing death hurtling toward him. The Spade curled himself into a small ball and pointed his sword at the sky. Starey Belft was running toward a large group of Spades, screaming and waving to warn them. But he was too late.

  The Jabberwocky landed with an earth-shattering crack, its metal netting covering hundreds of bodies. Its curved hooks pinned its victims to the ground like insects on a board.

  Screams of agony rang out over the plains as the king’s weapon took limbs, eyes, shoulders, mouths. Silence fell over the battlefield as everyone stared at the spot where the men had been, now just a quivering mass of metal. Seconds passed and Dinah didn’t breathe, not until several swords popped up from below, sawing through the metal. The few men who had knelt with their swords or shields protecting them from the Jabberwocky’s terrible claws emerged. Through the holes they had made, Dinah saw glimpses of terrible suffering—men impaled, their lifeless eyes staring up in shock. A pool of blood crept out from under the net now, and Dinah looked away, but not before she saw Sir Gorrann shake himself off and head back into the fray. Her heart resumed beating. Starey Belft, commander of the Spades, did not emerge. He was gone.

  The cranking sound filled the air again, but more dimly this time.

  “They’re sending one out on the other side!” Wardley yelled, plunging his sword into the heart of a suffering Yurkei, a mercy killing. Dinah’s face was wet with tears. Her army was decimated. At least half of them were dead or dying, though the king’s army was worse off. Loud screams echoed from the other side of the palace as the second Jabberwocky ended thousands of lives in its metal tangle of death.

  Her misguided attention was noticed, and two Heart Cards abruptly grabbed her arms, dragging her backward. Dinah spun out of their grasp. Wardley tackled the other man, pressing him to the ground and throttling him. The Card quickly lost consciousness. Dinah sparred with the man she’d disarmed, her blade moving faster and faster with each stroke. Finally, the man raised his arm a little too high. She plunged her sword into his stomach, through his thin leather armor.

  Before she could even pull her sword free, another Diamond Card grabbed at her, latching onto her breastplate, and hurled her to the ground. Dinah pushed herself backward while the Diamond advanced on her, an amethyst-encrusted dagger in his hand. The Card raised his arm, his eyes trained on Dinah’s face.

  Without so much as a whisper, Ki-ershan leaped on the man’s back, his white-striped hands wrapped around the Card’s neck. He gave a jerk and the man’s head twisted abruptly with a sickening crack. He fell lifelessly to the ground. Ki-ershan yanked Dinah to her feet and threw her on Corning, who had found his way to Wardley. Wardley climbed up in front of her, a new wound open on his leg.

  From her position astride Corning, Dinah looked with horror at what her quest for a crown had brought. All around her were blood and bone and bodies, some piled waist high. Screams of pain and the stench of smoke mingled in the air.

  Hell had come to Wonderland.

  She had come to Wonderland.

  Despite all this pain, her victory grew ever closer. Her Spades were at the gates now, cutting through dozens of Cards. Hundreds of her Yurkei were swarming and scaling the iron walls, as the few remaining archers sent arrows whizzing past their heads and shoulders.

  “No, no, no.” Wardley muttered as Dinah looked to see Xavier Juflee and his Heart Cards slaughter three Yurkei warriors with alarming ease. A trail of bodies lay behind him. Juflee sensed that he was being watched and looked up, his eyes meeting theirs across the battlefield. Xavier curled his finger at Wardley, beckoning him to fight. Wardley shook his head. He would not fight his old mentor and friend.

  A second trumpet blasted over the battlefield, its sound echoing across the valley. Every fighter turned to hear the words echoing down from the walls.

  “Retreat! Retreat to inside the gates! The King of Hearts has ordered a retreat!”

  There was a momentary pause as a quiet and refreshing wind blew around them. Then suddenly, all the Cards around Dinah ran for the iron gates, rushing through any Spades in their path, caring less about killing them and more about their own safety. The Cards pulled back, disappearing behind the protective iron swirls, but all for naught. It was done. She suspected the Cards had no idea that so many of her Yurkei fighters had made it over the wall. From behind the gates, she heard the intense rise of combat, followed by the quiet of surrender.

  A few minutes later, the creak of ancient iron echoed out over the battlefield as the tall gates that protected the palace were thrown wide. With triumphant bellows, her remaining Yurkei and Spades flooded inside. Shouts of alarm rose up from inside the walls as hundreds of her men swarmed through the south gates. The push to open the gates to Mundoo’s huge army on the north side had begun.

  The area outside Wonderland Palace now held only small remnants of her army and the thousands of bodies that littered the ground. Xavier Juflee had disappeared. A few hundred Cards, somehow left behind in the retreat, placed their weapons on the ground and bowed before a bunch of furious Spades.

  “Show them mercy!” Dinah screamed at them. “Or it will be your heads I take.”

  The Spades nodded obediently. Wardley turned Corning, and they galloped away from the palace, the bloodied white steed climbing swiftly up the hills. It was time for Dinah to regroup with the council and execute the rest of the plan.

  She looked back over her shoulder at the palace. From there she could see it all: the fields of wildflowers now
stained red, the pale horses of the Yurkei strewn lifelessly around the palace, the vast stretch of death on the north side, where Mundoo’s army and the Cards continued to war against each other. Dinah looked for Morte, but she could not see him anywhere. He was gone—there was nothing she could do. As Corning galloped away from the massacre, Dinah turned her head to the turrets above the castle, where she prayed an archer named Derwin Fergal was keeping his coat turned the right way.

  Seven

  Dinah remembered the first time she had met Derwin Fergal: barely taller than his bow, even at twelve he had been rugged and stern, smiling curtly at Dinah before splitting an arrow to impress her. As a friend of Wardley’s, Derwin would cross paths with Dinah occasionally at equestrian events where Wardley was competing, at croquet games, or at an endless parade of glittering balls that they both seemed to despise. Even then, Dinah could see that Derwin’s focus was elsewhere, for even in the presence of a moody princess, his mind was solely on his arrows.

  Upon turning sixteen, Derwin had entered the Heart Cards as a squire and worked his way up through the archer ranks until he served under Royan Eugedde, the lead archer. Derwin and Wardley grew apart as the Heart Cards pulled them in different directions, but they still remained friendly acquaintances. According to Wardley, there wasn’t much that Derwin didn’t already know about archery, so Eugedde stepped in as a father figure when Derwin’s own father disappeared. Like so many others, he was swallowed into the folds of the Black Towers without so much as a warning. Derwin’s talent grew as his anger about his father’s imprisonment expanded. Rumor had it that he could kill a running deer from a thousand yards even through thick foliage, right through the neck, a clean shot. He sometimes boasted himself a better archer than most Yurkei, a wild claim to make even in Wonderland Palace.

  Right before Dinah’s world had collapsed in a sea of betrayal, Derwin had been named lead archer of the Heart Cards. His reputation was legendary, and so when Wardley suggested his name at one of Dinah’s first war council meetings, Dinah and Cheshire had both sat forward with piqued interest. A Fergal? On their side?

  The idea that a Fergal would fight for them was at first ludicrous, and yet now Dinah found herself putting her life—and the lives of those who meant the most to her—in the hands of that same boy who had tried to impress her so long ago.

  “Do you think he can do it?” she whispered to Wardley.

  He reached down and squeezed her hand. “If anyone can, it’s him.”

  Corning continued to gallop up the hill outside the palace, with Dinah and Wardley sharing his back. Flecks of foamy blood poured out of his mouth. Wardley was whispering desperate words to his horse, almost unaware of Dinah’s existence behind him. She tightened her arms around his waist, taking comfort in his touch, in the nearness of him. His hair smelled like it always had, of hay and lemons, but now he was covered with an unfamiliar stench—smoke and dried blood, the pungent odors making her eyes water. She closed them and, for just a second, let herself pretend that he was hers and they were riding together back to the palace, the kingdom, and nights in tangled sheets belonging to them alone.

  Corning’s steps slowed now as he made his way up that same hill where Dinah had watched the beginning of the battle unfold. Though it had been only a few hours, it seemed like a lifetime had passed. Dinah wasn’t the same person she had once been, the same girl who had galloped down the hill full of battle rage, yearning for her fury to be satisfied. It wasn’t. In fact, if she listened to her heart for just a moment, it seemed to be crying for more.

  Dinah pushed the anger down, letting out a long breath as she surveyed the kingdom below.

  “Are yeh ready?” Sir Gorrann was stepping up beside Corning, reaching for her hand. “Hurry, we don’t have a lot of time.”

  Dinah kept her eyes on the turrets as she stepped backward, nearing the hastily built tent on the hill. Its purple fabric and Yurkei flags snapped in the wind as she ducked into the entrance. Inside, Cheshire was waiting for her, out of breath and bloodstained.

  “Quickly! Get undressed,” he snapped.

  With Sir Gorrann’s help, they stripped Dinah of her armor. First off was the breastplate, once white, now stained red, the broken heart spattered with mud. Cheshire worked his way down her legs, pulling off the black leather leg guards and the leather that was wrapped around her waist.

  “What happened to your cape?”

  Dinah shook her head. “Don’t ask.”

  He grimaced. “Pity, I was quite fond of it.”

  The tent flap curled back and Dinah looked up as Wardley stomped in carrying a dusty bag. He looked battered, but more than that, he looked exhausted. Blood and brains were splashed across his sharp uniform. He had killed so many. She had seen it. Dinah reached around her wrist for the red ribbon hidden there and quickly tied her hair back.

  “Do you have them?”

  Wardley nodded and emptied the bag. The brown shapeless garments favored by the poor hit the floor with a thump. The smell of fish hit their noses hard.

  “Are you sure this plan is necessary?” Dinah said sharply to Cheshire, who was loftily holding his nose.

  “Not anymore,” he answered with a shake of his head. “But I’ll ponder the repercussions of this decision at a later time.” He turned to Wardley as Dinah pulled the brown linen over her white tunic and black pants. The men in the tent followed suit.

  “Is the Fergal boy on the south side?” Cheshire asked. Wardley was trying to scrub the blood off his cheeks with a rag, his face drawn.

  Dinah answered for him. “Yes. He’s there. I saw him.”

  When Morte had first ridden into battle, she had seen Derwin atop the turrets, his signature silver vest easy to spot as he fired arrow after arrow at the Yurkei from just inside the gates. Even with the white cranes’ defensive maneuverings, he had managed to kill, at her count, probably fifty Yurkei and more than a few Spades. Dinah had watched both of Derwin’s brothers get riddled with Yurkei arrows, and found herself wondering if he would stay the course, now that her army had killed his family. She watched him running up and down the turrets, a man most comfortable off the ground, a man who loved the whoosh of a shaft flying by his cheek. And now their fate was in his hands.

  Dinah’s breath pushed painfully out of her bruised lungs as she walked forward in her brown sack. At the back of the tent, a young Yurkei woman named Napayshi was being dressed in Dinah’s armor—minus the breastplate. The Rebel Queen rested her hand against the girl’s short black hair, unsure of how to feel and what to say.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she muttered. “We can find another way.”

  “Damned hells she does,” snapped Bah-kan, his entrance into the tent going unnoticed.

  Napayshi took Dinah’s hand in her own, running her smooth brown skin over Dinah’s bloodstained palm. “It is my pleasure to die for my people, for Mundoo.”

  Her black eyes met Dinah’s, and the look in them told Dinah that this woman’s love for Mundoo was about more than just loyalty.

  The woman leaned forward. “Do not mistake this as a gift for you. I will watch from the valley of the cranes as my people rise, watch as they take back their land. I will gladly die a weapon for the Yurkei.” A small curl of blue smoke escaped from her lips.

  Dinah bit down, trying not to inhale. Damn the Caterpillar and Cheshire and their wicked, wicked plan.

  She remembered Cheshire’s words as they had argued this plan, Dinah pleading against it until she could see no other way. She is both a distraction and a weapon.

  Napayshi stood and squared her shoulders in the same way Dinah did. It felt strange watching this young thing become the fearful queen, the armor on her body bloodstained and dented. Blood that Dinah had drawn. Dents that Dinah had earned. The high collar of the armor shadowed the girl’s face, and between the blood being splattered on her cheeks and her short black hair, even Dinah was impressed at how successful the transformation had been.

  She tu
rned to her motley group of supporters. “Let’s get ready. We have to move quickly.” Dinah, Cheshire, Wardley, Bah-kan, Ki-ershan, and Sir Gorrann all huddled together in their brown sacks.

  “Ah, ah, ah.” Cheshire reached down and plucked the crown from her head with a chuckle. Dinah’s hands flew to her hair. “You forgot this.”

  She felt naked without it, her hands absentmindedly tracing over her hair.

  “You’ll get it back,” Cheshire hissed. “I swear on my life that a better crown than this will grace your head.” Their eyes met.

  Everyone was waiting for her, and so Dinah closed her eyes and drew a deep breath, once again steeling herself for battle. “The king waits for us.”

  All at once the two groups emerged from the tent, Napayshi out of the front, and a handful of brown-clothed paupers making their way out of the back. The fake queen climbed up on a black horse, tiny compared to the steed that Dinah had actually ridden. As Dinah watched, she felt a shard of pain twist in her heart. Was Morte all right? Was he in pain somewhere, wondering where she was? Even as she asked the questions, she knew that there was no way to answer them before this hellish day was over.

  Dinah let her eyes rise up to the palace, past the pile of bodies and the carrion-eaters that circled above them, the shadows of vultures already upon the forms of the dead, past the iron gates and past the walls to the turrets. A silver flash was moving now, up and down the stairs that linked various turrets and walkways at the front of the palace. Derwin.

  Underneath the turrets, the Spades, once called traitors, now conquerors, were moving through the outskirts of the palace. Below Dinah, hordes of frightened women and children cried in the courtyard as they desperately clung to each other, searching for their fathers, their sons. Members of the court were taking up arms, standing in front of their homes that lay just outside the main palace walls. Dinah barely glanced at them. She could not linger on what would happen to them, not now. She could only save them one way, by getting into the palace without killing thousands more on the way in.