Seeing Redd Read online

  THE LOOKING GLASS WARS®

  SEEING REDD

  BY

  FRANK BEDDOR

  A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Published by The Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  The Looking Glass Wars ® is a registered trademark of Automatic Pictures Inc.

  Copyright © 2007 by Frank Beddor

  All rights reserved

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Logo Design: Christina Craemer

  Part 2 & 3 art: Stephen Martiniere

  Front, Back cover and part 1 art: Vance Kovacs

  Map Design: Cold Open & Nate Barlow

  Beddor, Frank.

  Seeing Redd / by Frank Beddor.

  p. cm.? (The Looking Glass Wars)

  Summary: When Alyss Heart returns to her rightful place on the throne of Wonderland, she is put to the test as enemies, both inside and outside the borders of her queendom, push their own agendas, while she strives to unify them all.

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-0068-1

  [1. Kings, queens, rulers, etc.?Fiction. 2. War?Fiction. 3. Imagination?Fiction. 4. Characters in literature?Fiction. 5. Fantasy.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B3817982See 2007

  [Fic]?dc

  222007006335

  For Christina and Luc

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  PROLOGUE

  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.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  WONDERLAND’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.

  “This is one of the libraries,” Bibwit said, showing them into a paneled room crowded with books, scrolls, reading crystals.

  Only three lunar cycles had passed since Redd’s defeat and yet the pressures of Alyss’ position were wearing on her. She didn’t want to let anyone down, least of all Bibwit. He was the closest thing she had to a father since her aunt Redd had murdered her parents.

  “Don’t you agree, Alyss?” he asked, interrupting her thoughts.

  “About what?”

  “I was just telling young Molly—”

  “I’m not young,” Molly blurted.

  The tutor paused. In the short time since Redd’s defeat, the girl had grown at least a gwormmy-length and the cute slope of her nose had straightened somewhat, as if in anticipation of the handsome woman she would soon be. But her unlined face, her pillowy cheeks, and her strong, clear eyes turned defiantly upon him—she was nothing if not a child.

  “No,” Bibwit said. “After what we’ve been through, I don’t suppose any of us could be called young, although as Alyss has kindly pointed out, it’s unlikely anyone would have dared to think me so. My apologies, Molly. But I was saying that although the principles of White Imagination do not concern themselves with the luxuries so plentiful in the new palace, its opulence might be said to represent a time when beauty could exist in Wonderland unmolested by greed or other ill-intent.”

  Hard to believe this is where I’m to live.

  The crystal-shimmering spires and agate-mosaic artworks, floors inlaid with jasper and pearl, walls of quartz and stone and glittering mortar: It was all so unfamiliar and much grander than the former palace.

  “Alyss might not care overly much for such things,” Bibwit was saying as they again continued down the passage, “but on occasion a queen must follow instead of lead. The wisdom comes in knowing when to do so and, in this instance, Alyss has wisely chosen to follow the will of the people.” Bibwit’s ears twitched. “We have company.”

  Alyss soon heard footsteps approaching. General Doppelgänger appeared at the end of the hall, his military boots clicking on the polished floor. He bowed repeatedly and began talking before he reached her.

  “My queen, three decks of card soldiers have been dispatched to guard the perimeter of the grounds. The white knight and his chessmen will be stationed inside the palace and its gardens. They have promised to be as inconspicuous as they can, so as not to worry your guests, but—”

  Alyss laughed. “They are chessmen, General; they will always be a trifle conspicuous.”

  “That’s so, that’s so.” The general ran a fretful hand through his hair and split into the twin figures of Doppel and Gänger.

  “We urge you to reconsider,” said General Doppel.

  “It’s a risk to have invited so many to the palace all at once,” agreed General Gänger.

  “We don’t wish to cause needless alarm—”

  “—but we’ll be vulnerable to disruptions from any enemies we still have among the populace.”

  “To say nothing of the risk to you personally.”

  “Queen Alyss can take care of herself,” said Homburg Molly. “And besides, she has me.”

  In one swift motion, Molly took the homburg from her head, snapped it into a flat, knife-edged disk, and sent it zinging down the hall and back. She caught it, with a flick of the wrist returned it to its innocent homburg shape, and plunked it on top of her head.

  Always wanting to prove her worth even though she’s proved it tenfold in battles.

  Homburg Molly was still too inexperienced to have mastered the Millinery ethic of keeping her emotions hidden, an ethic Hatter Madigan had epitomized to perfection.

  “Your diligence and concern are appreciated, as always,” Alyss told the generals, “but the memorial is for all of Wonderland. And to bring out the best in Wonderlanders, I must assume the best of them.”

  “You’re starting to sound like Bibwit!” Doppel and Gänger moaned at once, and turned to leave.

  “I’ll walk with you, Generals,” the tutor said. “I must powder my head and poof out my scholarly robes for the party and so will take my leave of the queen.”

  Once Bibwit and the generals had gone, Molly said, “I don’t get it. He’s an albino. Why does he put white powder on his head?”

  Alyss smiled. “When we’re as clever and educated as Bibwit, I’m sure we’ll know the answer, Molly. But I think it’s time we joined the guests.”

  The royal garden, a courtyard at the center of palace grounds, was crowded with happy Wonderlanders, their ticklish eruptions of laughter competing with the singing of the sunflowers planted alongside the war memorial.

  Alyss had made only o
ne request of the palace architects: that at the grave site of Sir Justice Anders, former head of the palace guard and Dodge Anders’ father, they create a memorial honoring all who had lost their lives during Redd’s thirteen-year reign—royals, civilians, card soldiers, chessmen, palace guardsmen, and members of the Millinery. The bodies of Queen Genevieve and King Nolan hadn’t been recovered, of course, but Bibwit had surprised Alyss with two of their most intimate keepsakes: a toy spirit-dane invented by her father, and one of her mother’s charm bracelets, both of which he’d kept tucked deep within his robes throughout Redd’s tyranny. These had been enough for the Hereafter Seeds to do their work. Just as a bouquet forming the likeness of Sir Justice watched over his grave, bouquets of camellias, gardenias and lilies resembling Wonderland’s former king and queen now kept vigil over theirs. On either side of the graves rose a simple stone etched with the names of those known to have lost their lives in battles against Redd. Behind all: an obelisk of emerald green, in recognition of those who had gone missing during Redd’s occupation and were now, to their families’ grief, presumed dead.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Molly said, looking around at the variety of people and creatures in the courtyard. “You’ve got street vendors mingling with suit families as if no one’s blood is purer than another’s.”