The Wonder (Queen of Hearts Saga #2)(48)
After she had cleaned up, she joined the Yurkei for a celebratory feast alongside Bah-kan, Sir Gorrann, and her two Yurkei guards. It was a feast to put all others to shame, even the endless feasts she had known at Wonderland Palace. Birds of every type were paraded in on the backs of Yurkei warriors. Each bite tingled with rich spices, woodsy and full of flavor, each taste manipulated by Iu-Hora, their local medicine man. Dinah was given piles of edible mushrooms, each one producing a unique effect—some made her sad or melancholy, while others made her jubilant or silly. Some produced a feeling of intense passion that climaxed in seconds and left her breathless, clutching the table. One gave her a hallucination of the palace, filled with thumping red hearts and fluttering peacocks. Another showed her a river of blood, soaking her feet. The effects weren’t lasting—most were no more than a minute—so Dinah eagerly awaited what each new mushroom would bring.
Dessert was a towering concoction of berries and edible plants, along with some hearty honey bread of which Dinah couldn’t seem to get enough. When the bread was broken open, a tiny flame that somehow burned inside the loaf extinguished, leaving warm bread dripping with hot honey. It was incredible, and Dinah happily licked the honey off of her fingers, aware that perhaps a queen shouldn’t engage in such behavior. She hardly cared. The Yurkei didn’t care, either.
Cheshire sat beside her on one side and Sir Gorrann on the other; and while Cheshire was constantly trying to engage her with compliments or observations, she couldn’t bring herself to be kind to him, not yet. She did find herself staring at him when he wasn’t looking, taking in his jet-black hair and eyes, so like her own, a mirror image really. She imagined him with her mother, laughing and touching, finding every spare moment to be together, caught up in the danger of their forbidden passion. She couldn’t picture it, and at times the idea made her sick. Since he had arrived, Cheshire had given her a number of gifts—a lovely diamond brooch in the shape of a cat, a heavy purple riding cloak, a new set of dark-red leather boots imprinted with a heart on each heel. She pulled on the boots immediately and shoved the other presents into her bag. He could not buy her loyalty or love, not yet, but she needed new boots and so allowed herself to slip into their rich soles, her sore feet rejoicing.
Her training with Bah-kan and Sir Gorrann continued—brutal mornings, everyday—until she was able to spar competently with Sir Gorrann, even beating him on occasion. All the mornings she had played swords with Wardley were returning to her, and her strokes became quick and hard as her body intuitively spun and leapt. Somehow, without her noticing, the blade and her body had become one. One morning, as Dinah was bathing, Cheshire approached and invited her to train with him on throwing daggers. Dinah reluctantly agreed, but to her dismay found that she thoroughly enjoyed herself. There was something about winging a dagger at a tree that released her growing anxiety about leading an army. Cheshire was extremely skilled with a dagger, and Dinah realized that he had generously allowed her to hold her dagger to his throat in the orchard that evening. He could have disarmed or killed her at any time.
As they threw the knife, Cheshire recounted for her parts of her childhood that she had almost forgotten—her fifth birthday, a certain croquet game, when she broke her leg climbing a statue. He had indeed been watching her, but she told herself that it meant nothing. It was hard enough to consider that she was of his blood, let alone to develop the daughter/father bond that she had been lacking her entire life. And so, she didn’t speak. She just flung the daggers, again and again, loving the thwunk! against the tree bark when the knife made contact. She enjoyed their time together more and more as the days wore on.
Preparing an army took time. There were weapons to procure, horses to train, and large caravans of food to be assembled piece by piece. It was decided that Dinah would take a thousand Yurkei warriors with her as she marched south. If there was to be even the slightest hope of victory against the King’s army of ten thousand Cards and growing, then they needed the support of the rogue Cards who dwelled inside the Darklands. These were men, dangerous men, who had deserted the Cards and fled south, where they could live in relative freedom outside Wonderland law. Then again, they had to live in the Darklands, which to Dinah seemed to be punishment enough.
Mundoo and his army of four thousand Yurkei would march north, gathering men from the smaller tribes that lay scattered below the Todren, and make their way down from there to Wonderland Palace. Not only would this ensure that the palace would be attacked from both the north and the south—essential when the palace was surrounded by a circular wall—but the King of Hearts would surely focus on Mundoo’s large and noisy army, allowing Dinah and her small army to creep up from behind. Cheshire’s hope was that Dinah’s army would surprise him, or at least alarm the Cards. They would sack the palace together, independent armies working as one. He was unnervingly clever in battle strategy, and Dinah saw instantly why the King had chosen him over his peers to be his advisor. Cheshire’s mind was not unlike his dagger. Razor sharp and lethal, it could be wielded completely in whatever way he chose. He explained that her small army of Yurkei would be there for her protection in the Darklands, but they also served as a symbol to the rogue Cards of her commitment to a new kind of existence, one in which Wonderlanders, Cards, and Yurkei all existed and fought together to end tyranny. In his words, seeing the Queen of Hearts leading an army of Yurkei warriors would be enough to sway even the hardest mind. “Wars,” he reminded her, “are won in the mind, not in the field.”