Heartless(137)

THUD.

THUD.

THUD.

The sound of the King’s gavel interrupted their argument and Cath sank her head in between her tense shoulders.

“Th-thank you, Sir Peter, for your—er, statement.” The King’s voice was shaking. “We have now heard the defendant’s testimony. Jury, what is your verdict?”

The jury huddled down with their slate tablets and whispers. Catherine heard none of their discussion. Her ears were humming, her brain clouded with visions of Jest in the mud, the ax swinging at his throat, her own heart splitting down the middle.

“We have reached a verdict, Your Majesty.” It was a toad who spoke, standing up with a slate in his webbed fingers. On it he had drawn a picture of Peter Peter standing on top of an enormous pumpkin and grinning. “We the jury find Peter Peter not guilty!”

The cheer was deafening. All around her, the people of Hearts embraced one another, hollered ecstatically. Even the King giggled with relief.

The Kingdom of Hearts had never seen such a ghastly trial, and everyone was thrilled that it was over. The man was not guilty. They could all go on with their silly, pointless lives.

Except Catherine. From the corner of her eyes she saw Raven puff his feathers.

She snatched the gavel from her husband. “SILENCE!” she screamed, pounding on the railing so hard a crack formed in the polished wood.

The ballyhoo stopped.

A courtroom of faces turned to gape at their Queen. Her reddened face, her livid eyes. A turtle ducked into his shell. An opossum rolled into a ball. An ostrich tried, but failed, to bury its head in the polished quartz floor.

“I reject the jury’s verdict,” she seethed. “As the Queen of Hearts, I declare this man guilty. Guilty of murder. Guilty of thievery and kidnapping and all the rest, and for his sentence—I call for his head. To be carried out immediately!”

Her words echoed through the courtroom, casting a cloud over the stricken faces. No one dared to breathe.

Catherine had eyes only for Sir Peter, whose face was furious beneath streaks of dirt, whose teeth were bared.

The numbness began to settle over her again.

“You deserve no mercy,” she said.

Peter spat again. “I want nothin’ from you.”

“B-b-but, darling,” said the King. Soft, patient, terrified. His fingers brushed against her arm, but she ripped it away. “We … we have never … In Hearts, we don’t … Why, sweetness, we don’t even have an executioner.”

The corner of her mouth twitched. Her gaze shifted to Raven. “Yes, we do.”

Raven lifted his head.

“You were the White Queen’s executioner,” she said, “and now you will be mine. Serve me dutifully and we shall both have our vengeance.”

He remained silent for a long while, still as a statue. Then he spread his wings and stepped off the rail. Like an ink splatter on stone he transformed into the hooded figure. His face cast in shadow, his gloved hands gripping the handle of the glinting ax. Now, in the light of the courtroom, Cath could see that his hooded cloak was made from raven feathers.

The guards drew back, leaving Peter Peter alone in the center of the room. Though he held fast to his defiance, Cath could see him beginning to shake.

Raven’s shadow lengthened across the floor, dwarfing the murderer. He hefted the ax onto his shoulder.

“For the murder of Jest, the court joker of Hearts, I sentence this man to death.” She spoke without feeling, unburdened by love or dreams or the pain of a broken heart. It was a new day in Hearts, and she was the Queen.

“Off with his head.”





AUTHOR’S NOTE

OR, WHY IS A RAVEN LIKE A WRITING-DESK?

IT’S COMMONLY BELIEVED that when the Hatter posed his unanswered riddle in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—“Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”—Lewis Carroll did not have an answer in mind. However, after years of being pestered, Carroll finally gave in with a response, recorded in the preface he wrote to the 1896 edition of Alice: “Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front.” (Note that the misspelled nevar is raven backward. Unfortunately, the misspelling would soon be caught and “corrected” by some industrious editor and Carroll’s clever wordplay would be lost in future editions.) All of that is to say that Carroll’s “official” answer to the riddle was the inspiration for Jest’s debut performance at the black-and-white ball in Chapter Four.

Over the years, countless fans and readers have added their own interpretations of the riddle. The answer that Hatta gives in Chapter Eighteen (“Because they both have quills dipped in ink”), was one that I was quite proud of myself for coming up with, but soon learned that I was not the only one to think it. This answer was credited to David B. Jodrey, Jr., in The Annotated Alice1, along with dozens of other brilliant and amusing answers recorded over time. (My personal favorite comes from Tony Weston, one of the winners of a contest posed by The Spectator in 1991: “Because a writing-desk is a rest for pens and a raven is a pest for wrens.” I imagine that Carroll, with his love of wordplay, would approve.) Speaking of the Raven, I was unable to limit myself to abusing the work of only one great author in this book, I had to meddle around with two. Most of Raven’s dialogue is inspired by (and sometimes blatant reworkings of) lines from the poem “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe. Though readers are free to interpret the character however they see fit, I rather like the idea of Raven being the same bird that tormented the heartbroken narrator in Poe’s classic work. As “The Raven” was first published in 1845, twenty years before Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the timeline was too perfect to pass up.