Splintered (Splintered, #1)(86)

He stares, wide mouth gaping almost to the floor.

I can’t stop the blush rising through my face. “Morpheus said that the king is bad. That he wants the crowns to both kingdoms for his wife, Grenadine, and will do anything to get them.”

“Ha!” Humphrey says. “As seen through the eyes of a murderer.”

“A murderer?”

“There’s no proof of that,” Sister One says, patting down Humphrey’s shell to adhere it to the glue. “Morpheus carried Red’s corpse to me many years after her banishment. But he shared nothing about the circumstances surrounding her demise, or where he found her. I’m not surprised he’s lashing out at Grenadine and her king. He’s always held a grudge about what happened to Alice after Grenadine hid her. The queen’s intentions were good, to keep the child safe until they could capture Red. But after Red was banished to the wilds, Grenadine lost the ribbon into which she’d whispered Alice’s whereabouts and so forgot where she’d put her. Alice became a cautionary tale told to netherling children as they were tucked into bed. The real child was forgotten. By all but Morpheus. Seventy-five years in a cocoon, and he still remembered her upon waking.”

“Wait.” I grip the table, fingernails puckering the cushiony top. “None of this makes sense. Alice went back into her world. My world. She had to …”

“Oh, no. She was here. Upon his metamorphosis, Morpheus left no sandbar unturned in his search for her. He found her hidden away in the caves of the highest cliffs of Wonderland. She’d been captured and kept in a cage by a reclusive old bird, Mr. Dodo. But Morpheus’s precious friend was no longer a child. She was a sad, confused, old woman by that time.”

Panic chokes back any response. If Alice really did spend her life in a birdcage here, how am I alive? How are any of the Liddell descendants alive?

Scuttling to the stove, Sister One produces water out of thin air from a spoutless sink and fills a kettle. “Would one of you be so kind as to move the red queen to the next square on the game board?”

Humphrey minds the request, pink cheeks ballooned in concentration. “One more left to go,” he whispers, thumping the last remaining silver square with his clawlike hand.

The game board has sixty-four squares, half of them red and half silver, with pawns, bishops, and rooks in positions that make no sense for real chess. Their arrangement reminds me of the board in Morpheus’s room.

Out of the thirty-two silver squares, a diagonal line of seven glow like burnished metal—the one on which Humphrey centered the red queen, along with six others that lead up to it. On each glowing square, a script appears in floating, curvy letters—again, just like on Morpheus’s chessboard.

This time, nothing stops me from reading them:

Burst Through Stone with a Feather; Cross a Forest in One Step; Hold an Ocean in Her Palm; Alter the Future with Her Fingertip; Defeat an Invisible Enemy; Trample an Army Beneath Her Feet; Wake the Dead.

There’s one silver square left in the back row, waiting to be illuminated. I suspect that until that happens, the final words will remain hidden. “Do you know what the last one is?”

“Harness the Power of a Smile,” Humphrey answers, surprisingly cooperative.

“I don’t understand,” I say, feeling weaker by the minute.

“Don’t you see?” Sister One carries over a tray with the kettle and pours three cups of tea. A soothing, lemony fragrance rises on the steam. “’Tis a record of all you’ve completed. The tests you’ve passed.”

“‘Tests’?” I look at them again, unable to find a tie to anything I’ve done, aside from waking the dead.

Then I remember what Morpheus said in his room moments before I animated the chess pieces: “It’s all in the interpretation.” Illumination comes to me, flowing slowly into my mind:

I’m sitting beside Morpheus on the giant mushroom where I found him after Jeb and I drained the ocean, but I’m a tiny child of four. My seven-year-old guide positions a picture book in front of me. He’s teaching me to decipher riddles.

“This,” he says, pointing to a picture of a woman with puffed-out cheeks. “Something you can hold but cannot keep.” He reads the words under the picture.

I shouldn’t be able to understand them. I’m a toddler. But it doesn’t matter. Because each time I visit him in dreams, I feel older somehow. Wiser. Gifted.

“You know the answer,” Morpheus says, his young voice scolding. “You’re the best of both worlds.”

He takes a deep breath and holds it in his lungs. Lifting my palm to his mouth, he lets it out slowly, closing my fingers around the warm air. When I open my hand again, nothing’s there.

“Breath!” I smile and clap.

Morpheus smiles and nods, pride shining in his inky eyes. “Yes. We can hold it but always have to set it free.”

Back in the present, understanding blinds me, like a flash of sunlight across pupils accustomed only to darkness, dilating my perceptions to perfect clarity: I’m the best of both worlds …

Netherling logic awakened, I see my accomplishments imprinted on the board next to their summaries, like a checklist:





Burst Through Stone with a Feather—Used a quill to shove the sundial statue aside and open up the rabbit hole.