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There was more for a Champion to do in time of peace than Alice would have thought; rebuilding was not at all a tidy affair. While the larger decisions and the greater squabbles went to Mirana, the Queen - by virtue of her sorcery as much as her authority - was needed in entirely too many capacities, all at roughly the same time. Smaller matters began to fall to Alice - though to Alice, it felt more as though they fell on her than to her, their weight piling up, and her knowledge of the ways of Underland feeling weak and spindly and entirely unequal to the burden.
Thus it was that she decreed that for three hours of every afternoon, she would retire to the Queen's workroom - a most sanctuary-like place - and read of Underland's history and lore and customs, and unless another Jabberwocky appeared, she was not to be disturbed. All matters less urgent than Jabberwockies, Alice instructed, were to be directed to the attention of Mallymkun.
(It was amazing, after that, how peaceful Marmoreal tended to be between the hours of two and five.)
Sometimes Mirana was there with her, working on some potion or other; other times Alice had the place to herself. It was dreadfully tempting to explore all the pots and jars and chests of things, but Alice refrained, not out of timidity, but respect. She should not like someone poking about
her things, after all. (And it occured to her, as she considered her childhood full of creeping and spying, that it's entirely possible she'd not had a true friend in the world, nor the sense to miss having one, since her father died. There was no one before, no one up there, who inspired her to care one whit for their privacy.)
On this particular afternoon, Mirana was brewing something that smelled at least three days dead with a side of especially ghastly, and Alice was reading the collected songs of the Hightopp clan (if she tended to favor the history of a certain region of Underland rather heavily in her reading, well, she figured she'd just catch up on the rest later. She was curious.)
(And some of their ballads were decidedly bawdy, and she was not entirely sure she understood all of them.)
(She'd bet Tarrant knew them all, too.)
Mirana gasped suddenly. Alice jumped and looked up, fearing the queen might have slipped and cut or burnt herself. It was not so; Mirana stood over her boiling cauldron with one unmarred hand raised before her face, watching it closely, breathing in a curious manner.
"Are you alright?" Alice asked.
"Quite well," Mirana responded, but her voice didn't especially sound it. Alice frowned and shut her book, and went to the queen's side.
There was an insect of some kind perched just at the base of her thumb, where the vein ran, some thin, sharp bit of mouth stuck into the queen's flesh. It wasn't quite a mosquito - far too purple, with rather too much paisley in its coloring - but it reminded Alice of one. Only bigger.
"You can't even kill a biting insect?" Alice inquired, watching a little queasily as the creature's belly expanded, full of the queen's blood.
"It is against my vows," Mirana replied, voice high and thin and very strange - despite that Alice's definitions of strange were rapidly adjusting, and far fewer things in Underland struck her that way anymore (her memories of her life above, however, were beginning to seem absolutely bizarre).
"Would you like me to squash it?" Alice asked, though she didn't really want to do any such thing - still, she was the Champion, and this was her Queen, and if her service was needed in the killing of not-mosquitoes, well, at least it wasn't another Jabberwocky.
"No," Mirana shook her head. "It isn't truly harming me. It's only hungry."
"I hope you take a different view of hungry tigers," Alice muttered, as the insect took wing a little drunkenly; it bobbed about in front of Mirana's face in a manner that looked suspiciously like a bow. The queen ducked her head graciously in answer, and then the insect spun off, back out the open window.
It really was rather beautiful in flight, with the afternoon sun refracting off its wings. Alice was glad not to have had to squash it.
But if one such tried to bite her, she made it no promises. It really was very much larger than a mosquito.
Mirana exhaled, long and slow. "What is a tiger?"
"Imagine something half Chesire cat, half Bandersnatch," Alice said, after a moment of thought.
"My," said Mirana, then, in a tone still quiet and strained, "Alice? Would you do me a service?"
"Of course," Alice answered, though it startled her how easily the words left her lips - not that she'd never said such things up there, but then it was manners. Here it was sincerity. Had she ever really understood what it meant to trust someone, before? She didn't think so.
"Wipe that away, please," the queen asked softly, nodding down at her still upraised hand. There was a bright red spot of blood where she'd been bitten.
"Oh," said Alice, wincing. Her eyes searched the table for a clean cloth; she found one that looked to have an unspoiled corner of sufficient size, and moved to grab it.
"No!" Mirana exclaimed, loud enough to make Alice flinch back, eyes rounding. "No, please," Mirana repeated, more quietly, still breathing in that strange way. "Your own handkerchief. And tuck it quite securely back into your pocket after, if you please, and wash it straight away, as soon as you leave this room."
"Alright," Alice agreed, a bit warily; it seemed an odd request, but she didn't lack for handkerchiefs - in fanciful colors with embroidery fine enough for a ball gown. The one she had on hand today was a brilliant summer-sky blue, with vines about the edge; the little smear of blood turned the blue to dusky purple, like the sun going down. Alice did as she was asked and tucked the soiled cloth hastily away, so that no corner of it showed, though she thought that Mirana's eyes lingered a bit long on the slight bulge in the side of her dress. (All of her dresses had pockets, now, as did the trousers she wore nearly as often as skirts).
Mirana exhaled, long and slow, and finally lowered her hand. It curled around the edge of her worktable, fingers flexing. Her eyes fluttered closed.
Alice's definitions of strange were adapting, but this was still well within them.
"Are you certain you're alright?" Alice pressed. "Its bite isn't poisonous?"
"Oh, no," Mirana assured her, giving herself a little shake. Her eyes snapped open. She smiled. "Truly I'm well. Would you pass me the jar just there? With the mouldy bits of wood in it."
Alice passed her the jar, still watching her in concern.
"Boards from sunken ships," Mirana explained as she opened the jar, inhaling the noxious fume that emanated from it as if it testing a fine vintage. Alice coughed politely behind her hand, considering.
There was something here that Alice felt she needed to understand, as a subject of Underland, loyal to her Queen. As Champion.
As friend.
Direct questioning, though, was clearly getting her nowhere, which really wasn't so much of a surprise. In Underland, she was learning, the quickest road from A to B was likely to involve a number of turns, and had only a fair to even chance of being a road at all.
"There is no Church here, is there?" Alice finally asked.
Mirana looked up from her busy hands, eying Alice curiously through a veil of odoriferous steam. "What is a Church?" she asked.
"Never mind," Alice said hastily. "The last thing I want to do put the idea of religion into anyone's head in this place. I merely meant to ask . . if you are Queen, and there is none above you, none to whom you answer, then to whom are your vows made?"
"To myself, of course," Mirana answered pleasantly, dropping what looked suspiciously like quartered eyeballs into her pot.
"But then you could break them whenever you chose!" Alice exclaimed.
Mirana set her tools down on the table and, for the moment, ignored her brew, eyes all on Alice. "So why would I not break them, in defense of my people? Why would I have allowed my sister to reign so long, when all that held me back were words whispered in my own ear?"
"Well, yes!" Alice demanded crossly. "I know those vows must mean a lot to you, but surely -"
"That's not it at all," Mirana interrupted quietly. "Why do you think I so swore?"
"I would guess to be as unlike your sister as you could," Alice answered. "To assure yourself you could never be such an evil tyrant - which you couldn't be, I promise you, not if you tried."
Mirana smiled at that; it was in parts sad, and grateful, and really not very nice at all. "I'm glad you believe so," she said. "It matters, what people believe, especially Champions. Especially Queens. With the items on this table, I could destroy Underland."
Alice blinked.
"Not just Underland," Mirana went on, her voice still calm and level. "I believe I could tear down the walls between all the worlds, and pull the threads of what is and isn't, and pluck the sun and the moon from the sky and keep them in a teacup, Alice, I do believe I could - with the things here on this table, plus just one thing more."
Alice swallowed hard. "One thing more?" she asked.
"One drop of innocent blood," Mirana said.
"Oh," said Alice, and felt that she was saying 'oh' rather too much, but there wasn't a lot else to say to that.
"My sister, I told you once, chose dominion over living things," Mirana went on. "I know the ways of all that doesn't breath, whether it never did, or does no more. But blood, Alice, blood - it's what lies between the two, you see? If a man is very lucky in his dying, his blood just slows, stops - if he isn't so fortunate, it's spilled. A woman knows a man the first time, and she bleeds. Her womb isn't quickened, she bleeds - or it is, and a new creature is born, bathed in blood."
Alice felt herself turning red - blood, she realized uneasily, rushing to her face. "You - you are very forward in speaking of such things," she offered, trying hard to sound somewhere in the middle of amused and shocked, as if they could be two girls whispering of naughty things. As if they were not talking of the destruction of the universe, all blood and sex and death.
Mirana frowned, head tilted. "Should I be backward, when speaking so? Is that how it's done in your world?"
Alice choked on a nervous laugh. "Very much so," she said.
"I see," Mirana nodded; Alice doubted very much that she did. "Do you see, though, the flaw? I've built myself a cage but I've left myself with the key, and the lock, you see, opens from both sides. Do you understand?"
Alice didn't, not at first. One drop - oh! "Oh!" she exclaimed aloud, hand flying to cover the lump in her skirt where the handkerchief was so unceremoniously stuffed - the handkerchief smeared with one drop of Mirana's own blood.
"If I have need, the door is not closed to me, even by my vows," Mirana told Alice softly. "But it could be only the once. Only once."
The thought flew to the tip of Alice's tongue to say that perhaps Mirana should just squash a mosquito, then - or just stab someone in the foot, perhaps. Alice would happily offer her own foot. She didn't say it, though, because she remembered the way Tarrant's eyes looked when he would have left her alone in the wood, when she was still denying that she could slay anything. She could, she now knew - seeing those she loved threatened, she very much could, and did, and would again. Would again without thinking.
What Alice said was, "Your people are fortunate to have you."
"And I am fortunate to have you," Mirana replied, quite solemnly.
Alice nodded her head, acknowledging - promising. But that night she burned the handkerchief.
***