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It was misting the day the Knave came; tiny droplets settled on the shoulders of the new clothes I'd made for my friends, myself, and Chessur. For his part, Chessur had been largely repentant, and Mally had found it fit to invite him to tea. He commented on our new attire, in rich colours I had let them each select (Mallymkun favoured yellow and light blue, while Thackery fancied brown and orange. I was drawn to green, myself). He pretended at being offended that I hadn't made him any thing, so I suggested a scarf or cravat that might be easily removed and tied due to his evapourating abilities. How ever, he purred that he would not like to have me putting any thing round his neck.
Mally asked for the sugar, and as I began to scold her for putting so much of it in her tea, a clinking-clacking was heard and Chessur dissipated his body into smoke, swivelling his fluffly head with pricked ears to peer down the path to the windmill.
"Coming from the north," he mused, grinning. "Crims, I'll wager. This looks like trouble. Good-bye, all, and good luck..." Before we could protest, Chessur vanished, leaving his charming smile to grace us last.
He was correct: a band of perhaps five card soldiers and a man upon a horse were heading towards us. They were all over clacksome armour, gripping in their fists weapons that appeared disconcertingly new. Indeed, their pikes quite stabbed the paper-white sky in darkish, wicked, heart-like shapes. I supposed that I had never seen any thing like it. The man dismounted the horse, and I realised that, proportionally, he was all wrong: he was a spindly giant of a man, easily reaching eight feet high, perhaps nine. A deep crack of a scar raked across his eye, and as his eye-patch he wore the emblem of the Red Queen: a crimson heart. His armour was a barbaric show of leather-- real leather. The carefully fashioned scales of it fairly glistened in the mist. Faintly, I heard Mally gag.
Thackery's first response was, of course, to offer him a cup of tea.
"Would you like some tea, sir? Perhaps a few sugar-cubes?" The tea within the cup he held trembled. The Knave let out a scoff to the soldiers who huddled a few metres away, and they chuckled.
"Thank you," he said snidely, snatching the cup from Thackery's grip. "I've come to deliver some news." He leant his hand upon the table and said nothing else.
"Well, out with it," prodded Mally, nose in the air.
"A bold one, this," observed the Knave, fixing her with a cold gaze. "I regret to inform you that His Majesty the Red King is dead, poor old creature. He had a bit of an accident. Fell down a flight of stairs, as I recall. Or he could have drowned in the moat. Who knows? These things are so difficult to talk about." His tone held not an ounce of grief. There was another pause, during which every one squirmed; excepting, of course, the Knave.
"Who will rule the Red Kingdom, then?" I asked, simply to break the silence.
"The Red Queen, of course. She has generously stepped to the throne. She will be a splendid ruler, I assure you... But since the White Queen is quite unsuitable for rule, the Red Queen will be ruling all of Underland from this point forward." He looked at me with a sudden familiarity, eyes narrowed. "Ah, and you are the Hightopp cad," he spat, voice agreeable. "The Queen has been wanting to meet you. She's been a tad... irascible since that incident, but when isn't she, honestly?" The Knave came casually to my chair and rested his arm against its high back. I tensed. My mind seemed to empty. "You resemble them, I'm sure you've noticed. You all have the same red hair, pale skin, and inability to run quite fast enough..." He gave a lamentlike sigh. "Or you all HAD those things, I suppose. How you've made it this far while keeping your head, I cannot fathom. When that dragon descended, I'd thought you'd all--" A laugh broke him off. I startled to realise it was my own. My heart was pounding, battering my chest, I sensed myself beginning to panic. A smile quirked the Knave's lips. "Shall I tell the Queen that you've gone mad?"
"Tell her anything," I said, grinning a grin that made my cheeks ache. "Anything. Anything." I burst into another peal of giggles, and Thackery laughed too, nervous; but when Mally joined he relaxed, as though there was a joke being made. We laughed like a proper trio of lunatics, and the Knave told us so.
"Mad people are such a bore. It's no fun taking off their heads-- no begging, no grovelling, no tears," he noted, grimacing in disgust. He put down his cup forcefully enough so that the tea sloshed onto the tablecloth. My laughter petered off as I watched it soak through, and I got the queer inkling that I was not myself, but some one else-- some one curiouslike afrighted. A pen marking the page of a ledger upon the table caught my eye, and I took it and toyed with it. At that point I was seized by a sudden and debilitating impulse to write, and write I did; on the tablecloth, then on my hand when the Knave turned me away from the table to face him. "You had better pull yourself together," he said, the edge of an enraged chuckle decorating his words. I continued to write with a dreadful urgency, the source of which I could not place. "Pitiful," the Knave said sharplike, barely audible. In one fluid, abrupt motion, he drew his sword and placed the edge of it against my throat. I stopped writing. "The Queen will be hosting a party to-morrow in order to celebrate her new status," he said, voice harsh and close. "Every subject will be expected to attend." I nearly nodded, but decided that my situation was not ideal for nodding, so I merely looked to my friends, eyes wide. They nodded even though they had not heard what the Knave had said. "Excellent," he replied with a wry smirk. "Good day to you all." He returned to his armoured cards and mounted his horse. "And good luck."
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It was my turn to clear the table-- as I am human, it often is, in the interest of convenience-- and Mally hung about to keep me company.
"This stuff is right spooky-- What you wrote, I mean. Nice actin', by the way," Mally said from the far end of the table.
"Thank you," I lied. "And spooky? What do you mean?"
"Well, it's got no pauses, like, so it looks mad." I balanced a teacup upon my pile of porcelain.
"Could you read it to me?" I asked, striving to keep the apprehension out of my voice as I reached for a plate. "I was rather panicked and wasn't concerned with what I wrote."
"I don't see why not. Here, ready?" I nodded. "'Cluttered skies scuttle quick, into the vast unknown beyond the rain, rumble high humble thunder, tumbled nigh never wondered, for the fast controlled consumed with rage, shattered in tattered sheets torn from the will of salvation, close the crimson door in your mind.'" Before I could react, Mally scampered across the table, climbing over a plate and up onto my hand in her curiousity to know what I had written there. "An' on the back of your hand... 'Quarter and stone her, burn, burn, burn her in an urn, wait until they stop screaming, eyes glowing red, wait until they stop gleaming, walk forwards and cut off their heads.'" She glanced at me, wringing her paws worriedly. "Creepy stuff, Hatter. Were you hoping that Knave would see and think you were off your head? Trying to make him leave, yeah?" Her whiskers twitched, and I smiled a frozen smile.
"Exactly, Mally. You are quite sharp," I said. Her chest puffed with pride. "Now, could you leave so I might bring in the tableclothes?" Mally nodded and hurried away, the lie having satisfied her. I watched her go.
I gathered up the tablecloth quickly, disturbed. The content of the poetry unsettled me, and I would be removing the new adornment from my hand as soon as possible. How ever, a more pressing question kept me wondering: if I was unable to write simple fabric orders comprehensivelike, how had I managed to pen a poem in flawless, fluent Englandish?
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