Queen of Hearts Complete Collection: Queen of Hearts; Blood of Wonderland; War of the Cards. Colleen Oakes
her bastard sister out proudly like his prized steed. The day Cheshire had shown her the tunnel and she accidentally wove her way beyond the palace gates.
The door inched open with a loud creak. They slipped through it, making sure to leave the door unlocked behind them. Dinah led Wardley down into the damp stone tunnels that ran parallel to the Great Hall and then, with a sudden plunge, down underneath it. The tunnels were dank and cold, much more unpleasant than the last time Dinah had been down there. The buildup of winter snow around Wonderland had turned them into long, wet slabs of frozen mud and cracked rock. Dinah watched her breath freeze and fall to the ground in front of them with a loud tinkle.
Wardley grabbed a torch from the wall and lit it with his flint. Pink flame danced over his face. “We ought to hurry. You could fall asleep down here and never wake up. The cold is just cold enough …” He trailed off, his lips turning a deep shade of blue.
They ran. The tunnel became deeper and colder the farther they spiraled into the frosty earth. Several times Dinah had to backtrack, trying to remember all the twists and turns she had taken six months ago. It was nearly impossible; she had been so deeply wounded that day, running blindly through the weaving catacombs. Did she turn here, at that strange cat etching on the wall? Or was it up there, when the tunnel split into four hallways and then returned to itself? She gave a shiver through her cloak.
“We should have grabbed more layers,” Wardley whispered. They had been down in the tunnels for almost an hour by Dinah’s pocket watch, lifted easily off Harris the day before. “Are we almost there? Maybe we should head back.”
It seemed darker than before, and a sudden rush of panic enveloped Dinah. “I’m not sure. It’s so dark down here.”
“And cold,” added Wardley. “Don’t forget cold.”
Dinah bit her lip as she took in her surroundings. “It’s so much darker because we are deeper underground—the same reason it’s getting colder. Hold the torch up to the ceiling.”
She looked up and trailed her fingers across the dirt. Wardley held the torch above her. The light flickered and jumped against shiny black roots running the length of the tunnel. Every once in a while they gave a tiny pulse, as if alive, and they seemed to move ever closer.
Dinah grinned in the darkness. “Roots! That happened the first time. I remember thinking they looked like black bones. We’re almost there!”
“I pray you are right,” muttered Wardley, his teeth chattering. “Otherwise, we are turning back and I will spend the rest of my day warming my toes by a fire while you feed me tarts.”
The stone walls started to narrow; Dinah and Wardley turned sideways as they squeezed through, their faces damp with sweat. They turned one corner and then another, a maze of barely visible walls and dirt. There was a downward slope, and then suddenly they were there. The dirt circle. The collision of the three passageways.
Wardley let out a long breath and waved the torch at the drawings. “Incredible. This is old, Dinah, very old. Ancient.”
Dinah ran her fingers over the wavy triangle. “When I was down here before, I thought this was a symbol for the Yurkei Mountains. But it is so clearly the Black Towers.”
Wardley wrapped his hand around her fingers with a friendly squeeze. “You wanted to escape what your father had just done. It makes sense that you wanted it to be the Yurkei Mountains—it was anywhere but where he was.”
Dinah’s black eyes glittered in the darkness. “Do you have the chains?”
Wardley gave his bag a shake. Dinah heard metal clang against metal. “Let’s go, Princess.”
“You can’t call me that anymore,” replied Dinah as she crouched on her hands and knees and began crawling through the tunnel. “Once we get inside, you can call me any name other than that one. Be as cruel as possible.” She paused to catch her breath. “Pray that this goes to the Black Towers.”
Wardley grunted behind her. “I’m praying that it doesn’t.”
The tunnel sloped upward steeply, the air growing oddly stifling, almost humid. The warm dirt felt good underneath her freezing palms as they began their ascent.
Dinah’s knees ached when she rose again. Crawling up a steep slope had been much harder than she’d anticipated. Up ahead, light appeared from a narrow hole at the end of the tunnel. Dinah poked her head out and gave a sigh of relief. The smallest flicker of sunlight leaked in from a single rusted window that seemed to be miles above her. They had come to some sort of stone cylinder, and the tunnel went no farther. She looked down. The almost-vertical shaft ended abruptly with a steep drop into a large pool of ice. Wardley pushed up from behind.
“Stop, stop, we could fall!” whispered Dinah frantically. She glanced at her surroundings and found what she was looking for. Jagged stairs led up and away from the drop: mangled teeth that spiraled up the wall of the concave ring.
Wardley wiped his face. “It’s warmer in here.”
Dinah looked at the ice. “Not warm enough.”
“We must be in a hollowed-out grain silo. There are a number of them around the Towers.”
Wardley went first, climbing over Dinah and pulling himself up against the wall. “Stay close to the wall. Inch by inch. I see a door up there.” He gestured his chin upward. Dinah swallowed. A fall would not kill them, but it would surely break them.
“Don’t look down,” he instructed Dinah. She did, her eyes following a crooked crack in the ice. Buried up to its waist, frozen forever, was a skeleton. Its bony fingers dug into the ice, the claw marks inches deep. The scream on its face was etched there for eternity, the jawbone hanging grotesquely from its hinge.
Dinah gave a shudder. “Was that …?”
Wardley pressed his body against the wall. “Done on purpose? Yes. I told you the Black Towers was a brutal place. Club Cards find many ways of extracting information, mostly by torture.”
“So that man …”
“So that man was probably put down there in the water before the snow arrived and forced to watch as it froze around him. I would guess he’s chained to the bottom, at the ankles.”
Dinah stared, letting the revulsion wash over her. She shivered. “How is it both humid and cold in here?”
“It’s the Black Towers.”
Dinah fixed her eyes on the skeleton. Wardley, ever so carefully, reached his fingers under Dinah’s chin and turned her head. “Look away.”
The thrill of finding their way through the tunnels diminished with each pensive step toward the door, ever mindful of the frozen ground. Dinah heard the cry of enormous Wonderland bats, sometimes known to attack horses. Don’t look up, she told herself, pressing tighter to the wall. Don’t look up and don’t look down, just stay steady. They climbed silently until they reached a dilapidated wooden door, eaten away by mold and bat droppings.
Wardley turned to Dinah, the flame casting a pink hue on her dark features. “This is it. We can turn back from here, but after we go through this door, we will have to finish what we have started.”
Dinah looked at the door with a steely resolve, her stomach churning with fear. Regret was beginning to worm its way into her brain. But then she saw the note, unrolled from its tiny vial, and remembered the feeling that overcame her when she read it—that whatever conspiracy swirling through Wonderland Palace was coming for her eventually, whether she accepted it or not. She looked at Wardley, a brown lock