The Spades jerked their heads up with curiosity.
“I am the Princess of Wonderland, and you will put it in my hand.”
The gold-eyed Spade gave a deep hoot. “Aye, indeed you are, although the other princess has the look of one. If it were up to me, pretty Lady Vittiore would be the one getting the crown.”
Rising anger burned her spine. With a swift movement, Dinah reached up and struck the Spade, hard across his face. One of her pearl rings left a thin trail of blood across his left cheek. He lunged at her, only to catch himself, his fist inches from her face. Dinah reveled in his shock.
“The Lady Vittiore is not a princess, she is only a duchess. Now, you will put the toy in my hand.”
The Spade gave her an amused smile. “No problem, Princess.” He reached out.
“No. My other hand.”
He looked down with a grimace at her other arm, tucked firmly within her cloak. She made no move to pull it out for him. The other Spades watched in shock as he tried in vain to get the seahorse into her hand without groping her, an action surely punishable by death. Dinah watched the farce silently, as if her arm were detached from her body and she was merely a spectator to this man fumbling around her cloak. Finally, the ashamed Spade pressed the toy into her palm, and Dinah closed her fist around it. The Spade walked back to the barrel he had been sitting on and leaned over it, peering at Dinah. A keen interest now replaced what had been mockery on his face moments earlier.
“Eh, so yeh have some of your father’s fiery blood in you then, do you?”
Dinah scowled at him. “Speak to me again and I’ll have you sent to the Black Towers in a coffin. What is your name?”
The man paled. “I was just joking, Yer Highness. Please don’t report me to the king.”
“I said, What is your name?”
His dirty hands wrung together. “Gorrann. Sir Gorrann.”
“Well, Sir Gorrann, I will not report you to the king this day. But if you ever insult me again, I will have your head. No need to involve the king.”
With a hard look she brushed past them, her black cloak trailing behind her. As soon as the red-glass palace doors closed behind her, Dinah plunged into an empty corridor off the main hall. Her lips parted in a soft cry, but she steeled herself from the shame. Victorious, she clutched the wooden seahorse in one sweaty hand and wiped the tears from her face with the other as she made her way to her brother’s chambers.
Charles’s quarters were located in the western tower of the Royal Apartments, situated neatly above the castle’s kitchens. Her father had given in building materials what he never gave Charles in life. The king showed no other sign of love, affection, or even duty to his son. Charles’s room, as a result, was one of the strangest places in the entire palace. Huge white columns inlaid with red hearts twisted up to the ceiling where they met an expansive fresco featuring all the creatures of Wonderland. Hornhooves, gryphons, birds of all types, great whales, white-striped bears, and four-winged dragons danced across the ceiling in rich paints.
It would have been lovely—a gorgeous work of art—if crudely drawn hats had not been scribbled across the creatures in black charcoal. The animals now wore ugly slashes of feathers, top hats, and huge fedoras in wavy, messy lines that ran from one to another without stopping. The hats were richly detailed, the lines between them angry slashes—the art of madness.
Sad, Dinah thought as she gazed upward, her hood falling back onto her neck, that madness and genius were always melded together in this room.
The room itself was a testament to Charles’s obsession. Racks upon racks of hats rose up from the floor, twisting and circling between rickety, half-built staircases that led to nothing but air. Doors had been attached to the hat racks, swinging open and shut with the cold air blowing in from a large open window at the top of the main staircase. This staircase was Charles’s favorite, covered with hundreds of bolts and swatches of fabric. Piles of melting snow were accumulating on the window ledge in little drifts. Dinah gave a sigh and climbed up one of the rickety staircases, shutting the window firmly and securing the clasp. She heard a skittering of tiny feet below.
“Charles. You cannot leave the window open when it’s snowing outside. It’s bitterly cold in here, and the snow will get all over your new hats. We’ve talked about this.” She dusted off a sturdy gray fedora with orange canary feathers embroidered into a sun and stars. “You have to be careful with them.”
At her feet, a matted head of dirty yellow hair rose up in a space between the wide stair treads. “Pink snow on pink hats makes the walrus dance. He dances on the sea, hee-hee!”
Charles jumped out from under the staircase. Dinah gasped as he fell to the floor, somersaulting on his rough landing and leaping up into a kicking dance. “Snow on the hat, snow on the hat, black like your Cheshire Cat!”
He gave a high-pitched giggle, and Dinah laughed with him. Charles was younger by only two years, but in his madness he was practically ageless. He was a genius, a savant, a helpless infant and naughty child, all mixed into one tiny boy. He had been born mad—a squealing infant who never slept, a silent toddler who would bang his head against the wall, a curious boy who once ate glass and loved nothing more than to look at the stars. Davianna, Dinah’s mother, had loved her crazed son fiercely and was best at dealing with him. When she curled her arms around him, clutching him to her chest as though she could squeeze the madness out, he relaxed and was content, even as he babbled nonsensically. With his mother’s intense love and focus, Charles seemed to be improving, step by tiny step. When she died, he went completely maniacal and never returned.
He was regularly found wandering around the castle, a dead bird in one hand and a tart in the other. It was as likely that he had taken a bite out of one as he had the other. He once walked off the Great Hall balcony, breaking both legs on the marble steps below. After that, his walk consisted of short steps and a trotting leap—the grotesque gait of the permanently insane.
Then he stopped eating for a while. Not even Dinah, his beloved sister, could get him to eat. Barely more than a child herself at ten years old, she pleaded with him as she tried to shove a tart, soup, quail, anything into his open mouth. He grew weaker, retreating completely into his own wondrous world, and the entire kingdom dressed in black, awaiting the death of the little Prince of Hearts.
On what surely could have been one of his final nights, Dinah brought in a trunk full of their deceased mother’s clothing. She tucked it all around him, her dresses, slips, and socks, so that he might be comforted on his journey to another place. Charles’s fingers had found one of her mother’s bejeweled hats, the one she had worn for All Tea’s Day the year before—a gorgeous plum hat with a tall plume, plump and glittering in his small hand. An absurd smile played across his translucent skin as he turned the hat over and over in his hands, a look of fascination on his face. He then turned to Dinah and simply asked for a biscuit.
“My Dinah,” he had whispered with a smile, his small hand tracing her chin.
