They do not kill me in Tweedledown.
They inventory me.
Silver at my wrists. Silver at my throat. Silver looped through the chain at my ankles so I cannot run without bleeding for it. They drag me through the ashes past the cracked queenstone, past the well, past a broken doll lying face-down in the soot as if shame can make porcelain pray.
The village still burns behind us.
The villagers are gone.
Bill is gone.
They carry the Mirrorblade ahead of me in iron tongs wrapped with silver wire. None of them will touch it skin to skin. Wise men. The farther it moves from me, the worse the hollow inside me becomes. Not blood loss. Not shock. Something stranger. A vacancy with teeth.
The captain glances back once.
“Still awake?”
I smile through bloody teeth.
“Unfortunately for you.”
He answers by striking the backs of my knees with the butt of his spear.
I go down.
They haul me up again by the chain.
At the edge of the village stands an old apple tree blasted black by fire years ago and never dead enough to admit it. One of the soldiers throws a rope over a branch. Another jerks my bound wrists upward. My shoulders threaten to come apart.
“Leave her there until the wagon comes,” the captain says. “Let the crows look first.”
They raise me until my boots skim the ash.
Pain detonates white behind my eyes.
The captain pauses beneath me with the Mirrorblade held high in its iron cage of tongs, admiring the way it catches firelight.
“The White King will want to see this one burn properly,” he says.
“Tell him to kneel first,” I say.
The back of his gauntlet breaks my lip open.
He walks away laughing.
I hang there while the smoke thickens and the crows gather and the weight of my own body becomes a question I cannot stop answering.
Eventually even pain grows too large to hold.
Darkness takes the rest.
“Alice,” a voice purrs out of nowhere and everywhere. “You’ve gone and died sideways again.”
The dark around me breathes. Stars hang above like the eyes of nails hammered through velvet. Below me, something enormous turns over in its sleep.
The Cheshire Cat reclines across the sky with all the laziness of a wound reopening.
“Where am I?” I ask.
“Between one humiliation and the next. A very fashionable borderland.”
His body flickers—stripe, grin, smoke, grin again. The tail writes idle question marks through the dark.
I try to move. Invisible pressure bites deeper into my wrists.
“I failed.”
“Of course you did. Failure is how stories prove they have bones.”
I taste blood when I answer. Somehow even here. “Helpful.”
“I have never claimed to be kind.”
One star gutters out.
Then another.
I close my eyes against the dark and see the mother in the square. The child with the doll. The line of soldiers. Bill disappearing like a lie deciding it has stayed long enough.
“They took the blade.”
“They took a blade,” the Cat says. “Whether they took yours remains to be seen.”
“I should be dead.”
He yawns, showing a mouth too wide for mercy. “Should is the dullest knife in any language.”
Something twists behind my ribs. Grief. Rage. Loss. They wear each other’s faces so often I no longer bother separating them.
“Tell me what the first Alice did wrong,” I say.
For once he goes still.
The grin narrows.
When he speaks again, the play has left his voice.
“She believed them.”
The stars dim one after another until only his eyes remain.
“Believed what?”
“The story. The crown. The wound. The part they wrote for her because power is lazier when the victim memorizes the script.” His claws knead the dark as though it were flesh. “Once she accepted the shape they made, they did not need chains. She carried the cage herself.”
I feel the words strike somewhere deep. Somewhere already cracked.
“And me?”
The Cat’s grin returns. Smaller now. Sharper.
“You are still arguing with the bars. That is promising.”
The pressure on my wrists becomes fire.
The dream convulses.
His last words reach me as the dark collapses.
“Try not to learn obedience before you learn the house.”
I wake in iron.
The wagon jolts over ruts and drives splinters of pain through my shoulders. My wrists are still bound above me, though lower now, chained to a crossbar instead of a branch. I hang half-sitting in a cage built into the wagon bed. Rust scales the bars. Meat-hooks swing from the ceiling. The patched roof above me is leather, though from what I refuse to guess too closely.
My mouth tastes of smoke and old pennies.
A cane taps the bars beside my face.
“Alive,” says a voice bright with private amusement. “I do adore a stubborn product.”
The man outside the cage wears a burnt top hat and a coat sewn from skins in ten colors that used to belong to one species or another. His grin is cut too deep into his face, as if someone once carved delight into him and forgot to stop. One lens of his spectacles is cracked. Through it his eye gleams fever-bright.
“Careful,” he murmurs. “Twist too hard and the silver bites the tendon. Then you’ll fetch less for grace and more for pity. Pity’s common this season.”
I pull once anyway.
The silver burns.
He shivers in pleasure.
“There she is,” he says. “Still making music.”
I stare until he gives me a name of his own accord.
“The Hatter,” says a voice from the corner. “Most call him mad. Mostly because he insists.”
I turn.
A walrus crouches in the straw, if crouches is the word for the folded misery of a body too large for the cage that holds it. His tusks are chipped. One eye is swollen nearly shut. A chain has rubbed the flesh at his neck raw. Beside him sits a man built out of angles and hunger, his carpenter’s belt hanging empty from narrow hips. His hands rest on his knees, long-fingered and careful even now.
“And you are?” I ask.
The walrus coughs before answering. Wet. Deep. “The Walrus.”
The thin man gives me a short nod. “The Carpenter.”
The Hatter claps once. “Look at that. Civility in transit. Almost enough to make a man weep.”
He dances away toward the front of the wagon, humming under his breath.
I lower myself as far as the chain allows. Every movement tears fresh heat through my shoulders.
The Carpenter studies the silver at my wrists. Not my face. The damage. The method.
“You were hanging from the tree for half the morning,” he says. “Thought you were dead.”
“Disappointed?”
“Relieved,” says the Walrus. “Dead things don’t improve the air in here.”
Despite myself, a laugh escapes me. It hurts immediately.
The Walrus’s mouth pulls sideways. That seems to be his version of a grin.
“That’s better,” he says. “Would’ve hated you if you came in solemn.”
“He hates solemnity,” the Carpenter says.
“It reminds me of courts.”
The wagon lurches. Hooks above us ring against one another like bad bells.
“How long?” I ask.
The Carpenter shrugs. “Long enough to stop measuring by sun. Short enough to remember our names.”
“We had more of those at the start,” the Walrus says. “Names, I mean. And people. Mostly people.”
“Twenty-three,” the Carpenter says.
“You’re very devoted to arithmetic for a starving man.”
“Numbers hold still.” He glances up at me. “Stories don’t.”
That earns him my attention.
Outside, the Hatter begins singing to the horses in a high sweet voice that turns every few notes into a cough.
“How did he take you?” I ask.
The Walrus lets his head fall back against the bar. “Tea.”
“A table in the marsh,” says the Carpenter. “A white cloth. A kettle singing. We were invited by someone wearing manners like a disguise.”
“The biscuits tasted of lavender and lies,” the Walrus says.
“Dreamroot,” the Carpenter says. “Forget-me-knot. A sleep you cannot climb out of quickly enough.”
From the front of the wagon the Hatter calls back, delighted that we remember his methods. “Hospitality is so rarely appreciated.”
The Carpenter goes silent until the humming starts again.
“When we woke,” he says, “we were already priced.”
I think of the captain admiring the blade in tongs. Of the chain at my throat. Of the careful way the soldiers kept me alive.
“Where are we going?”
Neither of them answers at first.
The Walrus coughs into his flipper and looks at the blood there before closing his hand over it.
“The Flesh Bazaar,” he says.
The name settles in the cage like another passenger.
I taste it.
Meat. Perfume. Purchase.
I begin planning how many men I will have to kill to leave it.
The road lengthens.
Time rots.
Sometimes the wagon stops and new prisoners go in while old ones come out. Sometimes raiders test the convoy and die under the White King’s hired steel. Sometimes the Hatter opens the cage only far enough to jab his cane into whichever body seems least profitable that day.
I learn the map of the wagon by bruises.
Left corner: driest straw.
Rear hinge: loose by half a thought, impossible with silver-drunk muscles but worth remembering.
Roof seam above the second hook: patched badly. Rain seeps through there when the sky opens.
The Walrus fades by degrees. First appetite. Then humor. Then the strength to keep his tusks off the floor when the wagon lurches.
The Carpenter scratches marks into the boards with a bent nail he keeps hidden in the hem of his trousers. One line for each stop. Two when someone dies.
I do not ask the total.
The Hatter feeds us gray slop that smells of paste and sugar gone wrong. We eat because pride is a luxury for the unwounded. I suck broth from cloth. The Carpenter swallows without tasting. The Walrus stares at his bowl until I shove it close enough for him to drink.
He does, once.
After that, not even for me.
Fever glosses his eyes.
One night—if it is night; the cage forgets the difference—the wagon stops and the Hatter crouches outside the bars with a lantern under his chin. Light climbs his face from below and makes a sermon out of ugliness.
“Tomorrow,” he says, “we arrive. Such a pity to bring damaged goods.”
His gaze slides to the Walrus.
The Carpenter’s hand closes around the hidden nail in his hem. I see it because I am looking for any object that might become a weapon. The Hatter sees it because he has been looking longer.
His cane taps the bars once.
“No heroics. They never improve the accounting.”
He shoves the trays through.
The Walrus does not move.
I nudge his shoulder with my foot.
Nothing.
The Hatter sighs like a disappointed host.
“Plague makes the flesh bitter,” he says.
“He’s alive,” I snap.
The Walrus’s eye opens halfway at the sound of my voice. It tries to focus. Fails.
The Hatter smiles wider.
“For the moment.”
He slides the cage door open and enters before I can leverage my body between them. The cane comes down fast, all delight burned away into efficiency.
It pierces the Walrus just below the collarbone.
The sound he makes is small.
Smaller than he deserves.
I launch myself forward.
The silver at my wrists sears white-hot. My muscles fold under me. The Hatter kicks me in the stomach and the world leaves through my mouth in one violent breath.
By the time I can see again, the Walrus has gone still.
The Carpenter is making no sound at all.
That frightens me more than crying would.
The Hatter hooks the cane under the dead weight of the body and drags it toward the door. Tusks scrape metal. Blood paints a dark line through the straw.
At the threshold he looks back, delighted again.
“Don’t sulk,” he says. “Absence always fattens the appetite.”
Then he is gone.
The door slams.
The wagon starts moving almost at once, as if grief is a wheel-grease the road has been waiting for.
I lie curled around the pain in my middle and stare at the blood trail until it dries black.
The Carpenter keeps his eyes on the scratch marks in the floor.
“He liked moonlight,” he says eventually.
I say nothing.
“The Walrus,” he clarifies. “He liked moonlight on water. Said it made even a filthy shore look forgiven.”
The wagon pitches.
I close my eyes.
The Cat’s voice moves through my skull like a knife through curtains.
Try not to learn obedience before you learn the house.
I open my eyes again.
I do not let the lesson rot into passivity.
I remember the hinge.
I remember the patched seam.
I remember the Hatter’s throat.
When the wagon finally stops for good, the air changes first.
Not cleaner.
Richer.
Iron. Perfume. Hot grease. Sweet rot.
They haul us out into a yard fenced with polished bone. Buyers’ runners move between pens with ledgers in hand. Somewhere beyond the canvas walls a crowd laughs in waves.
They fit an iron collar around my throat and chain me to the Carpenter with three others too emptied to speak. The silver at my wrists stays. They do not trust exhaustion to do all the work.
Good.
Neither do I.
Inside the preparation tent, the attendants have no mouths. Smooth skin where speech should live. Their hands are quick and practiced. They strip us down to skin. Boots. Coat. Belt. Everything. Shame tries to rise. I kill it before it gets its feet under it.
One of them whistles at the scar along my ribs.
I memorize his height for later.
Buckets of water follow. Cold enough to bruise. Perfumed enough to sting. It runs over my skin in greasy ribbons, carrying away ash, blood, village, road. Not memory. Never that.
The Carpenter turns his face to the canvas wall and lets them work. I do not offer him comfort. There is no shape of comfort that survives here without turning sentimental, and sentiment is bait.
The Hatter sweeps into the tent midway through the washing, cane spinning between his fingers.
“Lovely,” he says. “Misery with cheekbones. Ruin with posture. They’ll eat you alive.”
An attendant presses a small metal plate inked with a number against my collarbone. When he lifts it away, black digits remain stamped there.
Temporary.
Still enough to make my jaw lock.
The Hatter notices and beams.
“Do remember,” he says softly, leaning close enough for me to smell sugar and grave-dirt on his breath, “a number is simply a name that’s given up.”
I look straight into the cracked lens over his eye.
“Then keep yours close.”
For one beat the grin slips.
Only one.
Then he laughs and orders us marched.
He leads us through the outer rings of the market like a parade master in hell.
The road curls between tents stitched from hides, stalls hung with strings of teeth, cages full of things that used to be people and may still be on technicalities. Children in lacquered beetle masks throw pebbles and shriek when one strikes flesh. Old women lean on canes of polished femur and appraise us like cuts of winter meat.
A girl skipping barefoot in the mud sings in a voice sweet enough to curdle milk.
“Off with the silk, off with the skin,
Find the red and let me in.”
No one hushes her.
They laugh instead.
The chain jerks when one prisoner ahead of me collapses. The Hatter does not pause. He only drags harder until the body remembers movement by being scraped across stone.
The Carpenter keeps his eyes down.
I keep mine up.
If this place means to make a spectacle of me, it will have to do it while I am looking back.
The gates open inward on a groan that feels older than commerce and twice as holy.
The Flesh Bazaar waits.
The smell hits first—a wound dressed in lilies. Then the sound: applause, bargaining, laughter sharpened into appetite. Tiered seats rise around a black-and-white stage veined red by what has been dragged over it. Silk and leather rustle in the galleries. Jewelry winks at throats and wrists and ears, though some pieces still remember being bone.
I see a small boy taken to a side dais.
He is crying so hard he cannot breathe cleanly.
Two attendants pin him down while a third presses a brand to his back.
The hiss of it reaches me through the crowd.
I lock my teeth together so hard my jaw aches.
The Hatter throws his arms wide.
“Ladies, lords, creditors, carrion saints—attend!” he sings. “A rare article for a vulgar age. Wild in temper. Untamed in spirit. She killed a knight in open square and would have killed six more if silver had not remembered its manners. Alice, they call her. Mirrorborn, some whisper. Catastrophe, I prefer.”
The crowd stirs.
Heads lean together.
Interest moves in them like hunger catching scent.
Bidding starts before he finishes turning me in a circle by the chain.
Not coin.
Never coin.
A lacquered box full of teeth from a noble with pearl-pinned eyelids.
A cage of singing hearts from a woman whose gown is stitched with tongues.
Seven oath-children from a man in a ram mask.
A mirrored chalice of preserved screams.
The Hatter glows under it. His whole body shines with greed.
“Look at her stance,” he croons. “Look at the way she refuses the floor. The way the eyes still promise murder. That’s quality. That’s breeding. That’s grief taught to stand upright.”
He yanks my chain.
I do not stumble.
That excites them more.
I see girls lined along the far wall waiting their turn. One with glass eyes. One with both hands wrapped in lace to hide missing fingers. One too young to have learned the stillness she is already wearing.
I file away every face I can carry.
Then the crowd parts.
Violet moves through it like a bruise deciding to walk.
The Duchess.
Her fur writhes faintly at the hem as if the animal it came from has opinions about the arrangement. Powder turns her face to porcelain. Her teeth are broad and white and flat. She looks at me the way old money looks at land it intends to tame.
“Her,” she says.
The word lands with absolute confidence. No bidding war. No performance. The kind of command that arrives already obeyed.
The Hatter bows so low I briefly hope his spine snaps.
“Most excellent choice, Your Grace. She’ll bruise beautifully against your wallpaper.”
The Duchess ignores him. She steps close enough to smell the road on me and slides one cool nail under my chin.
I do not lower my eyes.
Something approving flickers there.
Not kindness.
Recognition.
“Leave her unmarked,” she says. “My son dislikes damage done without his permission.”
My whole body stills.
The Hatter’s grin widens. “As you wish.”
Papers change hands. Seals break. Chains are transferred. The Hatter lets go of me with theatrical reluctance, like a priest surrendering a relic.
The Duchess turns away already certain I will follow because the collar and the guards and the silk-rotted world have all been arranged to make certainty easy.
She is wrong in the way powerful people so often are: not in the immediate fact, but in the future it implies.
They have numbered me.
Paraded me.
Priced me.
They have mistaken endurance for surrender.
I let them.
For now.