CHAPTER 1
W ONDERLAND’S FINEST architects had designed it and overseen its fabrication. The most skilled glaziers, carpenters, masons, and gemologists had worked tirelessly to ensure that even its smallest details were built according to plan: Heart Palace, imagined anew on the site of the former palace, which had stood for generations until being cruelly decimated by Redd. “The artisans labored with such great effort in tribute to you, Alyss,” said Bibwit Harte as he escorted the queen and her personal bodyguard, Homburg Molly, through the palace for the first time. The tips of Bibwit’s oversized ears crimped forward. The blue-green veins beneath the translucent skin of his bald head seemed to swell. He was amused by something. “I need no tribute,” Alyss said.
Bibwit’s eyebrows leaped up and his eyes widened in pleasure. So that was it. He had just wanted to hear her say it aloud. Why he never tired of hearing her expressions of selflessness, Alyss couldn’t understand. It was as if he thought they proved the kind of queen she was and always would be. But if he only knew, I am far from selfless. “You might not need a tribute, my dear Alyss,” Bibwit went on, “but the citizenry does, and those responsible for this magnificent palace—” “Hmmph!” Molly said, shrugging open her Millinery backpack, its various blades and corkscrews snapping to the ready.
“—have vowed that it should serve as a monument to White Imagination, a declaration of your ascendancy over the—how shall we say?—more sooty machinations of Black Imagination. The palace is an emblem of hope that you will—”
“Yenh!” Molly grunted, retracting the weapons of her backpack with a shrug. “—return our nation to the peace and contentment of your great-grandmother’s reign, when it is supposed the queendom had never heard of dissension. Here we have the ancestral chamber.” Bibwit guided Alyss and her bodyguard into a room whose vaulted, bejeweled ceiling twinkled purple and gold. In marbled crystal frames around the room hung screens of Alyss’ parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents—the generations of Hearts who had ruled in the service of White Imagination. “Hyah!”
“Molly, please,” Alyss said.
“Sorry.” Molly shrugged a last time, the knives of her backpack folding shut. The Millinery, Wonderland’s elite security force, had been officially re-established, and the girl had taken