Ever After High: A Wonderlandiful World Part 6

"They're reasonable even in the best of times! No, we need Wonder and riddles and sideways explanations. That's the kind of sense that will make sense of nonsense."

"I have a helpful suggestion," Maddie said. "But I'm afraid to say it because it might be reasonable by accident."

"Try saying it while standing on your head," Kitty suggested.

"Hat-tastic idea, Kitty!" Maddie bent over, balancing the rim of her teacup hat on the floor, and then flung her legs up into the air. "That's better. Anyway, we could go talk to Giles Grimm. The headmaster's brother? He lives in secret rooms beneath the library and only ever speaks in Riddlish."

Lizzie often visited the library, paging through books that reminded her of home-not because the books spoke or flew or read themselves backward, but because they had tales and pictures of Wonderland. It was nice to be reminded that she did have a home, a real home, a setting.

She followed Maddie and Kitty into the library, through the stacks of books, out of the school entirely, past the sports fields, around a tree three times, back into the library, through a wall, down a narrow, dark, and properly eerie corridor, and into the Vault of Lost Tales.

"There wasn't a more direct route?" Lizzie asked.

"Probably," Maddie said, and gestured to the pile of rags sitting at a desk. "This is Giles. Hi, Giles!"

The pile of rags stood, and Lizzie realized it was a man wearing extremely raggedy clothes, so she thought she could be excused for mistaking him for refuse.

"h.e.l.lo, er..." Lizzie said, searching her mind for an appropriate way to address the man, "Step-Headmaster Grimm."

Once upon a time, Giles Grimm had been co-headmaster, but Lizzie can also be forgiven for not knowing that.

"Party finds awkward twists in an unfound s.p.a.ce made mist, la.s.s," Giles said, smiling beneath his straggly gray beard.

"It does, indeed," Lizzie said, and then whispered to Maddie, "I'm not sure I caught all that. Usually I'm quite conversant in Riddlish. Perhaps this wretched reasonability confounds my brain."

"Mine, too," Maddie said. "I'm not sure if it's the me-side or the he-side that has changed."

Giles nodded. "Wonders never cease. Just they find peace and pieces in creases. The bent land releases but queasy pieces, my Ms. Three nieces."

"Wonderland, you mean?" said Maddie. "Something about Wonderland?"

"When stare ye long into the face of bear become not bear but banders.n.a.t.c.h fair."

"He knows about the banders.n.a.t.c.hes!" Lizzie said.

"Nay, fair is fare-though unfair-for the nightmare once cairned." Giles Grimm smiled kindly. "Don't forget the b.u.t.ter!"

"The b.u.t.ter?" Lizzie asked.

Giles nodded. "For the banders.n.a.t.c.h."

"Is this what it's like for the Ever Afterlings when they talk to us?" Lizzie asked. "Very frustrating."

"Maybe it would help if he stood on his head," Maddie whispered.

"Try this," Lizzie said. "Mr. Step-Headmaster Grimm, tell us, in the most unclear, confusing way you can imagine, whether or not things are changing."

Giles Grimm furrowed his brow as if thinking hard to come up with an incredibly difficult riddle. He cleared his throat, held up a finger, and said, "Yes."

"That was a silly question," Kitty whispered in Lizzie's ear. "We already know things are changing." Kitty disappeared and reappeared to whisper in her other ear. "What we need to know is why or how. And is there a cake or a pie in it for us? Lots of questions with more point and less silly were available."

Lizzie shrugged. "I didn't hear you speaking up with alternate questions, Catworm."

Maddie laughed. "It's catchy, right?"

Kitty did not appear to think it was catchy.

"Oh, Bookworm," Maddie said, presumably addressing the Narrator, though the Narrator had expressly expressed that Narrators must never be directly addressed.

Without warning, Giles Grimm vanished, and where he'd been standing a pile of books clattered to the floor.

"Oh, no, he disappeared!" Lizzie said. "Just when I had a better question about whether or not to behead Kitty."

Kitty sniffed the books. "He didn't disappear. Disappearing things have a smell like the echo of a lemon. I think those books might actually be him."

"Oooh," Lizzie breathed out. Things changing into other things suddenly and without warning was a refreshing change of pace and slightly Wonderlandian. That giddy, popcorn-belly feeling returned.

Wonderland is coming to me....

A small nag caught in her thoughts. In Wonderland, Giles might have shrunk, or enlarged, or folded up on himself, but when things changed back home, they were still what they were. Not a person into a pile of books. That was magic, certainly, but was it the right kind? The wonderlandiful kind?

"Should I put the Grimmy books in my hat and take him with us?" Maddie asked.

"I wouldn't," Kitty said. "What if he turns back?"

"While stuck inside my hat?" Maddie said. "Good point."

"I didn't mean to make a good point," Kitty whined. "Making good points is not what I do!"

"Leave the book-man be," said Lizzie. "We'll tell Headmaster Grimm about him when he gets back."

"If he gets back," Maddie said, and then coughed. "Sorry. Frog in my throat. Ribbit."

Maddie stuck out her tongue, revealing a small blue frog perched upon it. The frog leaped off and hopped away. Maddie's eyes went wide.

Lizzie smiled. Wonderland found me.

CEDAR WOOD WAS FEELING LIKE A HOLLOWED-out log. Though she'd fled Raven's room the moment the session ended, her unhappy encounter with Poppy seemed to chase after her. Quick steps down the corridor rattled her knee and elbow joints with a jangle of metal and wood, but she didn't slow down till she reached the safety of her dorm room.

Cedar opened her paint box. Black paint smeared on her index finger and seemed to tingle, as if beckoning her to lose herself in her art. Cedar knew the sensation was as false as everything else she felt. If I were you, Faybelle had said, I'd do anything to finally be real. Perhaps Cedar was not a person at all but just a piece of wood who imagined she was a person.

She squeezed her creaky eyelids shut, trying to close off thoughts about wood and people and what she was or wasn't. Bits of sadness-imagined or not-were already worming into her heartwood. Maybe she could paint them away.

Today she set aside the traditional canvas and instead placed a wide wooden plank on her easel. She started to paint a scene of a garden early in the morning, when the colors were still hushed and full of grays, more shadow than not, shapes not yet fully revealed.

The paint couldn't completely hide the wood plank, its rough grain, lines, swirls, and knotholes as much a part of the picture as what she painted over them. It took some time before Cedar realized she was painting her own experience, bringing a kind of life to the dead wood but never changing what it was, never hiding it completely.

And that's what she loved about art. It spoke the unspeakable, revealed truth before the mind had a chance to think it.

It's not a real garden, Cedar thought, standing back to look at her painting, but perhaps still worthwhile?

From her pouch of art tools, she took out a knife to sharpen a quill she liked to use for making thin lines. The knife slipped and cut into her finger. That wasn't unusual. Cedar wasn't particularly careful.

But then a thin line of red welled up along the cut. At first, she thought it was paint, but it grew. A red bead, fat as a honeybee, bled out and dropped from her finger, splashing onto the purple carpet. Cedar felt-truly felt-a sensation she had never experienced before: a slicing, hot, sharp fierceness, a hugeness as big as life trapped in the tip of her finger. She whispered the word: "Pain."

Cedar Wood's finger was bleeding.

She shouted toward Cerise Hood's side of their dorm room, "Look! Look, my finger is bleeding!"

But Cerise wasn't there. Cedar examined her fingertip again. It felt softer than normal. She patted herself, her hands b.u.mping against the bra.s.s pegs at her joints. She traced the knot of wood that marked her left thigh like an oval birthmark. Still there. And yet, when she lifted her finger to her mouth to suck on it, she tasted blood-salty and metallic and warm. Not just imagined the taste. Really tasted it. Like the difference between looking at a photo of a beach and actually putting bare feet in the sand.

Cedar giggled and performed a short dance that was a burst of joy, a wobble of uncertainty, and a flinch of fear all at the same time. Was something marvelous happening? Or something scary?

The bubble and rush of emotions made it impossible to stay still. Cedar ran out the door and down the hall.

"Help? I think?" Cedar called out. "Or maybe hooray? I'm not sure, but one of the two!"

No one answered.

She knocked on Maddie's door, finding it open but no one inside. No one except Maddie's pet dormouse, Earl Grey, who was standing on Maddie's tea table squeaking and strutting about. As Cedar drew closer, she could see he was wearing a dashing black silk shirt and trousers and holding up a tiny skull in one hand.

"Squeak squeak, squ-squeak squeak squeak?" he squeaked.

It appeared that Earl Grey was practicing a dramatic scene from Hamlet.

"Earl Grey?" Cedar said.

Earl Grey startled, dropped the skull, and leaned nonchalantly against a teacup as if he'd been just hanging out and not rehearsing his one-mouse show at all.

"Do you know where Maddie is?" Cedar asked.

Earl Grey shrugged, put back on his top hat, and leaped onto Cedar's shoulder, eager to go with her to track Maddie down.

Across the hall, Gus and Helga's door was ajar. Cedar couldn't see them inside, but two heaps of breadcrumbs sat in the middle of their rug.

"h.e.l.lo?" said Cedar.

Another new sensation crawled over her-a ticklish, cold, worrying sort of thing, like thousands of icy fingernails skipping down her limbs. Chills. Cedar had imagined chills before, but her imagination had failed to create the combination of pleasure and discomfort, the shudder and exhale.

Beneath her, the floor rolled as if the castle had started to gallop and then changed its mind. Cedar shook her head. Perhaps she was sick. Could she have contracted some rare wood disease that was causing her magic-enlarged imagination to overreact?

Out the window, Cedar spotted several small shapes dropping from the roof. Above the Crumbs' room was Ashlynn's balcony, and Cedar knew songbirds often congregated there. Had the songbirds been hurt and fallen? Cedar raced to the window but spotted no injured songbirds in the courtyard below, only a flock of dodoes, those odd-looking flightless birds, lurching around as if bewildered.

"I know how you feel," Cedar said.

"Squeak," said Earl Grey.

Cedar ran to Raven and Apple's room. Raven had magical abilities, and whatever was happening just had to be magic.

As she raced up the stairs, again the castle seemed to burp, the stairs swaying under her feet. The warm stab in her fingertip traveled down her arm and into her chest, where it flared to a pain that was as sweet as it was agonizing. The pain left behind a strange and wondrous thumping as if something were moving inside her chest. Moving, like the waves of the ocean. The beating of a drum. The buzzing of a dragonfly's wings. The rolling meters of a song. The everything of the world caught and moving inside her chest.

Cedar ran harder, as if she could somehow catch up to whatever wondrousness was happening to her and seize it, hold on to it, and make it hers forever.

And Cedar ran even harder, as though she could somehow flee the frightening changes altering her body.

As she leaped onto the next floor, she heard several small, heavy things fall off her and bounce down the stairs. She didn't turn to see what she'd left behind, her body in agony to be running so hard and yet burning with exquisite joy. She burst through Raven's door.

"Raven!" she shouted. "Something's-"

But she didn't have to tell Raven that strangeness had erupted at Ever After High.

Apple was standing before a mirror, a gasp of horror escaping her throat. Raven's hands were covering her mouth.

Apple turned as Cedar entered. The light from the window fell on Apple's face, revealing a deep red coloring her round cheeks and moving outward to paint her whole face. Sticking out of the top of her head was a finger-sized piece of wood. Even as Cedar stared, a lime-green leaf sprouted from the stick and unfurled itself to face the sunlight. It was a stem.

Raven pointed at Cedar in shock and opened her mouth as if to speak, but no sound came out.

Cedar hugged her arms around her chest. She felt warmth, softness, aliveness. The bra.s.s pegs at her elbows and wrists were gone. She touched her knees-gone there, too. Those were what had dropped away on the stairs.

She dared to turn to a mirror. Her hair looked as it always had-warm brown, wavy, and heavy as frayed rope. Her dress was the same lavender and coral one she'd put on that morning. But if not for those details, she might have a.s.sumed she was looking at a stranger. Her dark brown limbs and face were smooth, no wood grain, no chipped spots where she'd b.u.mped into something (like banders.n.a.t.c.h teeth). She blinked, and her eyes were wet. Two tears freed themselves from her lashes and rolled down her cheeks, leaving behind a cold, ticklish path.

She inhaled sharply for the first time, and she felt her chest-her lungs?-fill up, pressing against that constant winged, wave-ish, drumlike beating of a... a... a heart.

Her heart.

Her real heart beating in her chest.

She pressed her hands against the beating, crying faster with wonder and alarm and joy, so filled with the music of her aliveness she feared she might explode.

"Raven, what's happening?" Cedar whispered.

But the only response was a single, frightened squawk.

LIZZIE, KITTY, AND MADDIE WALKED OUT of the library, sounds wafting over their heads like invisible birds. Suss-suss. Hiss-hoo. Waaaahhh. Lizzie wondered if she was hearing the books whisper to each other. Or if the air itself had come alive.

The cushioned chairs in the hall just outside the library door were huddled together as though in conversation. When the girls neared, they scattered, their short wooden forelegs making clumping noises like little hooves.

Lizzie felt so good she longed for a ripping game of croquet. She pretended her scepter was a flamingo mallet, lined it up, and swung at an imaginary hedgehog.

"Things are obviously changing," Lizzie said.

"See?" Kitty said. "It was a pointless question."

The rug beneath Lizzie's feet rippled. Remembering her mother's advice to avoid rugs, Lizzie stepped off, just as a ta.s.seled end flicked to where her feet had been.

Outside the window, a stone gargoyle carved into the school's facade flapped its wings. And then the window Lizzie was looking through blinked. Startled, she took a step back.

"Well, I never!" said Lizzie. It seemed bad-mannered to blink when someone was actively looking through you.