Frank Beddor - Seeing Redd (Looking Glass Wars, Book 2)

THE LOOKING GLASS WARS

S EEING R EDD

BY

F RANK B EDDOR

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The Looking Glass Wars is a registered trademark of Automatic Pictures Inc.
Copyright 2007 by Frank Beddor
All rights reserved

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Logo Design: Christina Craemer
Part 2 & 3 art: Stephen Martiniere
Front, Back cover and part 1 art: Vance Kovacs
Map Design: Cold Open & Nate Barlow

Beddor, Frank.
Seeing Redd / by Frank Beddor.
p. cm.? (The Looking Glass Wars)
Summary: When Alyss Heart returns to her rightful place on the throne of Wonderland, she is put to the test as enemies, both inside and outside the borders of her queendom, push their own agendas, while she strives to unify them all.
ISBN: 1-4295-5556-4
[1. Kings, queens, rulers, etc.?Fiction. 2. War?Fiction. 3. Imagination?Fiction. 4. Characters in literature?Fiction. 5. Fantasy.] I. Title.
PZ7.B3817982See 2007
[Fic]?dc
222007006335

For Christina and Luc

CONTENTS

P ROLOGUE

She should have been disoriented, her image sneering back at her from the countless dust-filmed looking glasses that surrounded her, but she was too consumed with the quest that had brought her to this maze whose time had passed, its purpose unfulfilled .

Ive come! she yelled, the words ricocheting off the cloudy looking glasses without cease or loss of volume. The noise pained Redds ears, but what did she care? She would endure anything. She had made it this far. She would not leave until she had found what shed come for .

In every direction, mirrored corridors branched off into the dusky reaches of the maze. She tried to locate the scepter in her imaginations eye, but her powers were apparently useless. She would have to find it the old-fashioned way, by systematically walking every corridor, seeking the scepter as might a blind, rudderless fool .

Not much of a maze, are you? she muttered, because she discovered that she could pass from one corridor to another merely by walking through the looking glass walls. Hers was a phantom maze, the ghostly residue of what it had once been. A sudden, hissing sound at her back .

She spun, ready for anything. The dust of a looking glass had lifted and formed into the figure of a female: the teenage girl she used to be, before she had allowed corruption to gnarl and ravage her features, before her transformative passage through the Heart Crystal: bratty, intractable and vindictive Rose Heart .

How dare you show your face, when Im smarter and more imaginative than you, the dust-figure whispered, then faded into nothing .

Redd continued on, and half-formed images flitted past the periphery of her vision, apparitions pointing and ogling in disbelief that the mazes intended had arrived so long after shed been expected. Whenever she turned to look directly at them, they shifted and remained at the edge of her sight .

Only one image let itself be seen, and it gave Redd pause: that of her slinking into her mothers bedroom, so soon after being removed from succession to the throne, to place the fatal mushroom on Queen Theodoras tongue. She felt no remorseher mother had deserved an untimely endbut that night had been the last time shed employed a lethal mushroom in her nasty doings .

The scepter lay on the floor up ahead as if it were nothing, a useless stick someone had dropped in her hurry to leave. No doubt it had once been vibrant with color, a gleaming, crystalline staff with elaborate, gem-encrusted filigree awaiting the first touch of its intendeds hands. But now, the heart at its top was shriveled and gray. What gems still remained had turned black. The filigree was rusted and, in parts, had completely flaked off. But had it been otherwise, had she found a scepter as glorious and pulsating as Alyss Hearts, she would have thought it a trick, a setup. The scepter at her feet, so elaborate in its decaythis was beauty. Yet here it lay, abandoned, discarded, just as she had been by her family .

And they had the impudence to blame me! she yelled .

Again, her words reverberated until they became noise .

Its your own fault, Rose, Theodora had said. I cannot allow you to become queen. You refuse to listen to anyones counsel but your own, and you insist on being so undisciplined, disregarding the most basic principles of White Imagination .

Perhaps I have discipline in other things! she had spat .

Thats what Im afraid of. Youve already scared a number of important Wonderlanders .

Redd had made it her lifes work to scare so-called important Wonderlanders. She had scared a great many of them during her all-too-brief time on the throne. But whatever fears she had instilled, whatever terrors inflicted, were nothing compared to what she would accomplish now that she had navigated her own Looking Glass Maze .

Her fingers closed around the scepter, giving her access to the full potential of her imaginative powers. She was the strongest Heart alive. She would recapture the Heart Crystal, and no one, not even prissy Alyss Heart, would be able to wrench it away from her. Ever .

PART ONE

C HAPTER

W ONDERLANDS 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 Bibwits 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.

Bibwits 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 couldnt 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 .