Free Playing Hearts by W.R. Gingell Page B

puddle. Sometimes I found myself in a garden where the flowers were as
supercilious as they were beautiful, their charming tones a constant stream of
rude advice on how to do my hair and remarks on my desperate need for mascara.
Sometimes I was back in the Chessboard Woods, though I didn’t find Sir Blanc
there again– I got the impression he was up to Important Business, and perhaps
doing something rebellious. Hatter and Hare, when I visited them, wouldn’t talk
about him; and the one time that I met with him again he was far from his old,
cheerful, slightly silly self. It was stupid, of course: Sir Blanc with his
wits was back to his old self. But I hadn’t known him when he had his
wits—tired, sad, sharp-eyed and close-mouthed—and I was inclined to regret the
change. He wouldn’t talk about the Important Business, and the word ‘Rebellion’
never again crossed his lips, but I knew he was up to something, and Underland
itself was changing around me.

 
     

     
     
    By the time I was fifteen, there was no
doubt about the change. I did more puddle-gazing than travelling, trying to
keep under the radar at school and each current foster home, and what I saw in
the reflections worried me. When I did go to Underland, I mostly visited
Hatter and Hare. Though they didn’t encourage me to do it, they listened when I
told them what I’d seen—the latest outrage or fracas , or the Queen’s
sinister antics in the Mirror Hall—and they didn’t tell me not to poke my nose
where it wasn’t wanted. As far as I understood them, they found my information
useful, but didn’t want to push me to get it. They never said so, but I knew
they were trying to keep me safe as much as they could. By now they didn’t
question and even seemed to expect my constant presence in Underland: it was an
attitude that most Underlanders took to me. I’d thought that my coerced
engagement to Jack would have been enough to see me blackballed all over
Underland, but to my surprise, I found that no matter where I went in
Underland, everyone knew my name. More than that, they knew of me.
People knew of my first journey to Underland. They knew I’d saved Hatter and
Hare from the Jabberwock. It was a topic of dinner-time importance to decide
which teapot I had popped out of in my second journey to Underland, and the
rescue of Sir Blanc’s stolen wits was a story that was told to young
Underlanders everywhere. I knew this because in my trawling of the ripples I
had often discovered myself to be the topic of discussion. More worrying was
the edge I felt in the conversations: it was expectancy and tightly-repressed
excitement. I tried to tell myself it was just the slight madness that everyone
in Underland had, but I didn’t really believe it. It left me a little bit cold,
and wondering what it was they expected me to do.
    I may have done more
puddle-gazing than travelling into Underworld, but I did enough popping in and
out of puddles to hone my skills considerably. I was old enough now not just to
pop in and out of Underland, but to wonder how it was done and what I could do
to make it more seamless. Before long I was slipping into Underland with barely
a pause between leap and landing, and arriving within a metre or so of where I
expected to be. I also began to make notes and draw maps, which I found more difficult
than I expected: Underland’s geography occasionally shifted without notice.
This made mapping slightly difficult, but was the cause of a useful
development: it wasn’t long before I learned not just to move between Australia
and Underland, but between here and there in Underland.
    The first time I tried to
slip between places in Underland was more of an accident than an experiment.
I’d been frustrated several times in my journeyings into Underland to find that
I had appeared in the wrong place because another bit of it had shifted, and
I’d already wondered if it was possible to travel by reflection in Underland. I
was watching