THE EVIL QUEEN THROWS OPEN THE IRON DOOR to the dungeon. The Lost Library was sadly lacking a proper dungeon, so she’d formed one from broken pieces of stone, using willpower and magic. Everything she has done, every spelltacular deed, every takeover and power-grab, she accomplished with willpower and magic. It was a relief to return to full magical power on the island of the Lost Library, but she never lost her willpower.

“And I will have more power,” she says aloud, smiling at her own cleverness.

The single occupant of the dungeon, Madeline Hatter, waves. The Evil Queen’s shoulders twitch, and she straightens her cloak. She is uncomfortable with friendly greetings in general.

“You will put that flapping hand away,” the Evil Queen proclaims, “and you will tell me the truth!”

“Yes! I will!” Madeline Hatter proclaims right back, stuffing her hand into her pocket.

“You will tell me what they are,” the queen says, “where they are, and what their plans are!”

“Yes!” Maddie repeats. “I will!”

“Then speak, Hatling!”

“I shall speak!”

“Yes!”

“About what they are! Where they are! And what their plans are!”

“Get on with it!”

“They! Are! Hedgehogs! They are in Lizzie’s garden! And they plan to eat! To eat… tomatoes!”

“Hedgehogs? No, you addle-brained tea-swiller! The Narrators!”

“Oooooh. The Narrators! I was confused. When you said I would tell you what they are, I didn’t know you meant that you would tell me what they are. It might have been all the shouting. I mean, I’m used to shouting. Lizzie shouts a lot, too, and… why were we shouting, again?”

The queen conjures a spray bottle from thin air and squirts a single burst of water in Maddie’s face.

“Focus, little wretch! Focus!”

“Plegh,” Maddie spits, shaking droplets of water off her face. “Water? What kind of a person puts plain water in a spray bottle? Let me at least put a tea bag in there.”

Back in the height of her glory, the Evil Queen had any number of pet cats in her magnificent castle, as any decent sorceress should. She’d found a spray of harmless water to be a highly effective method of training her kitties not to jump up on her potion table. If it worked on cats, why not Wonderlandians?

“I’ll do it again,” the Evil Queen says, dangling the bottle menacingly. “You know I will. Tell me what you know.”

“Okay, okay,” says Maddie. “What I know. I will start with dormice. A single one is called a dormouse—”

“About the Narrators, you fool!” the Evil Queen shouts, using the spray bottle again.

Water squirts in Maddie’s face, interrupting what was bound to be an excellent exposition on dormice.

“Why, thank you, Brooke,” Maddie says, dabbing water off her nose. “Dormice are a passion of mine.”

“Aha!” the Evil Queen bellows. “You speak to them even now!”

“No, no, no,” Maddie says. “I was talking to Brooke, not the hedgehogs. There’s no way those little guys could hear me from here. I mean, they have good ears, but we all have our limits, you know?”

The queen leans so close their ears almost touch, and she tilts her head to listen.

“When you do that with your head,” Maddie whispers into the silence, “you look like a bird.”

The queen sprays Maddie in the face again.

“You know,” Maddie says, “it looks like you’re having fun with that. Can I try spraying you now?”

“Who is Brooke, Madeline?” the Evil Queen asks. “You thanked her earlier.”

“Oh, she’s this super-nice Narrator girl,” Maddie says, not realizing that giving the Evil Queen any information at all about Brooke or any other Narrator might be extremely dangerous.

“Oops,” Maddie says. “Forget that Narrator stuff I said. Brooke is… a river. That babbles. Like me.”

The Evil Queen smiles a slow smile. “Names are important, and knowing Brooke just may make a spell possible.”

“I’ve never had a spellpossible before,” Maddie says. “Is it breakfast food or luncheon food or snack—?”

“They will fall,” the Evil Queen says, “these Narrators who play dice with our lives, who watch and wheedle, gloating from their hidden towers. I will take the power of the thing they fear, and I will crush them beneath its heel!”

Maddie holds up a finger. “Are you talking to me? Because I didn’t catch much of that. Or… oh! Are you auditioning for a play? That was a pretty good monologue. Now, are you going to sing sixteen bars of a show tune?”

“I am talking to them,” the Evil Queen says. “The Narrators. They should know their end is coming. They should fear.”

“Fear the… heel, right? I got that. You think the Narrators are afraid of boots or something.”

“They are afraid of Shadow High, little Wonderling,” the Evil Queen says. “And I am about to become its new headmistress.”

The queen chuckles to herself as she exits the dungeon. She picks her way through the crumbling library, stepping over fallen stones, sweeping her velvet cape past wobbly bookcases. One wall has fallen away completely, and she has a view into the vast white haze of the Margins. There are books everywhere, scattered on the floor, open on stone tables, some still resting on ancient shelves. She stands behind a halved pillar of stone, almost as if it were a lectern and she were about to give a speech to the fog beyond. She pulls from her robe the Monster Mapalogue and lays it on the pillar. The map has changed again.

“The Lost Library is here. And look there, Shadow High is just where those ancient texts said it would be. Nothing remains hidden from the Evil Queen! Nothing!”

The Evil Queen starts to laugh. She laughs louder and louder, her voice crackling. She’s so amused she squirts herself in the face with the spray bottle.

She sputters on water. “Ugh, that really is annoying,” she says, throwing down the bottle.

Then the Evil Queen gets back to laughing. She raises her hands dramatically, gold fire crackling all around them.

“Narrators,” she says, “if you’re going to run away, now would be a good time.”⁶¹

61 Oh stet, I do not like the sound of this!