Despite all this pain, her victory grew ever closer. Her Spades were at the gates now, cutting through dozens of Cards. Hundreds of her Yurkei were swarming and scaling the iron walls, as the few remaining archers sent arrows whizzing past their heads and shoulders.
“No, no, no.” Wardley muttered as Dinah looked to see Xavier Juflee and his Heart Cards slaughter three Yurkei warriors with alarming ease. A trail of bodies lay behind him. Juflee sensed that he was being watched and looked up, his eyes meeting theirs across the battlefield. Xavier curled his finger at Wardley, beckoning him to fight. Wardley shook his head. He would not fight his old mentor and friend.
A second trumpet blasted over the battlefield, its sound echoing across the valley. Every fighter turned to hear the words echoing down from the walls.
“Retreat! Retreat to inside the gates! The King of Hearts has ordered a retreat!”
There was a momentary pause as a quiet and refreshing wind blew around them. Then suddenly, all the Cards around Dinah ran for the iron gates, rushing through any Spades in their path, caring less about killing them and more about their own safety. The Cards pulled back, disappearing behind the protective iron swirls, but all for naught. It was done. She suspected the Cards had no idea that so many of her Yurkei fighters had made it over the wall. From behind the gates, she heard the intense rise of combat, followed by the quiet of surrender.
A few minutes later, the creak of ancient iron echoed out over the battlefield as the tall gates that protected the palace were thrown wide. With triumphant bellows, her remaining Yurkei and Spades flooded inside. Shouts of alarm rose up from inside the walls as hundreds of her men swarmed through the south gates. The push to open the gates to Mundoo’s huge army on the north side had begun.
The area outside Wonderland Palace now held only small remnants of her army and the thousands of bodies that littered the ground. Xavier Juflee had disappeared. A few hundred Cards, somehow left behind in the retreat, placed their weapons on the ground and bowed before a bunch of furious Spades.
“Show them mercy!” Dinah screamed at them. “Or it will be your heads I take.”
The Spades nodded obediently. Wardley turned Corning, and they galloped away from the palace, the bloodied white steed climbing swiftly up the hills. It was time for Dinah to regroup with the council and execute the rest of the plan.
She looked back over her shoulder at the palace. From there she could see it all: the fields of wildflowers now stained red, the pale horses of the Yurkei strewn lifelessly around the palace, the vast stretch of death on the north side, where Mundoo’s army and the Cards continued to war against each other. Dinah looked for Morte, but she could not see him anywhere. He was gone—there was nothing she could do. As Corning galloped away from the massacre, Dinah turned her head to the turrets above the castle, where she prayed an archer named Derwin Fergal was keeping his coat turned the right way.
Seven
Dinah remembered the first time she had met Derwin Fergal: barely taller than his bow, even at twelve he had been rugged and stern, smiling curtly at Dinah before splitting an arrow to impress her. As a friend of Wardley’s, Derwin would cross paths with Dinah occasionally at equestrian events where Wardley was competing, at croquet games, or at an endless parade of glittering balls that they both seemed to despise. Even then, Dinah could see that Derwin’s focus was elsewhere, for even in the presence of a moody princess, his mind was solely on his arrows.
Upon turning sixteen, Derwin had entered the Heart Cards as a squire and worked his way up through the archer ranks until he served under Royan Eugedde, the lead archer. Derwin and Wardley grew apart as the Heart Cards pulled them in different directions, but they still remained friendly acquaintances. According to Wardley, there wasn’t much that Derwin didn’t already know about archery, so Eugedde stepped in as a father figure when Derwin’s own father disappeared. Like so many others, he was swallowed into the folds of the Black Towers without so much as a warning. Derwin’s talent grew as his anger about his father’s imprisonment expanded. Rumor had it that he could kill a running deer from a thousand yards even through thick foliage, right through the neck, a clean shot. He sometimes boasted himself a better archer than most Yurkei, a wild claim to make even in Wonderland Palace.
Right before Dinah’s world had collapsed in a sea of betrayal, Derwin had been named lead archer of the Heart Cards. His reputation was legendary, and so when Wardley suggested his name at one of Dinah’s first war council meetings, Dinah and Cheshire had both sat forward with piqued interest. A Fergal? On their side?
The idea that a Fergal would fight for them was at first ludicrous, and yet now Dinah found herself putting her life—and the lives of those who meant the most to her—in the hands of that same boy who had tried to impress her so long ago.
“Do you think he can do it?” she whispered to Wardley.
He reached down and squeezed her hand. “If anyone can, it’s him.”
Corning continued to gallop up the hill outside the palace, with Dinah and Wardley sharing his back. Flecks of foamy blood poured out of his mouth. Wardley was whispering desperate words to his horse, almost unaware of Dinah’s existence behind him. She tightened her arms around his waist, taking comfort in his touch, in the nearness of him. His hair smelled like it always had, of hay and lemons, but now he was covered with an unfamiliar stench—smoke and dried blood, the pungent odors making her eyes water. She closed them and, for just a second, let herself pretend that he was hers and they were riding together back to the palace, the kingdom, and nights in tangled sheets belonging to them alone.
Corning’s steps slowed now as he made his way up that same hill where Dinah had watched the beginning of the battle unfold. Though it had been only a few hours, it seemed like a lifetime had passed. Dinah wasn’t the same person she had once been, the same girl who had galloped down the hill full of battle rage, yearning for her fury to be satisfied. It wasn’t. In fact, if she listened to her heart for just a moment, it seemed to be crying for more.
Dinah pushed the anger down, letting out a long breath as she surveyed the kingdom below.
“Are yeh ready?” Sir Gorrann was stepping up beside Corning, reaching for her hand. “Hurry, we don’t have a lot of time.”
Dinah kept her eyes on the turrets as she stepped backward, nearing the hastily built tent on the hill. Its purple fabric and Yurkei flags snapped in the wind as she ducked into the entrance. Inside, Cheshire was waiting for her, out of breath and bloodstained.
“Quickly! Get undressed,” he snapped.
With Sir Gorrann’s help, they stripped Dinah of her armor. First off was the breastplate, once white, now stained red, the broken heart spattered with mud. Cheshire worked his way down her legs, pulling off the black leather leg guards and the leather that was wrapped around her waist.
“What happened to your cape?”
Dinah shook her head. “Don’t ask.”