On the third evening of every week, dozens come to Stalactite Keep to hear the storyteller teach about the place beyond Wonderland. Tonight, with only dewdrops of honeycomb light seeping through the cells of the sky, Creed told them of toys: rubber balls painted like the rainbow, tops that spun only as long as wind touched it, dolls dressed exactly like little children.

“Dolls are the most valuable gift a child from the Beyond can receive. The closer in likeness to their owner, the more exquisite the craftsmanship, and the better the gift. They are miniature guardians of their children, imbued with courage. Imagine,” he said, because there was nothing more powerful than imagination in Wonderland, “a storm raging all around; a wocky’s claws tapping on the window; the Jagged Queen’s army marching outside, and in your arms is a guardian that is all the bravest parts of your soul. A Beyonder without a doll struggles to live on.” In the audience a mushroom child sighed and snuggled under their mother’s cap. Creed looked away, but felt the twinge anyway.

Everything Creed knew came from his mother, Joy, who had first fled down the rabbit hole with a baby on her back, escaping a much worse monster than a jade rabbit. All she had with her were a looking-glass, a hair ribbon, her checkered dress, and her woven slippers. It was now customary to wear the pattern of the Beyond to listen to tales from its remaining child; amidst the sea of checkers tonight there were also rabbits with ear ribbons and a card soldier carrying a card doll.

He wasn’t actually sure if every Beyonder had a doll, but most of them did, and his mother’s had been called Grace. She had looked just like Joy: hair in waves like ink, rosebud lips, a blue checkered dress with woven slippers. Grace had been left in the Beyond. But when Creed was a child terrified of the Jagged Queen’s guards knocking on doors, his mother made him a doll with a sword and his smile, and they called it Journey, so it would not be the end.

“Dolls’ names are very important in the Beyond,” Creed went on. His voice flowed out over the courtyard, the way he had refined it over the years, and Wonderlanders tipped their heads to it as though it were wind. He had refined the stories too: “They must have power, but they cannot have more than you do, or they may replace you entirely. If done right, however, there is no greater joy or comfort for a Beyond child than a well-crafted, well-named doll.”

A little rabbit tentatively put its paw up. “What about the Ferris wheel?”

“Excuse me?” said Creed, unused to questions he could not answer.

“The Ferris wheel, the wheel that you can sit on and it takes you up to the sky in circles as it turns.”

“That sounds ridiculous. Wherever did you imagine that?”

The back of the lawn shifted as the rabbit was neatly pummelled by his siblings. Creed straightened. “You came in from the north. Did you hear something on your travels?”

There was an awkward pause. One of the older rabbits twitched its ears. “Just yesterday a girl from Beyond came through the comb. They say she has stories, too.”

A girl from Beyond.

“Do you think she knew Mother Joy?” a mushroom child piped up eagerly.

“Don’t be stupid, only the storyteller knows Mother Joy.”

“But she is a storyteller!” It was the young rabbit, hopping daintily out of his siblings’ reach. “She has a looking-glass. A little round one.”

A muttering went through the audience. Mother Joy’s looking-glass sat in its cradle next to Creed, reflecting his captive audience back to themselves. Wonderlanders used water pools and crystal sheets and spheres of solid honey for their own images; the looking-glass Mother Joy had brought with her when she fell down the rabbit hole had become the symbol of the Beyond—the symbol of the storyteller. It had been unique in Wonderland for fifteen years.

Creed held up his hand and the crowd fell silent. “Where is this girl?”

• • • •

It took several hours by carriage to arrive at Caterpillar Grove, where the newcomer had fallen into the prepared bales of lichen. Falling from the honeycomb sky had purportedly been an unpleasant, bloody business before the Wonderlanders began preparing landing cushions, but that was far before Creed’s time. He and Mother Joy had fallen onto a cotton heap in the rabbit dens.

Caterpillar Grove smelt like sweet smoke. Alighting, Creed scrunched his nose as politely as possible and followed the sound of a different voice.

“—lots and lots of foods. Sugar apples, popped corn tossed in salted eggs and curry leaves, sweet potato chips, chocolate cookies, ooh, cheese battered in breadcrumbs and fried.”

Creed came to a halt. Before him was a crowd of caterpillars. There were also two mushroom folk, one paper crane, a spiderling hanging from an arch, and an elderly cat on the ledge of the well. All of them were listening, rapt, to the girl on a dais at the centre of the square.

She was clearly human, probably no older than Creed’s fifteen years. Yet her hair was an unnatural mushroom red, and she wore a striped blouse. Striped! Like missing half its lines. Creed began to feel uneasy, and despite the crowd it seemed he was hardly the only one.

“But cheese can’t be eaten like that, can it?” came the spiderling’s gossamer voice from overhead. “Cheese is to be eaten with bread, or grapes, or apple, or wine.”

Creed recognised his mother’s wisdom. He had told the Wonderlanders of the food from Beyond as well; many of his mother’s dishes had made their way into the most coveted Wonderland tables. But he had never heard of any of what the girl was describing.

Meanwhile, she just looked perplexed. “You can put cheese in everything.”

That was quite enough, Creed thought, striding forward. The crowd parted, the whispers of his name rising to chaos, and the girl’s eyes widened. “Holy shit.” Her voice was high and crass, punctuated, so unlike his own. It sliced through the babble. “You’re human! You’re the other storyteller. Thank the gods!”

Creed blinked. He had shaped his voice after his mother’s lilting tongue, keeping out the skritches of the rabbits, the paper-cut edges of the card legions, the rounded springy vowels of the mushroom people. His mother’s voice was a heroine’s. It was the sound of the Beyond. And yet here was this girl, claiming to be from the same place, who sounded nothing like his mother at all.

So, he thought, she must be a fake. She had heard of Mother Joy, and thought to use her status as leverage. The honeycomb had many doors. She may have been from Elsewhere, but she was not from Beyond. What about the looking-glass? Well, what about it?

He tamped down the instinctive rage. Better not to cause a scene; Wonderlanders were fickle and disliked conflict. “I am also thankful,” he said carefully. “There’s never been another Beyonder, besides my mother and myself.” Animals often came through the comb, and often found themselves far more distinguished in Wonderland than their old homes. There was a steady stream of such newcomers and well-refined understandings about welcoming them, the same of which could not be said of humans from Beyond.

“Your mother’s here too?”

“She passed some years ago, from her injuries at the Battle of Stalactite Keep.” Creed’s voice stiffened involuntarily. “I am what is left.”

The girl’s momentary pity turned rapidly to horror. “Hang on,” she said. To what? Creed thought. “You can’t leave?”

“The honeycomb’s doors open only one way, and they are in the sky,” he said curtly. “A door to our Beyond has never opened since my mother and I arrived.”

“Until now.”

Imposter, he thought. “Until now.”

She frowned, oblivious to his discernment. “Damn. I just wanted to get away from my ex-boyfriend. We were at the Carnival, I told him to fuck off but he wouldn’t so I left, then I tripped over a pothole and woke up—” she gestured. “Here.”

Creed became acutely aware that the crowd had not dispersed; if possible they were pressing closer, ears extended, pupils widened. “Why don’t you come back to the keep with me,” he suggested. “I can have lunch brought, and we can talk about these circumstances.”

“God, yes, please. I tried to eat the mushrooms and they were like don’t eat the mushrooms! Then I tried to eat berries and they were like those are the spider queen’s eggs! Fuck if I was gonna eat those, obviously, but is there any normal food around here?” She let out an annoyed breath, puffing her cheeks, then folded her hands. “Sorry. Yes. I’d love to go with you.”

Creed had absorbed this extraordinary diatribe in silence. “What is your name?” he asked at last, as he motioned her towards his carriage.

“Aiden,” she said. “You?”

“Creed.”

Her face twitched politely. “I’ve . . . never heard that name before.”

No, he thought, turning hers over in his head. Neither have I.

• • • •

Creed had his favourite meal brought: spiced fried pancakes layered with bluebell egg and salted honeygrass. “It will differ from what you may have had,” he said, watching for her reaction. “We have different ingredients here. My mother always loved it regardless.”

Aiden pulled the plate toward her. “I’ve never had this in my life, actually.”

“Everyone in the Beyond eats this.”

“I’ve heard of it, sure, but nope. Obviously not.”

“You lie.” It came out fiercer than he intended. Aiden looked taken aback.

“Whoa, my guy. What are you talking about?”

“My mother told me about fried pancakes in the Beyond.”

Aiden frowned, looking as though she were trying to decipher him. She seemed about to speak again when something caught her gaze.

Reaching forward, she touched his breast pocket, where his mother’s looking-glass was tucked. When not displayed during story sessions, a silver chain hammered by the miner moles looped through its bronze handle and latched it to his pocket. “Is that a Dumarier?”

A low thrill ran through Creed. He had not shown her the minuscule letters on the inside rim, engraved beside the maker’s circular mark. If she recognised it by name, perhaps she really was from the Beyond. Perhaps everything else had a simple explanation. “You know it?” he asked, handing it to her.

“I’m obsessed with antiques. I have a Dumarier telescope, and their compact too. Wow, look at this engraving. You can see how their old bird patterns evolved into the current motif.”

Troubled once more, Creed closed his hand over the artifact, concealing the swimming reflection of her round face. “Antiques? You no longer have looking-glasses?”

“Well—we call them mirrors, and no, not ones like this. When did you say your mother got to Wonderland?”

“Fifteen years ago.” She had been only a little older than Creed was now. “She received the new looking-glass for her birthday. Why are you asking me this?”

“Dumarier hasn’t made mirrors like these in more than seventy years.” Aiden gnawed on her lip, staring out the window at the sky, where the current sun cell was closing and making way for the next to open with dripping light. “Time must work different here.”

Creed set down his prongs. The clatter echoed against the high ceilings, the glossy table, all the luxury paid for by his stories and built by pieces of the Beyond exchange for the Wonderlanders’ adoration. “You’re saying that the Beyond has changed?”

Aiden cocked her head, glancing back at him. “What, Wonderland hasn’t?”

Creed could not even conceive of Wonderland seventy years ago, but he recalled what it was when he was a child. Crystal gates had blocked every road, guards examining every wagon, and the Stalactite Court made sport of forcing citizens to joust to the death. Wonderland had been a dangerous place when Mother Joy arrived. Creed had grown up guarded by the Grinning Lynx, and still the air was syrup-thick with tension, the honeycomb’s doors like pitted eyes. He thought of Wonderland now, cheery and golden and sprouting new landscapes every day, and he could not recognise the two as the same at all.

“Tell me about where you come from,” he said.

• • • •

Aiden became his guest, and he began spending his days with her. They had sweet salad with toasted nuts and caramelised carrots courtesy of the Lynx, who proclaimed Aiden “an odd sort of type, not really a Mother and not exactly what one would have expected.” Aiden drank six cupfuls of the Jade Rabbit’s honey tea and gaped when they visited one of the wells where sweet rain pooled thick in the ground, ready for collection. He showed her the bubbling glass fields and the castles on either end, the card towers with their furrows glistening with hardened honey.

He enjoyed spending time with her. He had only ever had guardians and listeners, and Aiden was personable and chatty in a way that fit neither. More than that, however, as they explored Wonderland, she told him about her Beyond, and how she had come to tell stories—much like Mother Joy and Creed himself, entirely compelled by incidence.

“I thought it was kind of weird when all the caterpillars were asking me to tell them about my dinner. Like, I’d just fallen out of the sky, and I was looking at giant talking caterpillars that smelt like incense. And they wanted to know about banana fritters? I’d never had to explain fried bananas. But I get it now.”

She had to explain banana fritters to Creed, too, along with telescopes, airships, plastics, and electricity. They exchanged stories. His Wonderland for her Beyond, which was a city called Demeteria, where towers of stone and metal and glass rose into the blue sky, connected by shining bridges. For the mid-autumn festival, they no longer rolled rice into leaves and cooked them in the embers of the fireplace, as Mother Joy had. Aiden went to festival carnivals that lasted the week, where they sold the rice bundles on strings in a dozen different flavours. He had known the sky there was blue, but he learned that twice a year in Demeteria, the sky split and spilled out coloured light in rays that shimmered across the clouds for days, so close one could almost touch them from the tops of the towers.

Creed could have asked questions all day, even as something deep in his stomach roiled with every answer. Aiden asked where in the Beyond he was from, and he found he simply didn’t know. The Beyond, to him, was simply the Beyond. But Aiden drew him maps—bad ones, but maps nonetheless—and he learned the Beyond was vast and getting ever vaster in its range.

All this seemed far more fantastic to Creed than Wonderland, but Aiden was dazzled by the place. “They’re kind of nervy, aren’t they?” she remarked as they strolled down the wooden beach. A fawn had approached them with a glint in its eye and then cantered wildly away into the golden foam before it could speak. The oysters clacked irritably after it.

“They don’t know what to make of you.” That was true enough; he had sent checkered clothing to her, simply to put the Wonderlanders at ease. Though bemused, she had put on checkered trousers willingly. If it hadn’t been for her looking-glass, the Dumarier compact that she kept in her left pocket with a packet of lip paint, they might not have accepted she was from the Beyond at all.

He had noticed the Wonderlanders looking at them with a wariness that had never been present before. It wasn’t only that Aiden was strange. It was as though something had changed, now that there were two of them. As though one storyteller was a rare treasure, like a honeycomb star, but two began to be too many and too real, no longer a thing of stories—at least, when their stories even agreed.

Aiden’s Beyond was not the Beyond his mother had described, in all their bedtime stories in the attic of the Jade Rabbit’s tea room or the back of the Lynx’s manor. Her Beyond had been pastoral, filled with the most wonderful yet simple pleasures. Aiden’s Beyond was vast and loud and seemed to hold endless complicated things. She had been a city champion of something called windsailing, she had grown up not with a doll but with a stuffed rabbit called Snowball, which in turn was something cold and white from the sky that dusted Demeteria like sugar, while Mother Joy’s home had been warm and sunny all year round.

There were echoes of sameness, yet difference enough to make him doubt. For six years he had been the voice of Beyond, but he had never really been there. He knew more of shuttering suns and queens with crystal claws than he did of the place he had been born. But they were willing to lavish him for his stories, and his stories had been his mother’s, so what other choice had he had but to tell them? They felt true to him, and so he always thought they must be true. Yet what now if they weren’t?

Part of him didn’t want to know, the same instinct that prevented him from jumping off cliffs and picking from the wrong side of mushrooms. But there was another part of him that burned with a need that went beyond curiosity. It felt familiar in an excruciatingly painful way.

Without quite knowing why, he took Aiden to the courtyard at the very top of the Keep, where his mother had fought the Jagged Queen.

“That must have been horrible.” Aiden’s eyes roamed over the rocks as though she could see the battle in their weathered faces. It had been. The Grinning Lynx had kept Creed away from the battle, so he had only seen what the card soldiers brought back. Everywhere the Queen’s claws broke skin, his mother’s flesh had hardened and begun sprouting stalagmites. Within a day they had grown through her throat, a gaping mouthful of glittering green teeth, and Creed buried a crystal figure he didn’t recognise.

He had been seven years old. Aiden was the only other person from the Beyond who had stood here since; she was peering at the starburst of green at the centre of the courtyard, where Mother Joy had run the Jagged Queen through and made her molt into crystal. The honey light caught the veins of the stones and turned them alien. A hero had died, and a villain had died, and so the world had been remade with Creed at its centre, alone now, adopted into adoring masses.

Creed returned to his rooms that night and looked at the empty place on the bed. There Journey sat nestled in the sheets, stitched and shaped into courage. He pulled it to his chest, stroked its hair, felt yearning for home like grief.

• • • •

The card-splitting show was Aiden’s first public event. Theatre was popular in the playing lawn where the Jagged Queen had once held jousts; there had been some campaigns to abandon the Keep altogether, but on her dying bed with crystals in her lungs Mother Joy had asked Creed to give it new life instead. So Creed and the Grinning Lynx and the Jade Rabbit had gathered volunteers and set about rejuvenating the Keep. Once they buried the bloodstains and hacked away the crystals, returning the lawn turned to a stage for storytelling, croquet tournaments, opera warblers, and card-splitting shows, where card-jesters spliced themselves together so they were simultaneously five-of-hearts and eight-of-spades. Grass and honey had covered the old furrows. Some of the younger rabbits didn’t know at all that bunny skins had once been strung from the buntings.

After an act where five card jesters formed a melded pyramid, the show came to an intermission. Some of the audience dispersed to fetch cups of honey tea or simply take a walk about the lawn in the warm weather. Aiden was beaming from the spectacle, and Creed thought perhaps it was settling down after all. This was when two dormice approached, bearing a box between them. Creed recognised the dollcarver’s badge on their sashes and sat up.

“Storytellers, the carver sends his regards!” The mice raised the box over their heads so it neatly met Creed and Aiden’s eyes, revealing the doll nestled in the bedding.

Creed’s breath caught. It was exquisite, the finest he had ever seen. It was Aiden cast in white wood, draped in a red checkered dress that matched her painted hair.

Aiden’s brows and mouth both twitched. “Is that . . . me?” Uncertainly, she took the box. In the shadow of her bent head, the figurine did seem to distort, its whorls deepening into grooves. “Wow. That’s . . . kind of creepy.”

The dormice exchanged looks, little eyes flickering under little fuzzy lids. “It’s a doll, storyteller, to replace the one you left.”

Aiden frowned. “I don’t—”

“Thank you,” Creed interrupted. “Send the carver our praise. It’s his best work yet.”

The mice scampered off. Gingerly, Aiden set the box on the seat. “That was weird.”

“It is not,” he protested. “In the Beyond, dolls are the most—” But then he stopped, remembering who he was speaking to. He pulled the box onto his lap, fingers curling unconsciously over the edges. It exerted an unfamiliar weight.

Suddenly one of the mice stopped and turned back, tail twitching in shyness. “Storytellers,” it began, in a skittering sort of voice. “Is it true the Beyond has ships that can fly through the sky? I have a caterpillar friend, you see, and she was telling me such stories.”

Creed opened his mouth—airships, he had asked so very much about them, but before he could speak Aiden laughed. “Yes, it’s true. Airships with balloons as big as ten horses, with metal gears whirring in the hull, swooping through the sky. They’re awesome. On clear days you can see the entire mountain range from the tiniest window, and drink spiced tea as you fly.”

The dormouse’s eyes were saucers. “Storyteller Creed,” it said, bowing and bowing again as though embarrassed, “why is it you never told us about airships?”

“I told you of the birds and kites.”

“Maybe so, but birds and kites are hardly airships.”

Aiden chuckled. “Nope. But if you come tomorrow, I can tell you about the first time I rode one.”

“You’ll be properly telling, then?” The mouse’s nose was twitching now, its entire little body practically shivering.

Aiden sat back in her chair and slanted a smile at Creed, the kind that suggested a friendly joke. “If this guy is willing to share the stage.”

At that moment the dormouse’s colleague exclaimed loudly across the paces. They were still on the clock, and couldn’t stories wait until after? The mouse ran off, sash fluttering anxiously, and Creed watched it depart with the undeniable realisation that he had a decision to make. He had spent so long engrossed in Aiden’s stories that he had not considered her telling them to anyone else. Neither had he considered her listening to his.

After her death, he had taken on his mother’s duty of teaching the Wonderlanders about their world. Where he did not remember or never knew, he drew his own careful extrapolations to fill in the blanks. There were many; his audience always had more questions, wanted more details. He had begun inventing some, and then as his memories ran out or faded, begun inventing quite a lot. Everything had always been as true to his mother’s stories as he could make it. But they were no longer true to what the Beyond was now. What would she think, once she heard what he had made up? What would she do?

“Aiden?”

“Yeah?”

He thought of asking her not to speak. He thought that perhaps the Wonderlanders would not believe her version of the Beyond, so attached they were to his. But then he thought that it was perhaps too late, that if he wanted her to be an imposter, then he should not have had her in his company. By indulging himself, he had also made himself a liar.

“The show is starting again,” he said, which made it final.

• • • •

The only stories Creed had never told were the ones that even the Beyonders knew were only stories. The once that he had tried, the Wonderlanders had thrown up a fuss. “That doesn’t sound like the Beyond!” they had cried. Perhaps he could have explained that it wasn’t exactly the Beyond, but it was still created by the Beyond, and wasn’t that just as good? But he had been nine years old, and it had simply been easier to tell them the stories they wanted to hear.

Nonetheless, there was a bedtime story Mother Joy had heard from her own mother—Creed’s grandmother Faith, that faceless woman in his dreams—about a generous gingerbread boy. In it, a dozen gingerbread children were lying on a baking tray, freshly cut from the dough. One of them had been the last to be made, and thus had all the leftover dough and was larger and would be more appetising than all the rest.

As the children lay there waiting, they began to inspect their shapes. “I have such short arms next to the rest of you,” one said mournfully. “I shall be the last to be picked.”

It so happened that the large gingerbread boy was also very kind. “I can give you a little dough,” it said, knowing it would be the first to be picked from the plate and feeling guilty, “to round out your arms.” And he plucked two balls of dough from himself and gave it to the short-handed child.

“My smile is lopsided,” said another, “now I shall be last to be picked.”

“I can give you a little dough to widen your smile,” said the large gingerbread boy, and did exactly that.

And so it went, as each of the gingerbread children felt they were missing something, and the large gingerbread boy had so much. When they were all perfectly shaped, the baker came to put them in the oven. When she saw them, however, she started. “Why,” she said, picking up the large gingerbread boy. “Whatever happened to you! I can’t sell you in this state, not next to your siblings. There’s hardly enough of you to make a gingerbread man at all!”

For the generous gingerbread boy had plucked off so much of himself that he was now little less than a smudge of dough. “I shall have to throw you away,” said the baker sadly, “for there won’t be a new batch of dough till Wednesday.” And she slid what remained of the gingerbread boy into the can of wastes, and set the remaining perfect eleven into the fire to bake.

• • • •

The next morning was the summer solstice. On this longest day of the year, when the sun was in the centre of the comb and dripping light all over the hills, Creed and Aiden went to the meadow behind the Keep with a picnic basket.

When they were settled on the blankets he brought out a bowl. “I made you something.” Aiden’s eyes widened as he lifted the lid off the soup. She breathed in deeply, eyelids fluttering in the steam.

“It smells amazing,” she said, and it did, like wild roots and cream, sage and butter and toasted nuts and just a drizzle of fresh-fallen honey.

“Try it,” Creed said. He was ashamed to hear himself sound shy.

He could not help but watch as she lifted a spoonful to her lips and swallowed. She looked at him with a shine in her eyes, a dimple in one cheek, in a blue checkered dress, and for a moment, she could have been home. She took a second spoonful and then a third, sighing with contentment.

Then, unexpectedly, she threw her arms around him and buried her face in his shoulder. “I’m so glad I wasn’t alone here.”

Creed’s words were stuck in his throat. He had the urge to stroke her hair. But then her heart was beating against his and he realised, all too suddenly, how alive she was. She pulled back, still beaming.

Then she dropped the spoon. “Oh,” she said. “Oh!” She doubled over, whimpering. “Creed?”

He turned away.

There was a sound like a fading mosquito hum, fibres and skin and bones contracting. It went on and on, until finally, there was only silence. Only then did he look back.

There was a little thing wriggling on the grass, smaller and more perfect and more painful than a doll. He picked Aiden up and dropped her into the jar he had brought, with a honeycomb sieve over the top for air. She struggled against his fingers, and when imprisoned, beat against the glass with her pinhead fists. She might have been sobbing, but her voice was too small to hear.

The sun glinted the right way, and his reflection was caught over hers in the glass, warping both their faces. He had always held up the looking-glass, not looked into it himself. But now that he was, he saw—for Aiden was, he had realised, as good as himself in Wonderland—a version of himself that cast a harsh light on every bit of what he was missing, everything he had tried to hide in this world that was his home and was not his home. She had given him the Beyond. But in doing so, she could have taken away Wonderland.

He didn’t look again as he stowed the jar into his bag. The guilt was hot and thick in his veins, but there could only be one storyteller. There could only be one Beyond.

Creed kicked over the soup, the distilled mushrooms seeping away into the soil, and set a course back to the Keep. His heart felt broken; it felt whole.

• • • •

On the playing lawn of the Stalactite Keep where citizens once lacerated one another with crystal lances, Creed set down his looking-glass and told a story about doors.

The Beyond, he said, was vast and held untold mysteries. Such was its vastness that brave explorers ventured into its unknowns, on ships that sailed through the air. Who knew what they might find? Very few returned to tell their tales, and so tragic were the fates that Mother Joy had never wished to divulge them. But at the end of Beyond, where the land dropped into nothingness, an explorer had found a looking-glass. When she stood before it, another land appeared: one of honey and wonder, and on a green field stretching before her were two children on a picnic blanket.

She stretched her hand through the looking-glass, and the children had turned to see a shimmer in the world with a woman reaching out to them from its centre. The girl had leapt up and begun to sob, for it was her mother, who had searched for her all the days she had been lost.

She had taken her mother’s hand and bid Wonderland farewell; how marvellous a place, and how hospitable its hosts. Would the boy like to return with her? she had asked. But he was a child of Wonderland, and his mother’s blood was in the stones, and he had chosen to stay.

He tilted his head away and watched the reflection of children curling into their mothers, of applause, of the golden crystals they threw lavishly at his feet.