Page 38 of Wondrous

“You’re friends with the Cheshire Cat?” he hissed.

“Friends is going a bit far,” I said. “He’s been stalking me for years and sometimes shows himself long enough to taunt me. That’s not my idea of friendship, though perhaps it’s a cat’s.”

Jack gave me a look that was simultaneously impressed and appalled. “The Cheshire Cat,” he said again, as if I hadn’t understood him the first time.

“Yes. What’s the matter with you?” I said. But he made no reply, only shook his head.

“It seems to me,” the Cat said, with a cool glance at my hand, as if he knew what I’d been thinking before, “that the problem here is not the dragon but the dragon fire.”

“Hmm.” I mulled it over. Examining the dragon, I could just make out, through the flesh of his long neck, a coal of fire glowing at the back of his throat. “Then we need to put out his flame. But how?” I snapped my fingers. “I have it! Water. Lots and lots of water. Perhaps if he drinks enough, the flame will go out.”

“How logical!” the Cat said, which I knew meant the same as I’ve never heard a stupider idea in my life.

I suppressed an urge to pick the Cat up and shake him. The urge was often as strong as my desire to pet his silken fur.

“Flame or not, the mock dragon doesn’t belong here, Alice,” Jack said. He wasn’t looking at the Cat, but it was somehow clear from the stiffness in his posture that he was focusing most of his attention on him.

“He doesn’t belong,” I repeated thoughtfully.

“That makes two of you,” the Cat said. “There you have the answer to the riddle, ‘Why is an Alice in Wonderland like a nasty monster?’ ”

“I’ve never heard that one,” I said, glaring at him. “If you’re just going to be rude, you might as well be mouthless again.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” the Cat said with an especially malevolent grin. His eyes vanished, revealing two gaping eye sockets.

“Ugh!” Jack and I said together.

“I knew a monster in Briarland that could do that,” the mock dragon said thoughtfully.

“All right, all of you be quiet and let me think,” I said.

I began to pace, drumming my fingers against the breeze bottle. “The mock dragon doesn’t belong,” I muttered. “But I didn’t belong here, either, until I started Alice’s Traveling Tea Shop. I suppose in retrospect it’s a pretty silly business.”

I paused, still drumming my fingers. “The mock dragon has a ridiculous hobby—surely collecting breezes is a silly enough reason to remain in Wonderland. But his flame is still destroying the world. He’s like—he’s like an invasive species. He isn’t part of Wonderland, so the longer he remains, the more he destroys it.”

An idea formed in my mind. I turned to the mock dragon and held up the bottle. “Could you tell me more about this?”

“Of course!” the mock dragon enthused. “I found it here, in Wonderland. I was traveling far to the south, where eight rivers empty into a jewel-blue lake and the forest is a patchwork of meadows with flowering berry bushes and the air hums with bees….”

The mock dragon went on and on, describing in poetic terms the various breezes he’d encountered, long enough that Jack began to pick at his fingernails and I felt my eyes glazing over. At first, I thought I might be imagining what I was seeing, but after a few minutes of the mock dragon’s prattling, I was certain.

The kernel of fire in his throat was fading.

“That’s it!” I cried. “It’s just as I thought—the more ridiculous he is, the more he belongs in Wonderland. Fetch the other bottles, will you?”

Jack hastened away, returning with his arms full of glass bottles, all identical, to my eyes, to the first.

“Now,” I said, holding up a bottle at random. “What’s this?”

The mock dragon beamed. “That is ‘twilight petrichor.’ My favorite!”

“You say that a lot,” I noted.

The mock dragon winced. “It’s hard to choose.” He paused, giving me and Jack a nervous, measuring look. “I suppose we’re all friends here, so I can tell you the truth. I—I can’t fly at all.”

“That’s terrible,” I said sympathetically, trying to hide my lack of surprise. His wings looked about as useful as a propeller belted to a tree.

“Yes. So I’ve always been terribly jealous of the wind. How easily it soars over oceans, and mountain ranges, and up into the clouds! Now, I can’t capture the wind, but I can collect small pieces of it—my breezes, you see. Perhaps if I gather enough of them, I won’t be so jealous anymore, because I’ll be able to see what the wind sees—or rather, smell what it smells—whenever I like.”