Are you asking yourself some questions right now? One of those questions could be, "Valadilenne, did you release this chapter on November 1 to purposely get everyone to wish you a happy 24th birthday?" And I could be like, "I sure did," because, you know—true story.

Thanks very much for your reviews—I do appreciate them all.

Carroll and Disney and Brianna and Rain; awesome!

But Terry and Julie cross over the river
Where they fell safe and sound
And they don't need no friends
As long as they gaze on Waterloo Sunset
They are in paradise
"Waterloo Sunset," The Kinks

It was far too hot.

For some time the sun had come to rest in the skies over the Wonderland, and temperatures she had expected near tea were expressing themselves with precision at dawn, or even before. As if standing before the intense key of an oven in July, Alice was beginning to wonder if it were summer year round in this strange new world.

It could have been a sponge for her brow, the singular fringe springing from where she had pinned it, a few tendrils sticking to her in such a reminiscence of childhood sickness. Alice frowned and flung from her with no small disgust the oriental paper fan which she had appropriated from a drawer in the Hare's cottage to bring weak and insufficient relief in the nauseating humidity. England had never been this hot. She had never been this hot, even recollecting moments among the delicate flora in her conservatory. Greenhouses are always hot, but she dared not go near the dark wood door now. Ensconced beneath the consecrated layers of artistic dress which still held tenfold pockets of heat too near, Alice was frustrated and wanted to throw something else as well, but there was nothing at hand to relieve her from the twin suns of overreaching emotions. One for the heat, and another for—well.

Perhaps, dear reader, you had nodded, confident that détente between the Hatter and Alice had finally begun in his charmingly bestowed largesse. Indeed, some measures of pleasant regard between them had begun to show thin smoke, but whether these were signs of some summer bloom or necessity in a foreign land remained to be seen. At any rate, relations had unfortunately broken down somewhere between a chucked pot of strawberry jam and a flagrantly crooked game of Checkers. They two were no enemies, mind you, but the Hare felt that any brokerage of democracy would have to wait until after Alice overcame her firm insistence on sitting far enough away from the Hatter at the table that red preservatives would fail to assail her in a white dress. The man was, for his part, apparently keen to make some effort toward reconstituting Player 2 and insisted on invoking her spirit of competition with derivative sports. It was starting to work.

"Fungible," said the Hatter. The exasperated sigh which emitted from Alice's general location was that of a feral cat who is tired of being poked with pitchforks by local children, but is far too boiled down in the humors to really get the pep to do something about it, and so the lashing swipe of her paw winds up being more of a halfhearted gesture of dismissal. "Refusing to play is forfeiture, and I've taken the last three straight," he continued. His voice was beginning to drone, and that irritated her well enough, but he was winning their game and she was too hot to let it go.

"Crepuscular," she said after a long pause, far too long. They swayed for a moment in the dead air.

"Kakistocracy," he said too soon, and pulled his foot up from the ground to rest it among the two of them for the seventh time. This, and the smugness in his voice, was enough, and Alice extracted herself from the hammock, with a more animated motion than she had intended, to stand in a scrap of overhead shade and glare at the man in shirtsleeves, who was smiling benignly at all the netting space he now commanded alone. A slow roll of actual... perspiration--she enunciated the thought at a shuddering distance in her mind--was threatening to slide down from where her hair was tied in a loose bun. She balled her hands clammily into fists and made an attempt at ignoring it.

"I'm going inside," she said, and stood right where she was.

"You could take your shoes off," replied the man in what he apparently felt was a courteous gesture.

"You haven't," she flipped back. He knocked his large shoes together and sighed contently. Slate blue socks were bunched about his ankle, and a pale length of skin exposed itself to the whole world and everybody, but especially her. Where she stood. Sliding together at the joints uneasily and with a sickened discomfort.

"I'm not as warm as you are."

"I'm also not a thoughtless fool," she said crossly, and thought about folding her arms over her chest in a final gesture, but Alice thought perhaps she did not have the wherewithal to risk more heat. He stretched out his arms, bizarrely still gloved at their ends, shrugged, and began to hum quietly to himself.

While she was awfully fond of curiosities in their strange and unique forms, Alice was, by all opinionated accounts of substance, a decent and reasonable girl, an upstanding girl, one who remembered her decorum and held a keenly skeptical eye up to the telescope's glass that looked out over the lands and experiences that would lay before her over the years.

An eye which plainly beheld the struggle between obstinate chaos and austere reason implicit in all things and knew that both were in a mutual half-nelson and that therefore chose to uphold the proper bearings of genteel ladyhood while remaining at least aware of the opposing counsel, so to speak. Alice did not become unreasonably frantic in the face of such rampaging oddities that she had been dragged through as of late; this was insupportable given her years of utmost training in the ars ladying. But she was aware: if Alice's reason were physically manifested in the form of a large field of fresh white paint, the very smallest of black chaotic dots existed on the outer fringes of her consciousness. Like the Asian philosophers who see the world harmonized between ameboid halves of a circle, Alice was a little bit this and a lot of that.

As such, the duality of mind stemming from a proclivity toward both the absurd and the perfectly rational was quietly housed in a careful balance of inward moderation between the two, with a courteous and preferential nod toward all things appropriate. She was neither too ridiculous and silly as to awaken each morning with the notion that the dew drops on a local spider's net were "wedding veils of the elves," nor was she so dull and unthinking that she could not appreciate the morning sunlight on the plaster molded ceiling as she opened her eyes and asked herself that eternal question, "What now?"

This was, however, neither the thought on Alice's lips nor the consideration of her own nicely-heeled comportment as she turned and nearly stomped out of the Hare's garden. The colorful turn of phrase she did choose to fling over her shoulder caused the Hatter to see her off with peals of laughter and a triumphant shout of the word tmesis (which did not count toward the Hatter's lifetime score) as the gate clank-banged shut.

She was casting stones into the river. Or rather, Alice was attempting to skip stones, but she was distracted and each one sank with a deeper note of shplunk than the last. Finally she half-fell, half-sunk to the mossy bank and looked about her, then gazed at her own face down in the moving waters, calling out to her with relief immediate. She tried arranging the skirts so they lay as thin as possible, but the rushes on the other bank kept bobbing against each other with a rustling sound, causing Alice to look up every moment or two. It was beyond mannerly, beyond what proper ladies did. But the heat was inescapable—even among the trees it felt thick and hazy.

At least she could take down her stockings. Without straying her eyes from a roaming survey of the forest surrounding, Alice popped out the buttons in her boots and began to peel the white hoses down, stuffing them back in the ankletops and sitting with her legs tucked up beneath her as if she had not moved. All this in a matter of moments; it would take her far longer to slip them back on again, but she forced herself to be unconcerned.

The need for stream won out over propriety, and she stretched her legs past the hem of her dress and waved at herself with her toes, pink and white and in a row, then dangled them skimming, cutting patterns into the blessed waters beneath. And then slid her heels, and then her ankles, and then Alice sort of found herself standing balancing on a smooth chilly boulder, busily winding her skirts into puffy culottes round her knees, just above the water line, if only for a moment or two. It couldn't hurt to cool down in such weather, even if it was unseemly.

Alice splashed the now-cold-feeling water lightly into a mist and repinned her stray fringe locks. She really didn't look so wilted as she had thought, but then the waters were rather dark among the trees and it was difficult to tell. True, her lower half was sufficiently cooled at last, but the bounty of Peneus did not strike her to the core. Traipsing back to the bank nearby, Alice was nearly upon her hook-and-eyes but at the last moment reached for a strewnful of twigs, turned, and began throwing them each end over end as hard as she could. It didn't relieve the heat, but it did make her feel better about not being able to skip stones. There were two twigs left, and she bid them goodbye at the same time, then waited to see which passed post, which she designated as an oak tree, first. Had she won or had she lost the race?

"Let him finish, Alice," her older sister admonished her. They were younger, much younger, and there was talk of a picnic. Alice longed for a picnic, she did not long for lengthy boat rides and even lengthier discourses of theological seminarians. Going out for the day was for enjoying the out-of-doors, which was by its own right meant to enjoy without so much talking, she thought.

"No, it's alright," quietly said the new tall young man who was seated at the bow, half in shade from the trees overhead. There was a slight curl to the edges of his hair, and his eyes were blue or grey, she could not tell. He spoke strangely half the time, and the other half with ease he knew not; it was when the young man thought someone was listening that his hesitation came through. "Do you want to play a game instead?"

"What sort of game?" What games could be played in a boat on the river Alice cared not; she would much rather hear a nice story but did not say so.

"Um," said the young man, who was looking up into the trees to think. The other Reverend, the older one, said from where he sat at oar,

"Doublet," as if they had been discussing it previously.

"What's Doublet?" asked one of her sisters. They were port and starboard, and Alice was seated in the middle. She wanted to dip her hand into the water where it made a juicy slicing sound, but there she was, Alice, right in the middle.

"You take a word and turn it into another word. But you have to do it one letter at a time."

"Take CAT. Remove the A and put in an O. COT. Remove the C and add a D. Now it's DOT. Take the T and--"

"Look, there's the bridge!" The older Reverend guided the skiff to shore, and her sisters ran toward the churchyard, towing the hamper with the red checked blanket inside, but Alice clattered onto the wooden planked bridge, enjoying the sound of her heels against it. She climbed onto the lower rails to lean out and peer down into the rushing waters. The young man came over to her, and Alice lifted her head to see that he had two lengths of twig both about the size of her arm. He handed one to her, and held his out over the stream.

"On the count of three, we'll drop them both at the same time," he said slowly, once again conscious of the way his words tripped down the stairs and tumbled out of his mouth. He counted, and Alice heard a double splish below. "Here," he said, and then they went to the other side of the bridge. The two sticks appeared, one a length ahead of the other.

"Yours came out first," he told her. "You won."

"Won what?" He thought a moment.

"What do you have in your pocket?" She fished about in the small square in her apron and found the tiny silver thimble she had been using in the morning. She put it gently into his cupped palm, and then he turned his hand over and looked very grave indeed as he spoke.

"I beg your acceptance of this very elegant thimble, young Alice who has won the race," he said in his careful slow voice as he returned it with a small smile.

There was a quiet cough behind her.

Now, there is what Alice could have done, and what Alice did do, in response to this cough and the presence of someone else.

Spinning round in pure reaction, her brain was caught between two central lessons she had once been taught. The first was that a lady never shows her bare limb in public, for that is a cause of great humiliation and detriment to her feminine modesty and status. The other was that a lady's garments must not skirt the ground or besmirch the lady's appearance with mud or other spoiling elements of the natural world. This included several inches of water, which would ruin any fine fabric. She was stuck, uncertain which trumped which, and shrieked, trying to decide what was more important, working to cover the flesh but working to save the skirts but the bare legs and then the fabric--

But Alice with her skirts above her knees did not scream. She turned to find her perpetual companion there in the water, his trousers rolled up, watching her with a strange introspective expression. Alice took a few sloshy steps toward the Hatter and stood there, a bit surprised at how utterly unembarrassed she felt. The darker waters did help, though. He stared her right into the eyes in the slight distance and did not even give a flicker of a glance to the rest of her; there was no dress pulled past the point of modesty, there was no embarrassment. She had never realized how tall he was, almost as tall as the younger Reverend, but not the same at all. He was so strange, with all that white hair and a nose from a comedy, one that fit so perfectly it was unreal. Alice moved forward again, and reached out and with her fingers pushed on him, but he did not move, simply looked at her in quiet amusement.

"What are you doing?" She shrugged in response.

"Daydreaming, I suppose."

"I called you several times. You must have been very far away indeed."

"I was remembering something from a long time ago." He pulled a creamy yellow slip of paper from his waistcoat pocket and held it out to her.

"This came for you a bit ago." Alice took it but did not open it, simply looked at it. "Telegram from the Royal Offices."

"How do you know; did you read it?" she said this bluntly and he shook his head no.

"Always on that yellow paper, but never any cheerful news," he said, and went back to stand against the opposite side of a tree.

Duchess urges private conference bring Hatter stop.

R.O.

She pulled on her stockings with a blank face, her toes numb from the chilled water.

"Feeling any better?" she heard him ask, and she stopped in the midst of a pinched finger between one of the pearl boot buttons. It would have been easier with the hook, but there was time for proper dress later.

"A bit," she said, "Is it usually this hot for so long?" He came out from around the tree, shoes restored just as she finished the last one.

"Do sunny days and Fridays not always perk you up?" She stared at him, and he shook his head suddenly to dismiss the thought. "Why, do I dare ask, do you ask?" He was furrowing his eyebrows at her now.

"Well, it just seems like summer should end someday, you know," said Alice, pulling a leaf attached to a low branch down before her eyes to inspect it. "Nothing's even got the slightest hint of red or yellow, when does Fall--" The Hatter suddenly grabbed the branch from her and let it loose and it reared back like a long whip, and there was a shower of pale yellow and orange flapping gently into the waters below.

"Now you've done it," he said, but he was not cross. The green in the leaves above had blended itself to a very slight yellow, and the kiss of red and orange along the fingertips of the leaves at the top had perhaps been there all along if she had cared to look past the shimmering waves of heat. "That's all it takes, one thin drop of thought in the stream and on it travels until it catches everyone around here and they'll all be wondering why their trees aren't red."

There, that was all. Autumn, rather bluntly. No fade in, no chilled morning in repose lending itself to thoughts of future changes. Here you are, Alice, just what you wanted. Right now.

"That's it? That's all you have to do to make the weather change around here?" The trees on the other side of the bank had gone into a soft shade between chartreuse and blood orange, quite nicely against the clear blue sky. All the white was gone out of what she could see on the horizon, and instead there was a pure gradient of cornflower.

"No, you have to want it to be autumn. Lord, it's been summer here for ages, we've all been ignoring it so we could have a bit of holiday just a tetch longer, but nooo, we've got to have red on the trees. Well, come on," he said exaggerating irritation in a broad accent and ignoring her protestations of innocence, "Needs must go dress for court."

"You said you didn't read it," replied Alice with some petulance.

"I lied," he called over his shoulder easily. "Probably."

Alice was staring into the double mirror of her armoire, starched and curled and looking presentable. But the heavy thing in front of her was unlike other cabinets, for the doors did not swing out. Rather, one panel slid back behind the other. This was frustrating and confusing; she had never beheld such an inconvenient way to get at the stuff within, constantly having to slide them back and forth to get at opposite sides of the wardrobe. But when she pulled them both to their edges so that the mirrored doors reflected the whole room back at her, and stood with her nose against the split where the edges overlapped, the left side of her face seemed closer, and the right side seemed much farther away.

There were two Alices here, she thought, and neither of them wanted to see the Duchess. What progress had she made, what news did she have?

Nothing.

"Nothing, nothing, nothing," said the Hatter when they had reached the royal viewing room at last. She was looking at the windows and he was pacing the tile floor, arms upreached to the painted scenes on the ceilings, figures and forms she could not put together. "You clear out the tables in here and this is nothing but a gigantic room with a--look, she's got a gliding rocker chair up here, it's all covered in velvet! And bees! Embroidered bees all over the throne!" she heard him cry from the platform at the far end.

"Come down from there, you're going to get into trouble." She kept twisting her hands together; Alice sighing on the second stair to the royal riser and turning to look back through the gilded empty hall. It was so vaguely hazily opulent, but without all the beautiful courtiers it was really just a room with white plaster molding and tall windows.

"If I sit down, one could say this chair might just rock me on the dais," he said, and laughed so hard that he was wiping aside tears when she finally reached him. The hilarity didn't quite strike her, though.

"That's not even remotely funny," she said, thoroughly confused. Instantly the smile disappeared and he stared off into space for a moment.

"You're right, that is truly heinous." He even had the tenacity to look vaguely disgusted.

"There is nothing quite so fine as an autumn afternoon, is there?"

There was that calm voice, and then Alice turned as she was looking up, and the pictures in the ceiling rotated with her, deconstructing and unobscuring, becoming sotty people picnicking by upside-down rivermouths and liberally toasting their confused team of nearby horses. And then the white plaster wasn't quite white, but had lines of thin gold ribboning throughout, clear sunlight in wedges through the windows. She was standing at the double egg-blue doors, the Duchess, hands folded and hair twisted and looking expectant.

"I think not, Your Grace," said Alice.

"Tell us," said the woman in the gray dress stepping in measures cross the room, "Did you find summer's apex so dreadful as all that?"

"No, but change is inevitable... or rather, it should be. One expects it to be. I mean, in the normal course of things. That is, I--"

"It is nothing to be concerned of, we are sure, but certainly one must consider the citizens stranded at holiday with little to keep them there." Alice bit her lip and managed to stay quiet at this.

"In future send explicit details re urgent meeting, stop," said the Hatter in a calm monotone at Alice's elbow. The Duchess began a slow serene smile.

"Oh come, yellow paper isn't such a terrible augury," she said to him. "We thought it quite cheerful."

"Got the wind up," he mumbled, looking back at the plum-colored chair on the platform.

"We do hope we haven't worried you, dear Lady," she said this to Alice, "But the crown wonders whether your stay here has been necessarily fruitful toward a compelling end?"

"I don't quite take your meaning, Your Grace," Alice replied.

"Now, what news on the Rialto?" and she put on a thoughtfully concerned face for a moment. "Reports of more goings on, goings missing..." she trailed off and gestured. Alice blinked, feeling an impending sense of being shanghaied but pressing on. The Hatter had his hands in his pockets and was standing very still. She wished he were jumping about now, or spouting off non sequiturs.

"I've talked to loads of people, no one has seen anything, but there was--"

"Have you seen the Tweedles?" replied the monarch very lightly, very delicately, looking carefully up into the ceiling. There was this awful pause, and Alice seized on it.

"Well, I--"

"Hmm," said the Duchess in something of nonchalance, "That is far too bad, but at least you spoke with them before they went and gone; what did they say?"

"Went, went and gone?" said Alice after a bit. She felt very far away, as if she were in the picnic scene overhead watching the anticlockwise swirl in the ash blonde royal hair below. The woman's eye was on her, calculated to a point and finding Alice vastly short of early prognostications. She was a little teapot, short and stout and not measuring up. The woman was bored with batting at Alice's nonanswers, and Alice could tell their conference was closing in short order and with little to show and no recourse. Duchess moved and spoke mildly to the Hatter.

"The next time you decide to come around for our choice wingdings, do try to remember you are under oath to the crown. We were disappointed enough in your choice of raiment, but we shall not be sorry if you must be stricken from the roster next time. Livestock, though terribly amusing," she said as she turned and did not look over her shoulder. "Are not eligible for prizes."

They were both silent, and Alice pushed her thumb very hard between her eyebrows and squeezed her lids shut.

"Do find something helpful next time," said the Duchess to her, ambling toward the door. "It is highly suspect that you come here so experienced and yet so empty-handed. Something useful is all we ask." Alice heard her gently echoing down the hallway through the open doors. "Something profitable, productive, rewarding, constructive. Worthwhile, perhaps?" And she had quit the room entirely.

It was a fine Saturday for sailing. The schooner sat moored midst the southern breeze pushing white puffy clouds, blameless in their enormity, around the sky, rearranging them as seen fit, moving the furniture in early autumn. The Hatter was standing at the bow, one hand behind him and the other in the buttonfold of his longcoat, surveying carefully his pale blue eye over the open skies and distant landscape before them. There were endless journeys to be taken, choices to be made, dice to be rolled.

Lessons to be learned.

"Yes," said the Hatter, sounding affirmation over the roofs of the world. He took a bracing length of air, and with confidence that time was beside them, removed a brass monocular from his breast pocket, and took a good long look at the future.

"Persimmon will do," he continued to the Hare, who was digging with his hind legs sticking out of the long tube, kicking at the air as he reached further inwards. Alice was seated on the box below, trying to read a book with the pages all flapping about entitled Edwin and Morcar: Earls of Mercia and Northumbria while holding a bell-shaped fringe parasol in her other was a terribly dry book, and she was paying far more attention to the man in the large hat than she was to the fact that she had lost her place several times over. She had been feeling dull and gray, and he had forced her out of doors with many a push and shove into the open air and the weather she had managed to conjure with a firing of the synapses.

"Where exactly are you trying to go?" she said, rising and shielding her eyes from the sunlight with one hand. He passed her the monocular and pointed far below.

"You see that little cross catch?" he called out over the breeze. Alice murmured her assent, glass to the eye. "Good smack thirty degrees hooking to the left should take it out--" and here he grabbed her hand and raised it up high to tell where the wind came, for his hands were ever gloved, "--accounting for old Notus here." Alice lowered the monocular and looked out, merely appraising. The Hatter gave her a long sideways look, and she returned favor.

There was something to be said for what he was planning to do, and Alice had to admit that it was more scintillating, more tantalizing than the book. She looked out across the landscape and considered it, what he was going to do, for the first time really.

The ship creaked in the wind, our three pro tem miscreants stumbling slightly. They would have to hurry; ships fallen from the heavens above straight into the roofs of charity hospitals in the middle of capital cities may well be said by legend to have been there since "before elevenses as far as the Hatter knew," but how long this one would stand up was at present questionable. Alice had been assured before boarding that their engagement was far more pressing than "those ruddy geriatrics who could use a shock to the life system any-thumping-how" if the boat crushed the hospital below.

"Do you have anything to say about this?" cried the Hare, coming up for air out of the bag with the favorite to win in hand, upon which the Hatter pounced and began swinging back and forth eagerly in elastic arcs. The rabbit did not seem terribly concerned or pleased with their choice of afternoon activity one way or the other. She recalled strongly the lofty look in the Duchess's eye, and Alice rolled the dice and folded her hands demurely.

"Not at all," said Alice in a superiorly airy voice over the creak of the ship. "It is a fine day to be out taking the air," and she and the Hatter both looked quite pleased with each other. The man with the white hair gave the large wooden golf club a spin in his palm a few times, dropped the ball onto the tile of snaggy sod they'd lifted in haste from an unsuspecting lawn, wound, and drove, the silver slisk of air punctuating their smugness, full stop. For a moment they were just quiet; the sound of the targeted glass window exploding with such a bang did not reach them, and Alice pursed her lips to prevent a smile forming.

"Oh, that's a clean shot, that is," said the Hare.

"Hell's bells," said the disappointed Hatter.

"No, it's a rather jagged pattern," said Alice, looking back into the monocular for accuracy. "Yes, quite nicely—devastated half a good set of stained glass, and I think it smashed the leadpanes. Duchess won't be happy that you broke a royal window, sir," she told the Hatter with affected regret.

"Oh, I say, capital," said the Hatter by way of pleased embarrassment at his fine accomplishment, the Hare shaking his hand as though he had won the Open. "Would you like to have a go? There's a nice big circular window you could put one through."

Alice took the club into her own hands, handed off the folded parasol to the Hare, and the Hatter tipped hat and set up another white globe. The Duchess could have her machinations, but the open air, the breeze, and a leap at well-mannered malfeasance was for Alice.

After all, a pendulum swings both ways.