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of its buckle; his backpack with its seemingly endless supply of body-puncturing weaponry. Not long ago, Molly wouldn’t have been able to leave the gear alone, wanting to prove her combat skills. But since her mother’s death, she pretended not to see it.
    Hatter brushed his top hat clean of dust, held it by the brim and with a quick sideways jerk of his wrist flattened it into a coptering fan of S-shaped blades connected by a common axis-bolt. He sent the weapon slicing through the air toward the mouth of the cave. It boomeranged back to him and he caught it effortlessly, returned it to its conventional hat shape and flipped it on to his head. Molly was watching him.
    “Seems to be working all right,” he said. “When we get back to Wondertropolis, we’ll have a new homburg made for you.”
    “Whatever.”
    Her lack of concern for her lost homburg, her disinterest in all things Millinery, were more troubling than her insolence had been back when Hatter naively thought her untrustworthy because she was a halfer. Locking his Milliner bracelets into place, he squeezed his hands into fists to activate first one set of blades, then the other: deadly steel spun at the outside of his wrists. Relaxing his hands and forearms, the blades retracted and the bracelets clicked shut.
    “I’d better contact Bibwit to tell him we’re on our way,” he said. “The communicator doesn’t get reception in here, so . . .” He gestured at the open mouth of the cave. “Would you make sure my backpack works? All this dust, its inner mechanics might be gunked up.”
    By the time he was on the ridge outside, slyly peering into the cave, Molly had set down her mother’s satchel and strapped the backpack over her shoulders. She shrugged, unenthused, and a host of daggers snapped to the ready. With a second shoulder twitch, the weapons sank into the backpack. Another annoyed little shrug and knives and spear-points again pushed out of the backpack, but Molly made no move to reach for one, to pretend she was mid battle, as she used to do. She shrugged; the weapons folded away.
    “It works!” she said loudly. So she knew he’d been spying.
    He stepped into the cave and, taking the backpack from her, cupped her chin in his hand and lifted her face to his. He wanted to tell her what he’d told her countless times already—that Weaver had left her at the Alyssian camp out of love, not the opposite; that Weaver had intended to return to the camp until she became afraid of Queen Redd discovering that Hatter Madigan had a daughter—Queen Redd, who was intent on wiping out the Milliner breed. He wanted to tell her what he’d told her two nights earlier, as they stood at the cave entrance watching the setting suns—that, yes, King Arch had used her to satisfy his own ambitions. But if it hadn’t been Molly, he would have found another way. Lives would have been lost no matter what. The responsibility lay with Arch, not with her.
    “It wasn’t your fault,” he said, meaning Weaver, everything.
    “I know.”
    Molly didn’t look as if she believed it. He kissed her forehead, reminding himself not for the first time that he probably couldn’t underestimate the effect her years as an orphan had had on her.
    They shared a solemn moment together at Weaver’s grave, then started down, hiking the passage Hatter had tunneled through the mountain with his wrist-blades a lifetime ago. At day’s end they emerged from the passage on to the lower slope, the velvet-petaled daphnedews shivering in the coolness of oncoming night. Molly tramped on, a good ten paces in front of Hatter, and she almost didn’t realize it when he stopped, tense and staring at a bushel of shady greens. A sort of spicy licorice smell laced the air, her nostrils tingled, and out from behind the bushel’s thick, broad fronds a blue caterpillar four times her size floated on a cloud of hookah smoke, his lipless mouth puffing at his waterpipe as if this were propelling him