Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories The Novel (light novel) Page 4

  “Didn’t something like that happen before, too…?” Sora cocked his head. They had followed a rabbit, he was sure of it…and then what? “Hmm. I feel like we saw that rabbit, but…”

  “Wak! We’re sure to find out if we follow him!” said Donald, waving his wand.

  “Off with his head, he said!”

  “For such a peaceful-lookin’ place, it sounds pretty dangerous,” Goofy said nervously.

  “It doesn’t look that peaceful, either!” Donald retorted.

  “Huh?” Sora and Goofy turned.

  Donald stood with his arms folded, looking at the Heartless blocking his way.

  “Ack!” Sora jumped.

  “Fire!” Donald waved his wand, and Sora and Goofy, taking the cue, jumped at the Heartless.

  Through the lotus forest, there was a well-kept garden. They walked under a heart-shaped gate of green hedges.

  And through the gate, there was quite a commotion.

  “I wonder what everyone’s doing here,” said Sora.

  They peeped cautiously out from the shadow of the gate.

  “Gawrsh, maybe it’s that trial the white rabbit was talking about.”

  Just as Goofy spoke, a woman’s booming voice rang through the garden. “Alice! You do understand the charges, don’t you?!”

  From up on a dais, a rotund lady—the Queen of Hearts—shouted at Alice, a blonde girl on a wooden stand. The white rabbit was beside the queen, and playing-card soldiers surrounded them.

  “There’s Alice!” Donald hissed.

  “Of course I don’t understand!” said Alice, staring back at the Queen of Hearts. “I’ve done nothing wrong!”

  “Feigning ignorance, dear?” The Queen of Hearts waved her heart-shaped fan. “You are charged with aiding the creatures called Heartless who threaten my domain!”

  So the Heartless were causing trouble in this world, too.

  “Fiddlesticks! Where is the evidence?” Alice demanded.

  “The evidence is…” The Queen of Hearts fell silent a moment, as if she was trying to come up with evidence on the spot. Then she spat, “The evidence is I forgot! That’s the evidence! Because you, Alice, are the one who stole my memory!”

  “That’s crazy! How can the fact that she forgot the evidence be evidence?!” Donald stomped his feet.

  “We can’t rid the kingdom of Heartless until we get Her Majesty’s memory back,” the white rabbit added. “This is a serious crime!”

  “That’s completely unfair!” Alice cried. “So what if you’re a queen! I won’t be to blame just because you can’t remember things!”

  “Such insolence! You’re speaking to the Queen of Hearts!” the queen bellowed. “And to think, I might have let you go, if you had just returned what you stole and apologized straightaway! What a brazen thief!”

  “Who’s the brazen one?” Sora blurted, and glared at her.

  “The court has reached a verdict!” the Queen of Hearts declared. “Off with her head!”

  Off with her head, just because the queen couldn’t remember…?! Sora dashed out of the shadows to stand in the middle of the court, glaring up at the tyrannical queen. “Hold it! This trial is a farce! You have to investigate, not just arrest innocent people!”

  She stared round-eyed at Sora’s sudden appearance and her mouth opened wide to shout. “What is the meaning of this? How dare you suggest Alice didn’t steal my memory! I suppose you know who the real culprit is, then!”

  “Huh? I, uh…,” Sora faltered. Behind him, Donald and Goofy exchanged nervous glances.

  “Speak! Or it’s off with all of your heads! Now, out with it! Who’s the thief?!”

  “Um, uh…” What could he say that would help Alice? Sora’s mind raced. “…I’m the thief!”

  The Queen of Hearts and Goofy both jumped up in surprise.

  “Say that again?”

  “Gawrsh, really?!”

  “Of course not!” Sora whispered. “But what else am I supposed to say?”

  Then he turned back and winked at the defendant. “Run for it, Alice!”

  The Queen of Hearts shouted over him. “Cards! Seize them all!”

  A squad of heart playing-card soldiers rushed at the trio.

  “Wak! This is all because you’ve got to go and say something screwy!” Donald complained, blocking a playing-card soldier’s spear with his wand.

  “It was the only thing I could think of!” Sora swung the Keyblade at a spade soldier. Goofy seemed to be fighting with all his might, too.

  “Well, you shouldn’t tell lies!”

  “If I didn’t lie about it, Alice would’ve lost her head!”

  Sora and Donald were shouting at each other as they attacked the playing-card soldiers.

  “C’mon, you guys! This is no time to be fighting!” Goofy called, trying to mediate.

  “Okay, okay!” Donald and Sora both spoke at once and looked at each other, readying wand and Keyblade.

  “Yaaaaargh!”

  “Fire! Fire!”

  The heart soldiers all fell to the ground.

  “Whew…”

  Donald and Sora caught their breath as Goofy glanced from side to side.

  “Huh? Where’s Alice?” said Donald.

  “Looks like she escaped…” Sora breathed a sigh of relief. But—

  “Perhaps she did,” the Queen of Hearts shouted. “But you won’t!”

  Donald jumped back. “I think we’ve been trumped!”

  At the queen’s command, more playing-card soldiers began to chase them.

  “Run!” The trio fled through the heart-shaped hedge gate and ducked into the lotus forest.

  In that strange forest, there were plenty of places to hide.

  “Are they gone?”

  “Yep, all gone,” Donald replied, staring out at the forest from the shadows of the foliage. Sora jumped back down from a lily pad, still looking around nervously.

  “This kinda thing happened before, didn’t it,” Goofy remarked.

  Sora tilted his head, thinking. “It did?”

  “…Uh, I think so… Or am I makin’ it up?”

  “We didn’t have to hide before!” said Donald.

  Goofy folded his arms. “Oh. Hmm…”

  “Anyway, we’ve gotta find Alice!” Sora went farther into the forest.

  “Yeah, after all…didn’t she help us in that castle?”

  “What castle?” Sora asked.

  “Uhh… Y’know, the princesses…”

  “Alice isn’t a princess,” said Donald. She was a normal girl, not royalty.

  “Yeah, but…it was kinda different… Hmm…” Goofy wasn’t sure how to explain it. “Jasmine was there and Belle…”

  “We won’t forget Jasmine or Belle or Alice, either!” Sora replied, as if Goofy were only stating the obvious.

  “…There were some other princesses, too, weren’t there?” Now Donald frowned, too.

  “Cinderella and Snow White and Aurora, right?” said Sora.

  Donald nodded. “Yeah!”

  “And along with Kairi, there were seven princesses… Huh? Wait, Alice was a princess, too?” Sora got confused at what he was saying.

  “And the castle—there was a castle…”

  “We didn’t go to any castles.”

  “Oh. Gawrsh, maybe I did make it up…?” Goofy seemed to be getting more and more uncertain now that Sora was denying the existence of the castle.

  “Never mind that. We have to find Alice before the Heartless get her! C’mon!” Sora took off running.

  Goofy was still lost in thought. Donald grabbed him by the arm and they followed Sora.

  “Alice!”

  She was hiding deep in the lotus forest.

  “Things got a little crazy back there,” said Sora. “But at least you’re okay.”

  Alice looked at him uneasily. “I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but…was that true, what you said? Are you the thief?”

  “’Course not! Why would I steal the qu
een’s memory?”

  It was only a lie he’d told on the spur of the moment.

  Goofy nodded. “Yep, Sora only said that ’cos he wanted to save—”

  “—to show off!” Donald interrupted.

  “I was not trying to show off!” Sora shot back.

  Alice giggled. “Is that right? Well, you saved me all the same. Thank you, Sora.”

  “…You know my name, huh, Alice?” Sora looked a little bit confused.

  “Oh… Why, so I do! Even though we’ve never met.”

  “Yeah…”

  So Alice wasn’t the real Alice, either…

  “Okay, so what’s my name?” Donald asked her.

  “Er… Is it Donald?”

  “Bingo!” He jumped up happily.

  “How very strange… And you’re Goofy, aren’t you?”

  “Right! Ahyuck!” Goofy laughed. “And we know you’re Alice, too!”

  “Perhaps it’s because this is such a mysterious place…?” Alice wondered.

  “Yeah…maybe that’s it,” said Sora.

  And just then, a cat appeared in the midst of the lotus forest.

  “Feeling better after that mad dash, are we?”

  “It’s the Cheshire Cat!” They looked up at the cat floating above a lily pad. Before, too, the Cheshire Cat had sent them running in circles with his riddles.

  Before…? Sora thought. When was it?

  “What’s the matter, Sora?” asked Goofy, peering anxiously at him.

  “Oh—nothing.”

  The Cheshire Cat chuckled. “It seems you’re having quite a time—or are you out of time? After all, you’re not out of the woods yet. The Queen of Hearts is a stickler for justice! She won’t forget you till she remembers, and she won’t stop hounding you till you get her memory back!”

  The Queen of Hearts certainly did seem stubborn. But how could they get someone else’s memory back? It was hard enough to remember things you forgot yourself… Like the things that happened when you were very young.

  “Did she forget because she remembers? Does she remember that she forgot?” the cat mused. “Not that it matters much.”

  “I don’t know… I think we oughta just stay away from her,” Sora said, deep in thought. Jiminy Cricket hopped out of his pocket.

  “But, Sora, what about Alice? If the queen catches her again, it’s off with… Well, you know!”

  Of course, Jiminy was right. If they left now, the queen would just be chasing Alice around some more. Alice would end up on trial again, and the queen would yell, “Off with her head!”

  “Then, I guess we’d better do something about the queen,” Sora sighed.

  “You should do something. But you don’t have to do anything.” The Cheshire Cat’s head floated away from his body.

  “Huh?”

  The cat wasn’t making much sense.

  “If you can’t remember something, it’s like it never happened,” said the cat. “Likewise, if something never happened, you can’t remember it. Try too hard to remember, and your memory might lie to you.”

  “Lie…?”

  “Try too hard to remember, and your memory might lie…” But how could memories be lies?

  Maybe…if a person couldn’t remember something and somebody lied to them about it, then they might believe that was true.

  Like that time.

  When Sora had turned into a Heartless…he couldn’t remember it very well. All he really knew was that Kairi had saved him.

  But…he only believed that because when he got his body back, Kairi had been holding him. What if it had really been someone else who saved him?

  “That’s all I can say,” the Cheshire Cat told them. “The rest is for you to figure out.”

  With that, the cat floated up and up and disappeared.

  “He says such funny things, just like always,” said Goofy, staring up after him.

  Alice was looking the same way. “…I think it made a little bit of sense, though.”

  “What do you mean?” said Sora.

  “Well, we won’t know until we try.” Alice smiled at him. “At any rate, we ought to find out who actually stole the queen’s memory.”

  The trio nodded, and they headed farther into the lotus forest.

  “Can you climb?” asked Sora.

  “I’ll be all right,” said Alice.

  Sora and Donald lifted Alice up onto a lily pad, and they climbed higher and higher.

  “My goodness, we’re high up.”

  “The Heartless won’t come up here, though,” said Goofy, taking Alice’s hand.

  “Heartless… There were so many of them, even in the forest.”

  “You didn’t get hurt, did ya?”

  “They didn’t seem to be interested in coming after me. Oh—there! Over that way is a sort of passageway.” Alice pointed to a large clump of bushes hiding a hole just big enough to crawl through.

  They went through the hole—or fell through it—and on the other side was a perfectly normal-looking room with a heating stove.

  “Gawrsh, what a sudden change of scenery!” Goofy sat on the sofa. “Did we come here before, too?”

  “Yeah, we did.” Sora nodded and looked around the room. There had been a talking doorknob and potions to drink that made them bigger or smaller…and they had been in the room upside down, too.

  And they had fought a big Heartless here… What sort of Heartless was it?

  “Is there anything in here?” Donald paced around. Suddenly the door at the back of the room opened with a bang.

  “There you are! Thought you’d seen the last of me, did you?”

  It was the Queen of Hearts, surrounded by playing-card soldiers.

  “Uh-oh!”

  “The game is up, scoundrels! For stealing my memory, I sentence you to…to…”

  A weird flash of light interrupted the queen.

  “What was that?!” cried Sora.

  “I sentence…you…sentence…?” After that light, there seemed to be something wrong with the queen.

  “Gawrsh, what’s wrong with her?” Goofy stared with his head cocked.

  “Oh? What’s going on? Where am I?” the queen mumbled.

  “Huh?” Donald stared, too. She was always giving orders with such ferocity—now there was definitely something off.

  “What in the world am I doing?” The queen waved her fan about. “Confound it, I can’t remember!”

  “What could’ve happened to her?” Sora whispered.

  “Maybe someone swiped her memory again?” Goofy replied.

  The weird light filled the room again.

  “Look out! Something’s coming!” Alice cried, and just as she did, a huge Heartless fell from the ceiling. It had long arms and a flat face that seemed to be made up of heads stacked on top of each other—the Trickmaster.

  “This is what stole the queen’s memory?!” Sora stood ready with the Keyblade.

  “H-heeeelp!” The queen and the playing-card soldiers ran around in a panic.

  “Goofy, take care of Alice!” called Sora. He remembered—with this Heartless, they had to attack its body or its head. “Donald, you hit it with magic and get it to stop moving!”

  “Got it! Blizzard!” Donald’s magic exploded at the Trickmaster’s feet.

  Goofy took Alice’s hand in the meantime and hid with her behind the sofa.

  Sora leaped up high and dealt the Trickmaster’s body a heavy blow. It started to fling its arms around, knocking Sora and Donald back.

  “Wh-whoooa!”

  “Wa-wawaaaak!”

  “Are you fellas all right?!” Goofy gave them healing potions. “You’ve gotta jump to dodge it!”

  “Was that how we did it?” Sora got up and readied the Keyblade again, and this time jumped over the Trickmaster’s flailing arms.

  Then Sora jumped up onto the table and brought the Keyblade down hard on its head. He felt the impact in his arms.

  The Trickmaster was engulfed in light, and it
disappeared.

  “You did it!” Alice jumped out from behind the sofa and threw her arms around Sora.

  “You, there! All of you!” the queen bellowed, quashing their celebration. “What is the meaning of this? Where did that creature come from?!”

  “Well, gee, that’s a good question…” Sora scratched his head. Where did Heartless come from? Heartless were Heartless. But they still didn’t quite understand what the Heartless really were.

  “So, you refuse to answer? Hiding something, are you?” The Queen of Hearts pointed her fan at them. “They’re plotting against us! Seize them!”

  But Alice stepped forward. “Please, Your Majesty, wait! It was you who commanded us to destroy that creature.”

  “Huh?” Sora stared at her.

  “Your Majesty, in her prudence, didn’t completely trust us at first. And so, at Your Majesty’s command, we fought that thing to prove ourselves. Isn’t that right, Sora?” Alice turned just enough to give Sora a wink.

  “We did? I mean—we did! Uh, Your Majesty!” Realizing Alice’s trick, Sora couldn’t help but grin.

  “I…told you…to do that?” the queen fumbled.

  “But, Your Majesty, don’t you remember?” said Alice with a polite smile.

  “Don’t be ridiculous! I never forget anything! Of course I gave the command. You did splendidly.” The Queen of Hearts set her jaw as she deigned to praise them. “That’s enough of this place, then!”

  She turned and swept out, the playing-card soldiers marching behind her.

  “Oh, dear… That was close.” Alice turned back to the trio, delicately wiping her brow.

  “Way to improvise! I never would have thought of that,” said Sora. He hadn’t imagined that Alice would be the one to save them with a trick.

  “But the Cheshire Cat said as much, after all. ‘Try too hard to remember, and your memory might lie to you.’ The Queen of Hearts would never admit that she forgot. So instead, she remembered something—something that didn’t happen at all! She ended up fooling herself.”

  “Something that didn’t happen…” A troubled look came over Sora’s face.

  The world they were in was created out of Sora’s memories. But he didn’t remember everything that had happened in perfect detail. What if…what if he couldn’t trust his memories?

  “What is it, Sora?” said Alice, worried for him.