"Mm.. what are you doing, Wife?" Brennin grumbled, his onyx eyes half-lidded. The cup of spiked tea in front of him was starting to grow cold. One of the courtiers was still prattling on about how hard it was for her to find suitable men in the very limited male population of Underland. Her pointed glances at Brennin were not subtle.

"You're hair's coming loose," his wife, the fabled Alice, murmured. She was removing the black ribbon from his hair and combing through the blood-red locks. Brennin grunted in reply, trying to pay attention to the blonde bimbo across the table.

He used to hate her. Maybe he kinda still did. Brennin hadn't quite decided how he felt about the woman from Topside who'd been prophesied to fall down the rabbit hole and kill the Walrus and Carpenter. She had been another chain tying him down, another thing for the court to bug him over.

"You're the only unmarried King!" "You're young, eligible!" "You need a wife, soon. It's what your mother wanted."

Brennin scoffed at the thought. His mother was too scrambled to truly want anything. Sometimes he wondered if she had been too mad to recognize her own son. But the past was the past, life's a bitch and one day you die. Like it or not, he now had a Queen of Hearts.