The Giant's Almanac by Andrew Zurcher (black female authors .txt) 📕

looking up as his hands held out the knife, so that Fitz should take it.

Fitz knew that this, this honed and deadly edge, was his temptation, the last question. He took the knife.

‘I will always love her anyway,’ he said, forcing the words out through the swollen exhaustion of his throat.

Both hands to the handle he raised the knife, and with its point sliced at the mask in front of him. With a neat motion, as if he had practised it, he sheared its surface in a long line from crown to chin. For a second nothing happened; but then, like a tower falling, the sundered sides of the mask began to cleave and fall away, heavy and ponderous off the back of the Heresiarch’s shoulders.

The Officers and Servers fell silent then, standing struck dumb where they were.

The Heresiarch shook out her long hair, so that it fell black over her black gown. She smiled, never taking her eyes from Fitz’s. Around her neck hung the key to the palace.

How.

She stepped on to the plinth to join Fitz. Every eye stared at them. The Officers, one by one, ripped off their masks. The dance was ended. The still point, the one against one, detonated across the hall.

She took his hands. And then she kissed him, once, as gentle as a breath on his lips.

‘Little brother,’ said Dina, ‘welcome to the Heresy.’

15

The Kingdom of Bones

There was a knock at the door.

‘Fitz,’ said a voice, high and tentative. ‘Can I come in? Fitz? It’s me, Navy.’

She didn’t wait for an answer. The door pushed open and she stepped into the room, in her hands a candle. She looked around her, studying every corner and surface. She caught her breath and the candle began to gutter.

‘There’s nothing here at all,’ she whispered, as if in awe. ‘Nothing.’

Apart from the pitcher and the laver, which stood fresh on the window for morning, she was right.

She crossed to the window and stood quietly, looking down at the hall below, where the Sweepers and the Commissaries were still scouring the space after the Black Wedding. Fitz could from time to time hear the sharp squeals of wood on stone as they dragged tables and benches back into place. These noises of pain carried on the air.

Navy turned back into the room. Her candle, sputtering now, gave almost no light. She blew it out.

‘Oh, Fitz,’ she said, ‘where are you?’

‘Up here,’ he answered.

Navy seemed to know instantly. She craned her neck to peer at him where he sat in the trapdoor in the ceiling. He waved between his dangling legs. The rest of him was already in the sky.

‘What are you doing up there?’ she asked. Her voice rose soft upon the air.

‘Waiting for something to happen to me.’

‘What?’

‘I haven’t thought that far ahead,’ he said.

‘Come down.’

Fitz lowered himself through the gap, kicking out his feet to stand on the carved stone cornice that framed the room’s heavy, peaked window. He had climbed the cornice, wedging himself against the adjacent wall, to get up; the same method would get him down.

He hit the floor softly, landing on his toes.

‘The Rack sent me to the Master,’ said Navy.

‘How does he look?’

‘I haven’t been yet. I came here first. I want to ask you something.’

They sat on the bed.

‘The Rack gave me something to bring to the Master, but I don’t want to do it.’

Navy set down the dark candle. There was something else in her hand. She opened her palm and in the darkness Fitz could see it was full of seeds.

‘Conium maculatum,’ Navy said. ‘Poison hemlock. We studied its uses and effects with the Rack last winter, and grew some over the summer in the Herbarium. A small amount will give you vertigo, shorten the breath. It could knock you out, or put you in a coma.’ She began to number off the seeds in her palm. ‘But this much – ten seed heads – will kill you. Fast.’

‘It’s just a message,’ said Fitz. ‘This place. Everyone is always reminding everyone else to be ready for death.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Navy answered. She was silent for a few breaths. Her palm tightened round the seeds. ‘His exact words were, “Take these to the Master, or take them yourself.”’

‘Maybe tonight is your Black Wedding, too,’ said Fitz.

Navy threw her arms round him, suddenly sobbing. Her head she pushed into his shoulder, and he held the thick nutty fragrance of her hair close to him as she squeezed his arms to his side, rocking and crying.

‘We saw, we saw,’ she said. She sobbed the words in thick gushes of mucus and emotion. ‘We were all there. It was horrible. Dolly threw up after.’

Fitz felt cold as she rocked him, as if he were standing across a water from Navy, driven by a pelting wind. Her cries reached him as if from a distance, and only the smell of her hair bound him to her presence. He was grateful for it, and his shoulders slumped.

‘What do you want from me?’ he asked.

Navy let him go, sat up, and rubbed the tears from her eyes with her free hand. The other, still clutching the seeds, she had pressed to her chest.

‘It’s late. Maybe I’m not thinking straight. But I didn’t want to do this, go to the Master, I mean, with this –’ she held up the seeds – ‘unless you said it was okay.’

Fitz felt his blood rising again, as if the Officers had begun to circle around him, as if his arms were being slowly twisted behind his back.

‘It has nothing to do with me,’ he said. The chill in his voice was like the ice in Dina’s eyes: blue, far and hard. Like the air on the sea over her body.

‘But it’s like – he’s your – family!’ exclaimed Navy.

Fitz stood up. He wanted more: to stand up to the size