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

sort of lunacy that – running its thickening tendrils beneath his skin – now threatened to shoot and twine out of his body.

Dina shook him once, hard, then left him to stand and shiver while she turned on her heel and strode away from him, down the spiralling avenue of lanterns. He watched her go. After about twenty paces, she stopped, and turned.

‘You came to the Sad King, and you gave yourself. A good choice. That is all,’ she said.

As she spoke, all the lanterns in the hall began as if pulled by a single steady arm to rise. Their movement was silent, and still, but every light strung from every chain seemed to travel at its own pace, so that they burned in and past and out and among one another as they lifted, flexing and rippling Fitz’s wondering eye.

‘We’d better get you cleaned up,’ she said. ‘And then it’s time you met the set. If we dawdle much longer, we’ll miss First Feeding.’

Dina held out her hand. While the lanterns rose, he walked to her and took it. Down the clear stone floor she swept him, and out by the giant doors.

7

Dina

‘Is it true you knocked at the door of the Porch? Russ said he saw you knock.’

‘I asked the stupidest questions at my enrolment.’

‘Dina, what did the Jack say, when the new boy chose you?’

‘Why don’t you have your proper clothes?’

The questions and comments came so fast, the moment he sat down at the table, that Fitz didn’t know where to look first. Eight places had been laid for the eight Apprentices; and Fitz observed that his was the last, across from Dina’s. Now she took her seat opposite him, swinging her legs deftly over the bench without catching them in her long black gown.

‘Let him be, rabble,’ she said with authority. ‘He’s just been chucking stuff into the Sad King.’ She nodded down the hall to the place – beneath and between the long tables that had been carried in and laid for dinner, among the hundreds of people sitting, eating, conversing, laughing – where the well lay silent, waiting, full of a mystery that none of the children seemed to understand.

A mystery they wouldn’t believe, if I told them.

‘And besides, he hasn’t eaten all day.’ Dina took a bowl of bread that sat on the table between them and held it up to Fitz. His stomach had been cramping with hunger, and he seized at two crusts a little too greedily.

‘Evidently,’ said the quiet girl beside him, who hadn’t yet spoken. She held out her right hand – thin and cold as a sheet of glass, and as brittle – without extending it past her other elbow. Fitz put down the bread and tried to take it, but felt he was intruding. ‘Payne,’ she said.

‘And this is Russ, who is apprenticed to the Jack; Padge is with the Commissar and Navy with the Registrar (‘The tall, arrogant one,’ added Navy, a bright-eyed girl mopped with waving red curls). On this side,’ said Dina, numbering them off with her long index finger, as if tapping each one on the pate in turn, ‘Dolly, who shadows the Keeper; Fingal follows the Rack, and Payne the Sweeper.’ Fitz took them all in as fast as he could, circling the table of their eager and curious faces. ‘Introductions done,’ concluded Dina, nodding her head once for formal emphasis. ‘Let’s eat.’

‘And who do you follow?’ asked Fitz.

Dina already had a piece of the tough bread in her mouth, and was chewing vigorously. ‘The Master, obviously,’ she said, between gobs.

‘Then we both –’

‘Yes,’ said Navy. ‘It’s strange. We haven’t had eight before, and nobody’s ever doubled up.’ Navy, alone of all the children at the table, didn’t seem interested in the baskets of bread. Instead, she remained entirely focused on Fitz, staring at him with round eyes and her lips a little parted, as if always about to say something else. Usually she did.

‘I wish someone would double up with me. There’s more than enough to go round in the Registry.’

‘Eat,’ said Dina, taking up the basket and reaching across Russ and Padge to put it in Navy’s face. Navy took a piece of the bread and placed it on her plate.

‘But it’s nice that you two will be together,’ she said to Fitz from across the length of the table. ‘Maybe you’ll be close.’

Dina picked up the bread basket again, and with a look like murder shoved it with more violence across Russ and Padge, nearly knocking Navy in the nose.

‘Eat more,’ she barked. Navy took another piece of bread and set it beside the first.

‘Well, at least working with the Registrar I get to be with the animals,’ Navy said. She added, ‘That way it isn’t so lonely.’

‘If only you were lonelier,’ retorted Fingal, and then retired into a kind of sullen introversion. He was tall, with sharp features and a long fringe of heavy blond hair that almost concealed his eyes. Fitz thought he looked about sixteen.

‘We have a kind of farm in the Registry,’ Navy explained, as if she hadn’t heard him. ‘And a huge aquarium. I have to muck everything out about every five minutes.’

‘Perhaps you should go and do it now,’ offered Fingal.

‘Moodies,’ said Navy, philosophically, to the table as a whole. And then to Fitz: ‘Everyone gets the moodies at his age.’ Silently, she mouthed a number to Fitz: ‘Seventeen.’

Dina rolled her eyes, and Fitz felt for a moment like giggling. In all his life he had never seen, much less met, much less been part of, such a strange and dysfunctional and intimate group of children, so obviously dissimilar and yet so obviously familiar. The children he had known at school were nothing like this: distant, formal, and suspicious, or – occasionally – thick as thieves. But these children were different. He could see already that