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

‘I see,’ she said. She was looking at the staircase where the Master had disappeared, moments before. ‘You know, little brother,’ she continued, ‘the Jack lied to you about the stack.’

So you were listening.

‘That is, he’s right that it gives us a disordered sense of time. You learn faster. But you learn faster for a reason. You learn faster because you love what you are learning. You learn faster because you love the hand that feeds you, and the fellow mouths at the trough. You learn faster because you love the food, the air you breathe, because love is entwined with everything that you experience. By means of love, in love, people can accomplish almost impossible actions.’

‘You told me that before,’ said Fitz.

‘But you don’t seem to have heard me. If you eat stack every day, for years, and every day you live in the Heresy, and study its teachings, and feed and sleep among your fellow apprentices, do you think you will still want to go home?’

‘I’ll always want to go home,’ Fitz answered her, but he wasn’t sure he meant it.

Dina turned the necklace over and over between her fingers.

‘Stack will become your home. The Heresy, and all that is in it, everything that it is, will become your home.’

Fitz didn’t look at her, but at his necklace.

She gave it back to him, saying only, ‘Sometimes people keep the strangest things.’

That night, after dinner, Fitz went straight to his room and went to bed. The sun hadn’t yet set, and the bell hadn’t yet pealed nine. He had skipped Second and Third Feeding because he hadn’t felt hungry; perhaps that was why his sleep was so broken. He woke several times in the night, and at one point – lying in the still moonlight – he began to hallucinate. He dreamed that he heard oars rowing on the river, which was absurd, because his tower room was much too far away from the river for that. But in this dream he knew that the boat carried his mother, and so he slipped out of bed and, without bothering to put on his shoes or change into his day clothes, he descended the stairs and walked quietly through the courts towards the river landing. He hadn’t passed through the Heresy’s gatehouse since the day he arrived; now he found it empty, and dark, but the door stood open and he quickly covered the distance between the lawns and the river stairs.

At the water’s edge, a little wherry – it seemed that same little wherry that had first brought him to the Heresy – was pulling up to the bank. The rower stowed her oars and turned to grab the bank.

It was Clare.

They said nothing to one another, but Fitz took in the boat and ran its painter through the ring, just as the porter had done for him when he had first arrived. He offered Clare his hand, to help her ashore, and in silence they walked back into the Heresy through the avenue of still-blooming roses. Although the night was dark, the roses bloomed more darkly still, and in the cool air their perfume beat out from the buds in a rhythm as steady as the tide.

He showed her all the courts of the Heresy, and she seemed to know what they were, and what happened in each of them, without his having to say a word. Fitz marvelled at it, but said nothing until they arrived, last of all, at the Master’s court, and, in its corner, the door to his tower room. Here he stopped at the foot of the stairs.

‘How is it,’ he asked her, ‘that you know so much about the Heresy already, when I have lived here for months and get lost every day, and you arrived only tonight?’

Clare took his hands, and raised them a little, holding them out in the air between them. She looked at him; he felt her eyes on his, warm as daisies in the sun.

‘I know a great many things that I did not know before, Jaybird. I have been to a place that you cannot imagine, and there seen things beyond the reach of fantasy.’

Longing tore through Fitz’s stomach. It felt as if he were a boy of paper, and two hands ripped him. He wanted to ask Clare where she had been, what she had done without him, the dangers she had faced and the glories she had witnessed. He could see all of this in her eyes, that were fuller and wiser and brighter than ever they had been. But in the dream he could find no words.

‘Jaybird, there is a place in this world – a place just beyond this world, but in it, too – of such goodness. A place where everyone dreams and tells of the best things, of love, and justice, of kindness and courage, a place where stories heal the heart’s sorrows, and the mind’s, a place where everything is possible. Come with me there, Jaybird – leave this Heresy, and come with me.’

‘Is it over the green, green sea, Clare?’ Fitz felt he could hear his mother’s song, just beyond his hearing, or in the tips of his fingers. ‘Will you be my Bibi there, and I a prince?’

‘No, Jaybird, there are no princes there. There, everyone is equal, every voice part of the song, every thread a part of the same fabric.’

The blackness of the night seemed to deepen around them then, like the centre of a rose, lush and secret.

‘Would you like to come up to my room, Clare?’ he said. ‘I would like you to see it. Except for the cells, it is the highest room in all of the Heresy.’

‘I would rather you came with me,’ she answered. She wasn’t smiling, but her tone was so warm and so loving that he felt for a moment that he was returning through the Bellman’s Wood at dinnertime, a book tucked under his arm, and