Fitz felt with his tongue and realized that the Riddler was right. There had never been dirt in his mouth. He was choking on something else.
The words are sticking in my throat.
The blood is sticking in my veins.
The love is sticking in my heart.
‘How did you get here?’
Fitz looked at the trees, at the tall, straight trunks in the liquid green light. The butterflies and moths poured through the trees like a wave, their canvas wings flapping hard in the air, snapping against the gales of green. He was lying.
‘What do you see?’ asked the Riddler. ‘Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.’
Fitz saw the white chamber of the Sensorium, with its beaded ring of purple. He saw the green liquid light, the trees straight and tall as masts, the moths and butterflies with their angel faces and their huge wings like sails. He was lying.
‘Mother,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said the Riddler. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’
I have forgotten everything.
He saw it then, a sight he could not remember, could not bear to remember, a thing he knew before he had words to know it with: the white sky, the green sea, the vast blue distance of the sky, the little boat with its tall mast, now wrecked, its hull scraping with every swell across the rock, and in the heavy wind the scrap of dry canvas, still like a joke flapping and filling with air. And there, on his mother’s lifeless body, his real mother’s lifeless body, at the edge of the shore, the little rings of purple bruises, like coral – on her bleached arms, on her thighs, on her face. Lying. She was just lying there.
‘How can I love another mother in the place of my mother?’ he asked. ‘How can I have a home that is not my home?’
Clare.
‘You have been here too long,’ said the Riddler. ‘It is right before your very eyes, as plain as day. And still you cannot see it. Remember this, heir to the Kingdom, when the time comes, that there are holes worlds deeper than those dug in the earth. Remember this. But you have been here too long.’
Sobs began to course through Fitz’s chest, pushing towards his throat. They were his sobs, a long and retching music that sucked his breath away, that was his breathless breath. His body shook, rattling his hands where they gripped the tartan blanket like dead seed pods shuddering in a wind. Snot and saliva, tears and sweat soaked his pillow and matted his thick hair as he moaned, as blood surged in his hot, tight temples. The rhythm of his sobs shook him and grounded him, like chanting, like swells passing on a high sea, turning and turning in circles through his body. His body pushed against the measures of it, pushed against the Gyves and the Manacles where they bound him, against the Collar that ran about his throat. He felt that his sorrow might burst through the leather straps, as if they were paper.
But the Riddler stripped them off. Sight, sound, smell, taste – and pain, the searing pain of his touch – fell on him like an avalanche.
Fitz was not on the High Table in the Sensorium. He was not in a passage beneath the lawns. He was hanging from the mast in the Great Hall. The Black Wedding had begun without him. The Officers circled him, chanting; beyond them, a ring of black-liveried Servers revolved, their voices joined in a low and modulating humming. Fitz’s eyes widened. He tried to shake his head, to make sense of the order of events, to understand how he had come here.
I have been asleep. I haven’t been myself. I have been lying –
His heart stuttered, and the dirt of his own tongue choked in his throat.
The Riddler was nowhere to be seen; instead, the face that bent over his was the huge, masked visage of the Heresiarch, wielding his ornate, bowed knife. Below him, on the floor, Fitz could see the Five Fetters where the Heresiarch had cut them away, leaving them to fall where they would. Now the Heresiarch danced like a mesmer around him, the knife hovering in the air before those socketed eyes, catching the light of a hundred lanterns that hung from the ceiling.
The Riddler must have given him up to the Officers. They must have carried him from the Sensorium, strapped him to the mast, and begun the wedding while he lay still in a dream. Somewhere in his guts, Fitz was screaming.
Maybe.
I am here. I am myself. Whatever I am, I am myself.
The knife danced up and Fitz felt his legs come free, then his hands. He arched his feet, standing into his toes, then stretched his arms out at his sides like wings, like victory in an agony. The Officers circled in their hook-beaked masks. The Servers circled in their funereal pall. Every syllable they chanted was a knife. Fitz’s ears throbbed with time as the Heresiarch rounded before him, boring with the dead and hollow socket of the bulging mask into his own eyes. Around them the circles turned, the chanting rose and fell wordless and traumatic; around them light shifted like a carousel, a thousand or ten thousand figures revolving in the paintings that covered the walls, in the mosaics that tiled the floors, in the carving that crawled everywhere upon the benches, tables and woodwork like a live thing; around them the air seemed pregnant with motion, as if it might spasm in a cataract at any moment. But the Heresiarch now still as a spider in a web with a simple motion drew Fitz into the centre of that stillness, the pivot of all the dance.
He stepped close, very close,
