The murmurs quieted. Interesting.
“This is the riddle given to me by Lady Wittentree,” I said, speaking clearly so that all of them would hear.“What once stood in a line, now missing a brother. What was taken for wealth but refined by another? What holds death or life in the gap left behind? What holds endless damnation in similar kind.”
“We’ve seen how well you do with puzzles, mortal wife,” Vireo said easily. “Who can answer where you see not the solution?”
He was taunting me, I knew. And yet, he was partially right because I recognized a part of the riddle. It was tickling something in the back of my mind that I could not quite remember.
A head spoke, interrupting my thoughts and I recognized the square jaw and red curly hair of the seer who had prophesied for Bluebeard. Her glassy eyes were white as snow.
“A tangled path lies now before you, mortal wife of the Arrow, and only one way endures to the end. Turn to the left or the right and the ground will slip out from under you and drag you to your death.”
I shuddered but then paused at the wide smiles on the faces of the advisors. They loved this as much as Grosbeak did, reveling in whatever suffering might come to me.
“Have you nothing more useful to say to me?” I asked. “I know already that the way is precarious.”
“Nothing,” the Seer said. “Any words might steer your course and any steering might take you from the solid path.”
“It doesn’t sound solid at all, I’ll bet you three flies and a gnat she chooses wrong before she leaves this house,” Grosbeak’s father said.
“I raise you by a tooth that she makes it to the Hound’s chase,” Grosbeak countered. “She’s cleverer than you think.”
“But not clever enough to win?” his father pressed.
“Is anyone?” Grosbeak asked. “I once thought the Arrow capable of winning the game, but look at him now? He’s a rag doll in the hands of a mortal woman.”
“Mmmm.”
I clenched my jaw, frustration filling me. I’d counted on this wall of heads to tell me something — anything, that I could find to point the way. I understood Wittentree’s riddle to a certain extent. After all, Bluebeard had told me the story about the rib of the sovereign, there in the ground, mined out by evil men. If that wasn’t the thing that used to stand in a row then I didn’t know what was.
A loud cracking sound startled me and I swallowed, looking up at the dust spilling from the ceiling.
Mayhap, I should have listened to Grosbeak and run. I clutched at my heart with one hand, certain the whole structure was about to fall on us, when I realized it was laughter I was hearing, not the collapse of the house. Not the laughter of the heads, though some were certainly laughing in their cruel way.
When I raised my candle, it lit a flickering pattern of dancing shadow over a face as large as I was tall, jutting from the wall to one side of the shelf of heads. It was almost entirely hidden by tangled roots and squirming beetles, but I still made it out. The old Bramble King was here. It was he who was mocking me with his laugh. He seemed barely there, he was missing his crown, and he gasped between his chuckles, fading a little more with each gasp and then he spoke and he almost spat the words, he ejected them so harshly and intensely.
“Mist and Memories,”he spat and the words were echoed by the heads with confusion in their voices.
“Has he gone mad?” one particularly shrill one asked.
“He’s nearly dead, of course he’s mad. Coppertomb’s replaced him. Do you know what you call a replaced king?”
“Has there ever been a replaced king?
“You call him past, you call him refuse, you call him boring, for that is what he is.” I was pretty sure that was Grosbeak’s father.
The Bramble King flickered again and then there was a strangled sound and one of the heads fell to the ground gurgling horribly and then suddenly still.
ItwasGrosbeak’s father. I raised a single eyebrow. So typical.
“I’d wager that more respect might be due the Bramble King,” I said calmly and the great king’s eyes flickered to mine for a bare moment. Unlike the others, I knew what his words had meant for I remembered stealing a glance into the Sword’s copy of that very book. “Mist and Memories: The Memoir of Lord Antlerdale.” My heart was racing. I had an answer from the Bramble King himself.
“Chapter Ten,” he said very clearly, a dozen beetles scuttling into his curving lips as he spoke. “Paragraph Thirteen.”
And then he was gone and I was left repeating his words again and again in my mind so I would not forget. Chapter ten, paragraph thirteen. Chapter ten, paragraph thirteen.
“Well,” Grosbeak drawled. “This has been enlightening. It’s not every day you watch your father killed a second time, and this time by no less than the former sovereign of the Wittenhame.”
“Is heformer?”one of the heads asked. “He seemed anything but.”
