Page 10 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“Well, Arpix.” Algar gave an unsettling smile. “I want you to tell me all about this book.” The poorly bound volume he lifted into view was one that Arpix had never seen before.

“I…” The truth, Arpix felt, would deliver him back into the hands of the three soldiers and the continuation of their fun. Arpix had always been a great believer in the truth, but with his many sources of pain only now beginning to divide themselves into individual hurts, that faith was wavering. “Could I see it more closely?”

Lord Algar held it in front of Arpix’s face, eyes narrowing.

Arpix searched in vain for a title or an author, but the covers were worn smooth by time. The faintest pattern persisted but he could make out no more than a circle occupying most of the front, filled with barely visible lines squiggling this way and that. “If I could…” He tried to bring his wrists out from behind him. “…look inside?”

Algar glanced at the bearded guard and gave a slight nod. “It came from one of your colleagues. Young like you, though not one of us.” He set a conspiratorial hand to Arpix’s shoulder as the guard untied him.

Arpix brought his arms forward and rubbed at both aching wrists. He sensed he might be being offered a chance to remove himself from the menu. “Livira had it?”

“The duster, yes.”

“Where is—”

“She’s safe enough and not far away. But what I’m interested in is what you can tell me.”

Verification. Arpix was familiar with the concept. Librarians preferredto get the information in one book confirmed by a second source. Better still, many unrelated sources. Oanold’s forces must have recaptured Livira and be holding her close by. If what Arpix said contradicted Livira’s story, she would feel the consequences. The trouble was that Arpix didn’t know what she’d said and didn’t know anything about the book in the first place.

“Can I see inside?” Arpix moved his hand towards the book.

Algar drew it back. “If I give it to you, and you do anything I don’t like, I’ll have to ask Jons here to break both your arms. He’s recently had a sword stuck through him and is in very poor humour.” The aristocrat managed to wrap a diplomat’s expression of regret around the bluntness of his threat.

Arpix glanced nervously at the soldier by Algar’s right shoulder, a grizzled veteran, seamed by old scars, chest blood-soaked. His fatal-looking wound had presumably been healed by the centre circle; the pale eyes with which he regarded Arpix gave the lie to the grey in his short-cropped hair—this was a dangerous man.

Arpix took the book in trembling hands and opened it somewhere in the middle. He saw immediately that the pages were all of slightly different sizes and made of a wide variety of parchments and paper. The comfortable sprawl of Livira’s quillwork greeted him. This was Livira’s book, the one that she’d been writing for years but that had always been scattered inside other tomes in the library, a cuckoo book securing each new page in the nest of some other volume. She must have worked fast to collect the leaves into one manuscript on the day that the library burned.

He’d opened the book at the start of a new chapter, or more accurately the beginning of one of the stories that Livira was always going to weave into a coherent whole but never had. “The Phantom Queen”—it wasn’t one he’d ever heard her talk about. Though from what Evar had said during his stay on the plateau it might be that some of the book had actually been written by Livira whilst in the body of the assistant that had raised the canith children.

What strange fiction Livira might have created whilst in that timeless state Evar couldn’t say, but a familiar name at the foot of the page caught his eye. “Carlotte…”

Arpix, rather than starting at the beginning, began with the line thathad snared his attention.“ ‘It does look a bit like Carlotte.’ Leetar squinted up at the giant statue.”

And without transition Arpix was there with them. A wide square, bordered by tall buildings with balconies at every level where figures, made tiny by the distance, looked out from their dining tables, their hanging gardens, their soirees, and their gatherings. The light was different here, bright but gentled by some quality of the air. Moisture! Arpix breathed it in. Not the arid mountain air he’d always known, not the wind that leached the water from your skin as it skipped by.

“ItisCarlotte,” Arpix said, staring up at the familiar statue. In his time on the plateau only the head and one shoulder emerged from the ground, and the prominent nose had been damaged. Here it was perfect. “It’s her.”

“How would you know?” Livira was standing to his left, looking down at him.

“I…” Any attempt at an answer was lost in the realisation that Livira was towering over him. He’d been so dwarfed by the two statues in front of him, Carlotte and some unknown king, that he’d not noticed how almost everyone in the square loomed above him too. It was as if he and Livira had reversed their traditional positions where he stood head and shoulders taller than she did. He looked down at himself. “What?” He was dressed all in white, and where his arms emerged, his skin was as pale as the turns of linen that wrapped his body.

“Yolanda?” Livira knelt beside him. “Are you sick?”

“N…no…” Arpix shook his head. Somehow, he was a child. The same white child that had joined them just after Livira had escaped the king. Yolanda had been the one who led them to the Mechanism and the audience with the library’s founder, Irad, and with Jaspeth, the brother who opposed him.

“Why would anyone build a statue of Carlotte?” Leetar asked.

It felt like the wrong question. “How did Carlotte get to be queen?” Arpix asked in a girl’s voice. Asking how he got to be the white child seemed an even more pressing question, but something kept Arpix from posing it. The situation felt somehow fragile, like a page that might easily be torn. Arpix had nothing good to go back to. He wanted to stay. And to do that, some instinct told him that he should follow the rules of the piece.He’d always liked rules. At least as far as they represented a vessel that could hold compassion as well as the order that he always sought.

Livira shot Arpix a look. “How do you even know who Carlotte is?”

“I…uh.” Arpix could feel the story slipping away from him. Though suddenly he wasn’t sure itwasa story. Certainly, Livira couldn’t have written it as her normal self. She could never have anticipated the statue. And if she wrote it as the Assistant then maybe it was real, seen across time. Because there definitelywasa statue of Carlotte out on the edge of the Dust. “Is this real? You’re really Livira? Oanold’s men didn’t catch you again?”

“What?” Livira stared at him. “You know that he didn’t. Thank the gods.” She looked so sad and scared and horrified all at the same time that Arpix was sorry he’d asked.

“But he got Arpix, Salamonda, and Neera, and who else?”

“Only them.” Livira set her jaw. “But it hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen for thousands of years. And that’s plenty of time to figure out how to save them.”

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