Page 102 of The Book That Held Her Heart

A grey-haired man in uniform hurried towards them. Kerrol’s fists closed without instruction, remembering the last uniformed man to approach them in the town. Yute took a scrap of paper from an inner pocket of his robe and held it up.

“Ah.” The man slowed his approach. “I wasn’t told there was a school inspection today.”

“It wouldn’t be much of a surprise inspection if you were told about it, now would it?” Yute smiled.

“No.” The man laughed; it made him look younger. “I don’t suppose it would. I’ll let you be about your business then, Herr…”

“Yute,” Yute said.

“Herr Yute.” The man nodded. He paused. “We’ve another visitor today. A scheduled one.”

“I know.” Yute smiled. “I was hoping to meet her.”

The man pointed to one of the newest classrooms.

Yute thanked him and walked towards the door. He waved his piece of paper across a light near the entrance, and the door opened, surprising Kerrol with a strange beeping sound. Mayland started at the sound, revealing his well-concealed tension. He moved on, rumbling in complaint.

Yute followed the corridor and came to a stop before a door, looking into the room beyond through its window. Kerrol joined him and stooped to see. Mayland waited behind them, his mane brushing the ceiling.

The classroom held about two dozen children, all sitting at their desks. They looked more than half-grown, but Kerrol hadn’t enough experience with children of any kind to be able to hazard a guess at their age. A fair-haired young teacher stood to one side of the room, her hands knotted together, eyes bright. The children’s attention was fixed upon a frail figure sitting at the head of the class, facing them, presenting the back of their head to the door. A halo of wispy hair, as white as Yute’s, seemed to float around the person’s skull, turned into some kind of aura by the sunlight that slanted in through the far windows.

Kerrol tried to speak, found his throat too dry, swallowed, and tried again. “You couldn’t have made it sooner?”

“The efforts that brought us here were immense. To say mountains were moved would not be exaggerating. But the library’s sense of timing has always been its own.”

The library seldom gave a person what they wanted. Kerrol had to hope that it made more of an attempt to give them what they needed.

Applause broke out within the classroom, the children clapping, led by their teacher who clapped hardest of all. Not joyous applause, Kerrol thought, but the kind offered in respect and gratitude. He hadn’t the skill in reading human faces that he had for canith ones, but he thought he saw sadness in the children, shock even.

The figure in the chair looked away from her audience towards the exit. She stood up unsteadily and said something to the teacher. The young woman started to address her class as the old woman picked up her stick and began to walk towards the door.

She wasn’t merely old. “Ancient” would be a fairer word. Wrinkled, shrunken, bowed beneath the weight of many decades. Yute opened the door as she approached.

“Anne,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”

“Yute.” She nodded, then looked up at Kerrol with watery eyes. “Kerrol. I wasn’t sure I would ever see you two again. But I always hoped so.”

“We…we came back as soon as we could.” Kerrol wasn’t sure why he had to fight to keep his voice steady. She was just old. The child had become a woman and grown old. Nature’s work. It shouldn’t hurt him like this.

“And you’ve brought a friend?” Anne peered over Yute’s shoulder.

“My brother Mayland.” A short introduction, Kerrol thought, but the alternative seemed to be practically a book in itself.

“Come.” Anne shuffled past them. “There’s a bench in the playground. On the shady side. We’ll sit there.”

And so they sat, looking out across the empty sun-drenched yard, Yute and Kerrol on either side of the girl they’d left behind yesterday. Mayland sitting on the ground in front of them with his knees drawn up.

Without speaking, Anne reached out with her right arm and took Yute’s hand in hers. She took Kerrol’s in the other, her age trembling in her limbs.

“You have a number.” Kerrol wasn’t sure what to say, so he said what he saw, a blurry number tattooed on Anne’s forearm, exposed as she’d reached for his hand.

“I show it to the children when I come to schools to talk about what happened. For some of them it’s not until they see it that they really believe me. Some of them need to touch it.”

Kerrol covered the numbers with one finger. They were ugly. He couldn’t read Anne well, but he could read her well enough to tell that the story those numbers told was a terrible one, bad enough that just touching them would fill a person’s eyes with tears. He wiped his own with the back of his other hand. “We should have made you come with us.”

“No.” Anne shook her head, voice fragile with age. “No, you should have listened to me and respected my decision. Which was exactly what you did.”

Kerrol opened his mouth but didn’t find words there.

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