Page 15 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“If she came to this time,” Yolanda persisted, “she would be a ghost just as we are. How would anyone make a statue of a ghost?”

Livira’s frustration spilled out and anger coloured her voice. “I’m not saying—”

“We could just go and see?” Leetar interrupted before Livira got into full flow. She had one arm extended, finger aimed at two vast bronze doors sitting atop a flight of steps on which guards in plumed helms stood to attention. “Whoever the queen is, she lives in there.”

Livira shrugged. The palace Leetar had pointed out would be their best option. She gestured with an open hand for Leetar to lead the way.

Yolanda followed on after Livira. “They tend to make statues of people after they die.”

“You don’t know Carlotte. She’d want to see it for herself.” Livira climbed the steps behind Leetar, all three of them passing unseen between watchful guards.

Livira opened her mouth to add what was both obvious and at the same time a revelation—namely that Carlotte must be married if she were queen. That she must be sharing her bed with a king. But as her lips parted, a sound like the cracking of the world ran through her, a knife of noise, as agonising in its volume as in its discordant sharpness. She felt immediately fractured, her mind in different places, too many images filling her eyes. Arpix bruised and bloody, head hung in defeat. Yute standing in some lesser library beneath an unwavering light, a slim, drab book in his hand, wonder on his face. Evar lying in darkness, his pale skin the only source of light, eyes closed, deathly still.

Her vision cleared slowly, other images of places and times she had known trying to claim a place, though none as vivid as those of Arpix, Yute, and Evar. Livira found herself lying on the steps, partly intersecting the stonework. She levered herself up wincing. “That really hurt!”

A white-faced Leetar got to her knees beside Livira. “I thought we couldn’t be harmed. Not here. Not like we are.”

“We can’t.” Yolanda corrected herself. “It shouldn’t be able to happen.” She got to her feet and directed her puzzled gaze at Livira. “It…it’s almost like the damage your book does. But it can’t be reaching us here. Not already?”

Livira found it hard to be guilty about her book. She didn’t feel that anything she’d done by writing it or by following her curiosity into the Exchange had been deserving of such an outcome or overmuch censure. “I’m pretty sure of one thing. We won’t find the answer out here on the steps.”

Leetar took the hint. She glanced around at the guards, sharing Livira’s sense of amazement at their indifference, then hurried on up the stairs. She stopped short at the great doors, glancing back for instruction. Livira simply took her arm and dragged her through.

“Oh, I didn’t like that at all!” Leetar stood shivering in her stained finery, looking back at the door, and flinching away as Yolanda walked through it as though it were a trick of the light rather than tons of bronze and timber.

Leetar pulled herself together and led on. Livira trusted the girl’s instinct to navigate the corridors of power even in a different nation and era. Leetar might be guessing, but those guesses would be more informed than any Livira or Yolanda might make.

The path to the king’s court proved to be a straightforward one, following the broad corridor—that in any other circumstances Livira would have called a grand hall—from the imposing exterior doors to a pair of similarly huge but far more lavishly decorated doors at the far end. In the process they passed a dozen chambers, all of grand design and indulgently furnished, but of unknown purpose.

The far set of doors stood open, though guards in elaborate armour waited to interrogate anyone that approached. Beyond them a capacious throne room, with walls of white and gold, held nearly a hundred of what must be the citadel’s most important people. Livira couldn’t tell if they were aristocrats, part of the royal family, or merchants, but she could tell that all of them were eye-wateringly rich.

The size of the room meant that it wasn’t crowded. The glittering courtiers mingled in groups. Musicians at the far end of the chamber entertained without their playing filling the space. And before a dais that supported two great thrones, one silver and one gold, a more favoured group of five spoke directly to the man on whose brow the crown rested.

Livira recognised the king from his statue. The sculptor had captured his features with rare skill, and little time seemed to have passed since completing the work, as the man appeared unchanged. The curling hair was brown and thick, the eyes sharp, intense, a light colour. The king was still young, closer to thirty than to twenty, but fresh-faced, not yet corrupted by the excess to which his station gave access.

“It’s him!” Leetar said.

“It is,” Yolanda agreed.

None of them needed to have seen the statue, nor for the man to be wearing a crown. Their eyes would have converged on his if he had been the pauper in the crowd, or the least remarkable of men, an average of his fellows, with no single feature to latch upon. Livira tried to understand it. The man was lit by a different light. As if the sun found him and him alone on a dull day. He seemed like a figure added to a painting at a later date, by a different artist, somehow at odds with everything around him, edged by a border that didn’t quite match the larger scene.

Livira wove her way towards the dais, avoiding the courtiers. Her gaze kept returning to the empty throne beside the king’s. Shouldn’t Carlotte be sitting beside her husband, just as her statue stood beside his?

Yolanda and Leetar followed, Leetar exclaiming in alarm when she inadvertently discovered the unsettling effects of having someone walk through you. As she stood shaking off the thoughts and memories of the old aristocrat, and the man walked on with a shiver of his own, the king’s head turned in their direction.

He raised a hand, and then, slowly, a finger on that hand. The lord addressing him faltered and fell silent. The king stood from his throne, looking from Yolanda to Livira to Leetar with a puzzled expression.

“We should go,” Leetar hissed.

“Why?” Livira asked. “What’s he going to do? Have the guards arrest us?”

“Weshouldgo,” Yolanda said. “He shouldn’t be able to see us. Such things are dangerous. Do not, under any circumstances, speak to him.”

“You three!” The king approached the edge of his dais. He pointed at Yolanda. “Am I the only one seeing this?”

A silence rippled out across the room, snuffing conversations. The courtiers closest to the king exchanged glances and stiffened their faces against expression. The woman most directly in the line indicated by the royal digit dropped into a deep curtsey amid a billowing sea of plush blue taffeta. “Me, sire?”

“No! Not…you.” The king shook his head, stepped from the dais, and advanced on Livira and her companions at a brisk walk.

---