Page 21 of The Book That Held Her Heart

Chapter 11

Evar

Evar remembered being shot. It hadn’t hurt. It had been a punch that had somehow stolen his strength and left him kneeling at the mercy of the human soldiers. He remembered the one who had not been uniformed. The one-eyed man who had been about to gouge out one of Evar’s own eyes.

“Clovis!” Clovis had saved him.

Clovis had dragged him back to the reading room, back to Livira. He remembered Livira holding him, and how he had tried to stop her tears. But in the end his arms had been too heavy to lift.

Falling.That was the last thing he remembered. Falling!

Evar opened his eyes. Or thought he did, because at first it seemed that there was no difference. He saw a vast black sky. It took a moment for him to wonder how he knew it was a sky.

Because I’m on my back.He wanted to say the words, but they sounded only in his head.Because something is falling from the sky.“Rain?” It wasn’t rain, though. Even without ever having seen rain, Evar knew that was not what he was seeing.Snow perhaps?One of the white flecks appeared to be dropping towards him. As it came closer, following an erratic path, he understood it to be something far more familiar than snow. A page. It was a falling page. It veered away to land somewhere to his left.

“Evar?” His sister’s voice. “He’s waking up!”

Clovis’s face moved into Evar’s field of vision, softened by concern.

“Clo,” he croaked her name, and tried to move.

Starval crowded in from the other side, obscuring his view of the black heavens and the scattered fall of pages. “Take it easy. Mayland said you’re going to need time.”

“Can’t…move.” Evar frowned, straining to lift anything that could be lifted. He realised then that not only didn’t he hurt, he couldn’t feel anything at all. Not heat, or cold, or the ground beneath him, or his own hands as he tried to make fists.

“Mayland said you’d find it strange to start with.” Clovis echoed Evar’s frown.

“Had a big hole in you, brother. Too much blood in your lung. Not enough in the rest of you.” Starval’s gaze kept darting from here to there, alert for ambush.

“What…” Evar swallowed to wet his throat. “What did he do?”

“We should sit him up,” Clovis said.

Starval’s mouth made a flat line. He nodded and bent in. Together they started to lever Evar up.

“Livira?” He couldn’t even turn his head to look for her.

The look Clovis gave Starval was enough answer.

“Alive?” He couldn’t feel his body, but he could still feel pain.

“Yes…” Clovis said, trailing uncertainty.

“Kerrol?” Evar wanted Kerrol. Of all of them Kerrol really felt like an older sibling, combining authority with competence in an annoying but non-threatening way.

“Gone.” Starval looked grim.

“Not dead,” Clovis hastened to add. “He went with the white human. The older one.”

Sitting up did little to help Evar make sense of his surroundings. They seemed to be on a gently rolling landscape of loose pages and dust, everything around them black despite a directionless illumination bleeding from the air to paint all of them in a kind of half-light.

In the distance their surroundings became less certain, taking on a hazy aspect with almost surreal shapes suggested here and there. Evar blinked,wondering if the behemoth-sized creature, barely visible where it lumbered at the limits of his vision, were some after-effect of his ordeal.

His top half was bare, and his lolling head offered him a view of his own chest, along with the hole that had been punched through him. The wound looked too black, even if the blood had had time to dry and crust, and the hole had a curious liquid quality to it. The veins around that area seemed darker too. In fact, he’d never seen any veins crossing his ribs before. An image came to him, of a tiny black horse galloping around the perimeter of a white hand.

“Ah…” He understood it and, in that moment, raised his head. “Mayland did this. He used…the library’s blood.” The black stuff from which the Escapes shaped themselves in response to fear, and from which Yute had fashioned horses, flowers, butterflies, and fire. That same blackness now ran in Evar’s veins.

“It was the only way to save you.” Clovis removed the uncertainty from her voice but not her eyes.

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