Page 41 of The Book That Held Her Heart

Kerrol growled out a question.

“Window or door?” Yute supplied, before answering, “Doors seem far more civilised.”

“We should look around the back,” Anne said. Climbing the broad steps to the large front doors felt far too public. “But there won’t be anyone there. And the windows are all closed.” She huddled in her coat. It wasn’t cold for November, but it was still cold, and a mist was rising, the first of its tendrils questing among the bushes. Anne shivered. Amberg should welcome the fog. It was a night that needed something to hide its sins behind.

Yute led the way around the side of the building and, sure enough, there was a single door facing a gravelled area, a door of more modest size than those at the front entrance. Yute crunched his way up to it.

“Kerrol should try it,” Anne suggested. “He’s the strongest.”

Yute translated both ways. “He says that he spent his whole life until just a couple of weeks ago trapped in a library chamber, and never managed to open any of the doors that would have let him out. In the end it took a young woman very much like yourself to open the door he escaped by.”

Anne found this claim too strange to refute and wondered if it were perhaps some clever way of saying something she lacked the wit to recognise. Rather than argue, Anne went forward, and tugged on the letterbox. “Locked.” She stepped away.

Yute pursed his lips, then set a white fingertip to the keyhole. A moment later he gave a gentle push and the door swung inwards.

“It was locked,” Anne protested.

“You pulled. I pushed.”

“I…” Maybe she should have pushed, but it must have been locked. Late at night with all the lights off. Of course it was.

Yute went through. “The library still tends to let me go where I want to, even now.”

Anne followed on in. Kerrol came behind her, dipping his head beneath the doorjamb and growling something.

“It is dark, yes,” Yute agreed. “This is notthelibrary. Though parts of that lie in darkness too.”

“Itisthe library.” Anne patted around for the switch. A click, and the hallway filled with electric light. The doors to either side must lead into administrative rooms, the public area lay ahead.

“Ingenious.” Yute looked up at the nearest light then raised a hand to shield his eyes before looking away. “There don’t seem to be many books for a library…”

Anne edged past him. “This way.”

She was going to lead on but paused instead, finding herself emboldened by events, ready to ask more questions. “I almost understand why you’re here, Yute. Though I couldn’t properly put it into words. You fit with the library somehow. But Kerrol?”

“She’s asking why you’re here, Kerrol.”

Kerrol regarded her from his great height, eyes dark and assessing.

Yute translated the soft snarling. “He’s hoping to keep his brothers from killing each other. He says that he’s very good at changing their minds, but he’s even better at knowing when he can’t.” More rumbles, so deep that the sorrow bled from them, requiring no interpretation. “And perhaps, if he’s honest, he’s here so that he doesn’t have to watch them do it.” Yute looked up at his companion with compassion as if all of this might be news to him too.

Anne nodded and, unsure how to reply to such an admission, she led them along the corridor. The door at the far end was unlocked and brought them out behind the librarians’ desk. At first the rows of shelving were just suggestions in shadow, but after a little hunting she found the switches she wanted and turned on half the lights.

Yute lifted the hatch in the wraparound desk and went out among the shelves. “There don’t seem to be many books for a library…”

Kerrol strolled after him, making an unimpressed kind of snort. Yute began to wander, much as he had in Madame Orlova’s shop. Running his fingers across the spines of books as he went, as if the briefest of touches were sufficient to know each from prologue to epilogue. Kerrol, who could almost look over the tops of the shelves, prowled, the tension outside not forgotten. For her part, Anne watched the strangers that she had led to a place that had, long ago, seemed as holy and perhaps more mysterious than even the synagogue with its giant scrolls and ancient songs. Her father had often brought Anne to the library as a young girl, even though they lived above a bookshop. The bookshop, he said, was a beach where the currents of chance washed up this book or that book, and beachcombing throughsuch wonders had a charm all its own. The library, though, was a cultivated collection. The selection was, admittedly, only as broad as the minds of its librarians, and only as deep as the pockets of the city council. However, where the librarians saw a gap, they tried to fill it, acting with deliberation to ensure a full spread of answers to every question a curious mind might conjure. Or, failing that, perhaps at least to equip that person with the tools to discover their own answer.

The library, Anne had come to think, was an imperfect reflection of something divine, a shadow of the impossible. It was shaped by bias, prejudice, and held within its pages every human failing. And yet, in its conception and in its ideals there ran an echo of some great song that if it could only be heard would wrap every listener in its beauty and lift them to some higher, unattainable ground.

The violence of the night outside, the horror of seeing her loved ones taken away to uncertain futures, hadn’t left Anne. A large part of her still wanted to rage against it all, to demand that Yute and Kerrol use whatever magics they had to make things right. To scream at them for their aimless patience, for their wasting of time among the sleeping shelves whilst outside the book-burners spewed their vitriol, broke glass, and shattered lives. But she stood in silence and when Yute’s path took him from her view, she followed.

“This book”—Yute plucked a slim volume from the shelves, seemingly at random—“was written a century ago, by a man of your faith. Heinrich Heine. A poet. He says on page forty-seven, ‘Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.’ This I have seen recently with my own eyes. The wisdom sits here, waiting quietly to be found again.” He returned the book to the shelf and moved on.

Yute’s wanderings brought him to the foyer where wide steps led from the double doors up to an open, tiled space. Two grand statues in the classic style faced each other across the expanse of floor, and midway between them stood a wooden lectern where the librarians always left an open book as if welcoming visitors with an immediate offer of the printed page.

“Do you know who they are?” Yute nodded towards the statues.

“Plato and Aristotle,” Anne said from memory. “Though I don’t know which is which.” The two men stood in togas, one staring at the other overan open book, both with curling hair, fine beards, and marble musculature that seemed unlikely given that both were scholars rather than famed athletes. But then again, the library was a temple to fiction. The statues were almost certainly not marble either, but plaster reproductions.

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