Page 46 of The Book That Held Her Heart

The din of battle died as soldiers began to understand that something had changed. Without warning, the remaining skeer turned and fled to all points of the compass, some trampling more of Chertal’s troops as they ran, others hitting trees, some of which toppled. The two fallen skeer began to haul themselves brokenly away, crushing wounded men and women as they went. Soldiers finally stopped those two by driving spears into the most obvious of their eye sockets.

Chertal emerged, unsteady on his feet, armour running crimson. Inone gauntleted hand he held an iron ball. He reached clear ground and thrust his prize aloft.

The cheering that followed was loud enough to drown out whatever he had to say but a pale shadow of what six thousand voices would sound like.

Livira hoped the ganars’ weapon would serve Chertal and his people well. Looking around at the few hundred still on their feet and the scattered survivors stumbling from the trees, it was clear that the cost had been ruinous.

“Come on.” Yolanda interposed herself between them and the king, stepping through the fallen. “We need to go.”

Livira had expected Carlotte to protest, or at the very least to drag out a dramatic leave-taking, but she hung her head and allowed herself to be led away.

The horror of hunger is not how completely it strips away humanity—one pain will do that as well as another. The horror is that it happens slowly enough for us to see it go, a strand at a time, until that ugly, mewling appetite lies naked for all to see.

Intermediate Cookery—Cajun Style, by Gordon Bennett

Chapter 22

Arpix

Arpix managed to restrain himself and not run to join the queue for the fruits of Celcha’s magics. He told himself that waiting was the civilised thing to do, that he had waited this long to eat and could easily wait a little longer. Even so, had the ganar’s flask been even a touch smaller, Arpix suspected he would have been amongst the crowd of half-starved soldiers, scrabbling for his own bite.

The first of the soldiers, though they might have requested roast beef, fresh bread, or anything else their imagination could summon, asked instead for water. Celcha dripped the library’s blood and where each drop fell, a brimming bucket stood. The sight of soldiers quenching their long thirst and wiping the grime from their faces with wet hands was nearly enough to break Arpix’s reserve. He could somehow smell the water—though he’d been sure that water held no scent—and it was enough to wake the awful thirst that had been building ever since his return to the library.

Clovis held back too, saying that she wouldn’t lower herself by standing in line with the troops. Arpix suspected that she would actually have relished fighting for food, but to stand behind the soldiers who had slaughtered her people was more than she could stomach. Violence would be only a sneer away.

In time, the queue shrank to just two of the civilians who had until recently been the soldiers’ prisoners and prey, just as Arpix had. He stood behind the last of them, and after helping himself to water he asked Celchaif he might have a plate of butter cookies, the ones he remembered from Salamonda’s kitchen and that had haunted his dreams across five hungry years on the Arthran Plateau. The ganar took his hand and let another drop of the blood fall, tilting the flask further than she had at the start. And there, in his open hand, on a glazed earthenware plate, were eight golden, buttery cookies, as perfect as he had ever imagined.

Arpix was so astonished, despite seeing the miracle dozens of times already, that he promptly dropped the plate with a despairing cry.

Clovis caught it. So fast. So fluid. So sure, that she took his breath away. She raised the plate, its precious burden still in place. “Yours.”

“Do you— Would you like one? Some?” He received the plate in hands that trembled just as much as Salamonda’s had, his mouth full of saliva, his stomach a hard and demanding knot.

Clovis sniffed the plate, inhaling so deeply that Arpix half expected the topmost cookies to start lifting towards her nose.

“You keep them. I’ll have mine.” She stepped forward, towering above Celcha. “Steak. Please.”

For far too short a time Arpix lost himself in an ecstasy of eating. He filled his mouth, shuddered with pleasure, remembered to chew, swallowed, filled his mouth. His resolution to pace himself joined the one about keeping some for later, in the graveyard of good intentions.

At last he looked up, wiping crumbs from his mouth with one hand while holding his belly with the other. Clovis had already devoured her steak, whose merits she had either read about or picked up from her brothers and was licking her teeth with enormous satisfaction. The gaze she turned on him was accompanied by a half-smile. A smile that suggested she still had appetites to be met.

With their hunger dented, the canith and Arpix grouped together while Celcha led on, bound for the door by which the ganar automaton had entered. Salamonda and Neera came to join them, Salamonda walking boldly up among the towering canith and giving Arpix a rib-creaking hug, while Neera hung back, still nervous.

“You saved us all,” Salamonda said, her face pressed into Arpix’s chest. “I don’t know how, and I’m happy keeping it that way. But itwasyou.”

Arpix didn’t try to deny it, although the result had been somewhatcataclysmic, and only luck had prevented Salamonda from tumbling into the cracks that spread from the destruction of the Mechanism. Slowly, he freed himself from the old woman’s embrace. Over the course of their years on the Arthran Plateau, Salamonda had provided Arpix with more mothering than his own loving but undemonstrative mother had managed in the twenty years prior to their stranding. In consequence, he bore the current attentions without complaint until the soldiers coming up behind encouraged them both to move.

Clovis eyed Salamonda’s hugging without comment, showing her teeth to Neera, who fell back three more paces. Arpix threw Clovis an admonishing glance and beckoned Neera to join them. His gaze lingered on the shabby line of Oanold’s troops following the ganar, the gift-giver, source of their food. None of them that he had noticed had asked for meat of any kind. It seemed impossible that these men and women, now exchanging grins of relief at being fed and watered, and perhaps at having the burden of the king’s authority removed from their shoulders, were the same who had literally been eating their fellow citizens alive not much more than a day previously. How long after the dust and blood were washed from their hands and faces would their crimes continue to stain them? Would they forgive themselves, forget, move on with their lives, settle, marry, produce children? As if they had not been monsters. As if the horrors behind them belonged to strangers. Perhaps, having taken on the skins of ogres all together rather than singularly would make it easier to shed them and walk away. A shared offence, owned by nobody.

Arpix found it hard to imagine that he would forgive them. But also, that he might live among them for years to come and somehow maintain this level of…was it hate he felt? Arpix didn’t think he had ever hated before. It felt like sorrow, but with the knives turned in every direction, not merely inwards. He didn’t like it. He should, he thought, find a way to leave the soldiers behind, though they constituted the bulk of the survivors. Without the uniforms only their relative youth would mark them out among the others who escaped the city.

“You think too much.” Clovis took his hand and pulled him along, keeping pace with the others.

“Perhaps I do.”

“You hate them too.” Clovis motioned with her head to indicate those behind them, not looking back.

“Everything about what happened makes me sad.” Arpix couldn’t deny what she’d said. “At least you can tell yourself they’re a different species. To me, they’re a mirror. They’re telling me that something’s rotten at the core. This cycle Jaspeth says the library binds us to. The reason Mayland wants to destroy it…It’s not the library, it’s us. It’s humans.” He looked at the hand Clovis hadn’t taken control of. “It’s me.” Their eyes met, hers large and grey, his feeling like small, hot beads, prickling in their sockets, insufficient windows onto an insufficient soul.

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