Page 49 of The Book That Held Her Heart

Evar

Falling, Evar discovered, was every bit as terrifying as he had imagined it would be when Livira had taught him to fly. Instinct tensed his everything as he dropped through the far-too-penetrable dark. Aeons had constructed the canith body to expect the sensation of falling to end swiftly and painfully. When, after the first scream had emptied his lungs, Evar found himself still plummeting, further acceleration opposed by the great rushing wind of his already fatally fast descent, he started, ever so slowly, to unclench.

He still had hold of Starval’s hand, but the roar of air passing around and between them made any communication impossible. Slowly, it began to be the unaccustomed darkness that most unnerved Evar. Until his recent escape from the library, he had never experienced a night, and only in the tunnels beneath the plateau had the darkness thickened to something like what now wrapped him.

It seemed bizarre that it was possible to get bored of falling, but Evar found his fear of a sudden end to what had felt like a short trip was being replaced by the worry that there wasn’t going to be an end to it at all.

“I—”

A sudden jolt cut off his first attempt to complain. A jolt, a twist, flashes of light, and he ended up sprawled across something more forgiving than the library floor, with a mouthful of grass.

Evar rolled to all fours, spitting, ready to fight. The Exchange lay allaround him. Clovis had fetched up against a tree and had some sharp complaints about the situation. Arpix lay dazed, his legs still in the pool they all appeared to have been spat from. Mayland was getting to his feet.

“…what in the hel—” Starval dropped from a nearby tree, followed by a shower of leaves.

Evar went to help Arpix up.

“Something’s different.”

Now that Arpix mentioned it, Evar saw that he was right. The sky, that had always been a timeless blue, had turned an ominous shade of grey. And a chill breeze had insinuated itself among the trees, twitching at the leaves. To Evar it seemed a wound more grievous than cracks in the library floor, like the one they’d dropped into. The Exchange had always filled him with a kind of peace, a muted joy, the sort of contentment that had made him want to sink roots too and remain a part of the place. Now, it felt wrong, like a song sung off-key.

“I didn’t think we’d end up here.” Starval brushed leaves off his leathers.

“I brought us here.” Mayland wasn’t looking at any of them, but staring up at the branches, turning slowly as if he might be hunting for the sun.

“This pool should take us back to where we came from,” Arpix was explaining to Clovis, whose ventures into the Exchange had been limited to two brief excursions, on one of which she’d made a spirited effort to kill Livira. “Though, since we came from a crack in the ground…I’m not really sure.” He pointed along the row. “If I’ve got my bearings right, that’s the future, and the past is back there.” He indicated the pools marching off to his left. “And each of the parallel rows is another world, I believe. Each with their own past and future pools.” He glanced towards Mayland. Evar guessed that the human had a list of questions as long as his arm, but was naturally hesitant to engage with the canith who had murdered the head of the librarians’ order in this very place.

“So, where has this damn book gone?” Clovis asked the question of nobody in particular while removing a piece of bark from her mane.

“There are lots of pools to choose from…” Evar rolled his neck. As much as he hated to be dependent on Mayland, it seemed that without his brother their chances of finding either the book or Livira were essentially zero.

“It’s not in any of these.” Mayland continued his study of the branches as if Oanold and the stolen book might be hiding in a tree.

Arpix couldn’t restrain himself any longer. “You appear to have ruled out all of space and time. Where else do you suggest we look?”

By way of reply, Mayland waved a hand and somehow the action divided Evar’s vision. Every tree became two overlapping images of a tree, pulling slowly apart from one another. As the distance between them grew, each image doubled again and the speed with which they were parting company increased. The gaps widened, the doubling happened again, the speed increased.

Within the span of a few heartbeats a great stack of identical Exchanges layered the space above them, ghostly and translucent, and with some sense unconnected to his eyes, Evar knew that the layers repeated below them too.

“Time and space.” Mayland encompassed their surroundings with a sweep of his arm. “Possibility.” He pointed upwards. “May have beens, might have beens, must have beens. In short: alternatives. That’s where the book fell.”

“How do we get up there?” Evar didn’t care about the wriggling of time. He cared about how he felt, and he felt that each hour he wasted was an hour in which Livira faced dangers without him. To his mind and body, the conviction was as real as the falling had been once he’d dropped into the crack, but unlike the plunge, the shock of it wasn’t wearing off the longer it went on.

“It’s more a question of where we want to get to.” Mayland began to climb steps that weren’t there, rising towards the first of the perhaps infinite layers.

“Wait!” Evar tried to follow. “How are you doing that? Wait!”

Mayland glanced back, irritated. “I doubt any of you who can’t work out how to follow me are going to be much use.”

“I wasn’t aware that being useful was a necessary qualification for being part of our family,” Evar found himself scolding. “Go on then, you’ve walked away from us all before.”

Mayland continued his ascent, without looking back. “We’re not a family, we’re a chance alignment.”

“That’s all any family is!” Evar shouted.

Mayland stopped. Dark and curiously grim eyes found Evar’s. He drew a deep breath, and said, “Brother, you really would be better off walking away from this. Staying here. Doing anything else. But if you really must come, then just climb the stairs.”

“What stairs?”

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