Page 99 of The Book That Held Her Heart

Livira had seen too much to believe that she had seen the limit. Therewere more directions to take, more corners to turn, more dimensions to explore. The book was scattered? The others were scattered?

She reached for Evar first. He needed her. She’d seen him lying there, a broken thing on the floor. She reached…and found nothing. Panic seized her. Had he died? Had she let him die? Had they finally found each other only for her to doom him? All she had needed to do was close the door on everything else. To lock them both safe within one story. One maybe. And leave the rest to fall where they might.

One maybe…Livira found her new direction. She held her book, her weapon, the book that wouldn’t burn, and drew on it, seeking all its shadows and reflections, all its maybes and might have beens.

A vast shadowy multiplicity bloomed around her. The ghosts of ghosts, the walls of the palace repeated and repeated, variations on a theme, growing more and more different with whatever served as distance in this new place. If she reached far enough the throne room might not just have a different design but sit hundreds of yards to the left, or not exist at all, further and the city itself became a question, impermanent against the constancy of the mountains. And perhaps, were she to reach far enough, even the mountains might dance, rising and falling to the tune of different geological refrains.

Stamped clearly through a dozen or so of the nearest maybes were images of her book, all of them in similar variations of the throne room she stood in. All of them close to the potentate who had claimed them.

In one maybe, the potentate really was Oanold, and he faced Clovis, flame-haired and fierce, Arpix at her side looking pale but unusually determined. In another possibility Oanold was a tavern landlord, currently being helped from a cage not unlike the one that held Yute and Kerrol. Starval had opened the door but hung on the bars for support, bleeding from several holes punched through him by bullets. The potentate lay slumped behind the assassin, the hilt of a throwing knife jutting from his eye.

More books, more maybes, more variations of Oanold, more of Livira’s friends, more versions of them, a handful of Arpixes, of Clovises. She found Yolanda and Leetar. Even Mayland, hunting the book. In two possibilitieshe already had it in his hands, and as she touched upon him he looked up, frowning, sensing but not understanding her presence.

In none of these maybes could she see an Evar, though her vision stayed close to the book in each of them, so it might be that Evar was just beyond her sight. Even so, a quiet panic started to close in around her heart. She saw him as she had deserted him, crumpled beside the broken bed where they had shared their love. Abandoned where she had left him. Dying.

Livira shook the feeling off, or tried to. She would find him. She would unite the book and summon Evar into being. Somehow.

Seeing through a god’s eyes, Livira understood that all of this had been the work of two mistakes, three if you counted her own and Evar’s unsanctioned adventures in and out of the Exchange. Arpix had destroyed a Mechanism, sending Oanold and the book tumbling into possibility, spreading both through a stack of similar maybes. And Mayland had let his own hubris lead him and his family in a chase, where his imperfect understanding had scattered them across Oanold’s “landing site.”

Join the books.

That’s what Yute had said: join the books. Livira saw it now. The book was the common thread. Making the many into one would draw a multitude of threads together. Easily said. Hard to do.

Livira opened her book, the pages fanning in the arc between two covers. Every shadow of the book opened too. The easy part.

Every story wanted to run. They wanted to spread like water spilled upon a slope. They soaked in, trickled here, flowed there, fingered their way into places she never imagined they might go. They took to the very air itself and let the wind have its say. Each story sank its roots deep, dividing, dividing, and dividing again. They resisted direction. They refused instruction. Each character took a voice of their own, and “no” became a favoured word.

To close the book, and with it, each of its shadows, would unite them. Livira knew this. Knowing it made it so. That was part of the lesson. But to close the book—that was the hard part. To close the book was to steer the story towards its end, to weave in or cut short every thread and fibre. To gather the spilled water and return it to the shattered glass. To bottlethe genie once more. Ending any tale was an exercise in narrowing possibility, closing off maybes, until in one moment every thread that had been seeded passed through the eye of the same needle.

Livira pressed on the opposing covers, the strength within her arms irrelevant in the face of the forces against her. She brought the whole of her will to bear. She had written this book across two centuries, across a life, and now she came to the sharp point, the place where it would make her bleed. She pushed with the whole of herself, knowing that in the singular result there might be no place for Evar, knowing that what happened when those pages finally came together was not within her control. She could ask. She could not demand.

There comes a point when a mind presses against some immovable thing where either the thing becomes movable, or the mind breaks. Livira wasn’t sure whether thesnapthat ran through her, top to bottom, was the former or the latter.

The book in her hands was smoking gently, disproving the old adage, for there was no fire. It seemed somehow more solid, more real than it had before. Livira looked up and found that she was on her knees, still on the dais, still beside an empty throne. The throne room looked much the same, save that the floor was black, a smooth unbroken black like the blood of the library, and every doorway and window showed the same inky night beyond it.

The swordsman who had been about to kill her was gone, the potentate too, the Saviour’s people with them. Yute and Kerrol stood roughly where they had been, but the cage had vanished. Starval stood where she had seen him in her vision, patting at his wounds in surprise and finding them gone. Clovis and Arpix were facing the throne, not far from Yute. Clovis looked confused. Arpix even more so, swallowing hard, both hands on his neck as if checking that his head was still on his shoulders.

Yolanda stood alone on the far side of the throne room. Mayland leaned over the musicians’ balcony, hands gripping the railing. Leetar was close on Livira’s left. Carlotte by the main doorway, framed in darkness, and just ahead of her, Oanold—not one of his alternatives, not the ones who had walked different paths, but “her” Oanold, the venal king who had ordered the slaughter of Evar’s people and eaten his own.

“Where’s Evar?” Livira turned her back on the bewildered king. “Where is he?” She ran to Yute, her mentor, her master in so many things, Yute who had known the answer that brought them all together again. All except Evar. She took the librarian’s white hands in hers. “Evar?”

“I don’t know, Livira. The fewer alternatives he survived into…the less there would have been for you to take hold of.”

“No. I would never have let him…” She would never have let him slip through her fingers, she had been going to say. But hadn’t she done just that? Hadn’t she had him in both hands? Hadn’t he been literally locked into her by their passion? And yet here she stood without him. Whose fault was that if not hers?

Starval, black mane at wild angles, pain still on his face despite the absent wounds, took a step towards her. “I tried…I tried to kill him.”

Livira shook her head violently, sure that Evar’s brother had misspoken.

“I stabbed him.” Starval looked at his hands. “The last I saw him was when he threw himself down a stairway packed with enemies to protect my back.” He turned away and pointed at Oanold. “So I could save this man.”

Livira knew it to be true. She had looked upon the scattered maybes and might have beens through the eyes of a god before she brought them together by closing her book. The story of each had been printed upon her mind. Starval and Evar had gone to save Oldo because he had tried to save the Amacar children, and Evar wanted to break through the armour that Starval had placed around his soul. He’d wanted to make his brother step back into the world and be a person in it, not a weapon. He had wanted to show his brother something good, and worthwhile. And that thing had been Oanold, a version of him thrown into different circumstances by chance, faced with different lessons and choices. Not a perfect man, probably not even a good one, but one who had done good, and certainly one who was far from being a terror.

Even if Evar had been in more than one maybe, if he had thrown himself down those stairs in each one of them…and fought his way up another set to answer her need and save her in that tower of stories…then she had left him there.

Livira’s eyes found Mayland, up on the balcony. He looked down on all of them as though they were pieces in his game. “You paid Starval to killEvar.” She said it loud enough for all of them to hear. Clovis’s gasp became a truly scary growl before it finished.

“I did,” Mayland agreed, not looking away from her. “He has the library’s blood running in his veins. The destruction of the library would destroy him too, and it would be an ugly death. I couldn’t let him stand in the way of our freedom from the library’s tyranny. The knife was kinder.”

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