Page 100 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“But you saved him?” Livira didn’t understand that part. “It was you who put the blood in him to start with.”

“I couldn’t watch him die,” Mayland said simply. “I wasn’t brave enough. Only Starval could do it. Surprise him so he’d never know. Never suffer.” He glanced at his brother. “But apparently he couldn’t either.”

“Is he dead?” Clovis snarled her question across both of them.

Mayland shrugged uneasily. “I don’t think Evar can fully die while the library lasts. But, from what Starval says, he might have met a physical death and been subsumed in the library’s essence.”

“I can’t…” The weight of her loss hit Livira unexpectedly, swinging in from the side beneath her defences. She’d always snorted at the collapse of the heroines she’d read about in similar circumstances. But here she was, falling.

Starval caught her, his swiftness a cruel reminder of Evar’s. Clovis was there a heartbeat later, one arm shoving her smaller brother aside as she supported Livira with the other. Arpix seemed to lumber up by comparison, but his hug was both more welcome and even more surprising than Clovis’s concern.

“You don’t hug.” A whisper as she held tight to her old friend.

“I do change.” His voice was choked with un-Arpix-like emotion, as if his grief for Evar had overwhelmed him nearly as much as hers had her.

Livira understood. She had seen all their stories in the moments she fought to draw everything together. There had been too many stories to take onboard at once, but she had seen them all, and now, with Clovis’s arm and Arpix’s hug keeping her upright, she remembered that they too had formed a bond, and sealed it in a manner that Livira would never have predicted for Crath City’s most reserved librarian—a title earned in the face of stiff opposition.

For a moment all Livira could think of was how the news might explode Carlotte’s head, and how pleased Evar would be for his sister and his best friend. The tears started immediately. Ugly, unchecked tears. Grief that shook her body like a flag in the wind and made her depend once more on the support of friends in order to keep her from the ground.

In the aftermath of any great struggle feelings of anti-climax, post-coital tristesse, hangover, and/or general depression are not unusual. What next? What now?

Potty Training, by Melinda Rees-Mogg

Chapter 45

Livira

Livira sat on the step of the missing potentate’s dais with her head in her hands. Carlotte sat beside her, pressed close, wise enough to say nothing. Leetar perched on her other side, the space of a hand between them. Livira could sense the woman wanted to speak but was abandoning one line after another as it reached her lips.

The rest of her friends, and, she supposed, enemies, stood around the throne room. The blackness, filling every doorway and window, gave the place an unearthly feel, as if it might be some grandiose stage set on which players were about to perform in the roles of ancient gods.

Yolanda was speaking with Yute. Livira saw it as a sign that this really was the end of the world. An estranged daughter talking to her father.

Starval had taken on the job of keeping Oanold under guard. Having the canith hulking over him had kept the man from complaint or snide remarks, so far. It seemed that Evar and Starval had happened upon Oanold in the most sympathetic incarnation imaginable for the man, and since neither of them had ever laid eyes on him before, they had been allowed time to warm to him.

Learning the larger truth had certainly soured Starval on the king who stood before him, but not to the point at which he was going to murder him on the spot. Clovis might have fewer reservations on that score, but Arpix had successfully kept her at a distance, despite his own reasons for despising and fearing Oanold. Even in her distress Livira noticed Clovisand Arpix’s new closeness, moving through each other’s personal space, one brushing against the other, like sibling cats raised to see each other as extensions of themselves. It made her own loss cut all the deeper.

Evar’s absence left Livira hollow. Her moments of near divinity in which she had seen the fabric of not just one but many worlds, laid bare before her, had equipped her with enough understanding to know that if Evar was out there, he wouldn’t be able to make it back to her until the small matter of the end of the library was resolved. The experience had not, however, equipped her with enough understanding to know if hewasstill out there in any meaningful sense. And if he had died, then the blame was squarely hers. She had left him when he needed her.

Where the throne had been, a portal now acted as a window to another place. If Livira were to turn round she knew she’d see the ganar Celcha, who had tried for so long to kill both her and Evar. That misplaced effort, based on incomplete evidence, had inspired Celcha to tread another path for the next century and more of her kind’s long life. The ganar had somehow reached the centre of the library, a journey that Livira imagined was less about miles covered and more about reaching some elevated state of enlightenment. She also imagined that somehow the destruction that her book was wreaking upon the library had made Celcha’s quest easier, opening new pathways for her. Causality rather than coincidence.

On the last stage of her journey Celcha had managed to shed her companions, directing each of them to places they wanted to be. Salamonda and Neera she had sent, along with other citizens of Crath, to a town named Tru where friends, including Jella, awaited them. Lord Algar and a contingent of the soldiers had returned to Crath City shortly after its sacking. Because they had not left the library since fleeing the city’s invasion, Celcha’s skills were able to return them in full. A dangerous destination, but the pull of the known proved strong.

Celcha was even now employing the wisdom, acquired over a lifetime of study, in an attempt to save the library from the collapse that Livira had initiated with her book. If such a repair could be achieved anywhere then the centre was that place. Thus far, all Celcha had managed was to slow the process’s acceleration.

The ganar’s position had allowed her to perform other minor miraclesthough, including finding and contacting Livira. At first the contact had been in the form of the throne tumbling through a newly opened void in the stonework beneath it. Livira’s initial thought had been that the book was working its destruction again and that cracks from the library were spreading out through the foundations of not just the city but the mountains themselves.

When it became apparent that a portal had formed, Livira, Yute, Yolanda, and others had come to peer in cautiously. To begin with, Celcha had not been visible. The view moved continuously, as if the other side of the portal were the eye of some questing cyclops. It looked like the library, and yet not like it. Smaller, somehow older, though the library had always seemed both ancient and timeless. The view moved swiftly, along narrow aisles whose shelves were stacked with scrolls, beneath vaulted roofs.

“Remarkable.” Yute’s voice trembled with awe. “I believe that’s Alexandria.”

“Where?”

“One of the foundational libraries from the first-cycle worlds.” Yute nodded to himself. The view pressed on into a pillared hall where stacks of clay tablets imprinted with innumerable sharp-edged marks rested on stone shelves. “Hanjanika,” Yute said, nodding again.

The journey continued and all resemblance to the library fell away as the viewpoint passed into a sequence of natural caves. By the light of fissures in the roof where vegetation trailed in with green fingers, Livira could see that the walls were covered with art, most of it simple and stylized, the shapes of herd animals, their motion captured in a few powerful strokes, the fleetness of a gazelle, the thunder of a buffalo, other objects of the hunt she couldn’t recognise, pigments not of her world, daubed by hands that might have shared little in common with hers.

The viewpoint swept on relentlessly into the dark. Here and there were islands of illumination where artists laboured on their endeavours by the smoky light of a single flame. And suddenly out into the blazing sunshine of a hardpan desert across which a near infinity of stones were arrayed with an order that couldn’t be nature’s work. No two the same, large, small, light, dark, but almost all of them flat, pieces of slate fractured from a cliff face by frost, river stones smoothed by millennia of patient flow, discs of rock fashioned by the sea and thrown upon the beach by a storm’s rage.

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