Page 106 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

The sun shone, birds sang, the trees drank. The birds had taken their voices from the night-song that had haunted the darkness beyond the city walls—a beauty sharp with sorrow.

“I make this place,” Evar said softly. “It’s built from expectations.”

He sat with his back to the trunk of a tree, and watched the young woman sleep, letting the slow rise and fall of her chest count away time that might otherwise go nowhere. Had his expectation made her too? He’d come looking for the girl from his forgotten dream, and here with improbable convenience was someone who might fit that very hole in his memory. She seemed somehow familiar too. Doubt seized him. Was she even real? She looked almost too real to be trusted, like the colours that the rich folk had worn in the city: too vivid for an eye that had for decades rested its gaze on the library’s dark and tan vistas. Even sleeping, the woman had a vitality to her that seemed to shout, to urge him to his feet.

With a pang of guilt, he remembered Livira. He’d been ready to deal with any Escapes that might be waiting. And after that his plan had been to return to Livira’s pool in the hope that the water had re-established itself and that he might follow her to check on her safety, or perhaps to mourn yet another tragedy. On quiet feet he stole away from the sleeper and followed the row of pools in the direction of the future and of his home pool.

Livira’s pool had refilled. The ground around its edge still bore the scuffs and scars of Evar’s defence. Its unrippled waters reflected the sky through interlocking branches and, glancing up, he found the fractured end of the branch he’d torn away. It looked too thick for him to have wrenched it free. Evar stared down into the lightless depths. Many hours had passed. However the girl’s encounter with the Escape had gone, it would be over now. Whether he followed her now or in a short while made little difference.

He turned and started back towards the woman. He didn’t want to disturb her sleep, but he did want to talk to her. Even as he glanced her way again, his memory itched with recognition. She was familiar to him. He hoped it wasn’t in the same way that imagination had patterned his family’s faces onto the doomed citizens of the city he’d watched burn. But no—there was more here: somehow even though he couldn’t place her, he knew her. Evar’s heart began to beat harder, almost painfully so. This was her? In his mind she was the puzzle piece that would complete him, make him whole, like his siblings, like everyone else, not some broken thing limping through life. Even as he approached her, he acknowledged the unreasonable burden he’d heaped upon sleeping shoulders.

Back at the woman’s pool Evar stood, unsure. Livira had asked him if Clovis was pretty and he hadn’t really been able to answer her. He hadn’t known what pretty was. But he had a word for the sleeping face before him. Beauty. The quality that made his eyes linger, that gave him joy, that made him want more...

“I wasn’t sleeping!” The woman sat with a jolt and patted the ground to either side of her, disoriented, as if stumbling from her dreams.

“I—” Evar found his mouth unaccountably dry. “You were doing a remarkably good impression of it.”

“Evar!” The woman got to her feet, flustered, hair in disarray. “You’re safe!” She stepped towards him, half raising her arms to embrace him, then hesitated and let them fall as if suddenly shy.

“You know me?”

The woman’s shyness evaporated in a wave of exasperation. “Not this again! I’m—”

“Livira...” What her shyness had hidden her sharpness revealed. He looked at her, amazed. How had that ink-stained child become the woman before him? And yet that child remained if sought for, there in the eyes, there in the line of her jaw. “You’ve grown!”

“And you’re the same,” she said wonderingly. “How long has it been for you?”

“A day.” Evar shrugged. “Not a good one.” He met her gaze. “I’m glad to see you. I tried to follow...”

“And I tried to come back.” She pressed her lips into a troubled smile. “We can’t keep doing this. I’ll be an old woman next time. I’ll stagger up to you all grey and wrinkled and you still won’t know me...” She trailed off, studying his face, growing serious as if seeing something there that worried her. “A bad day? How bad?”

“Sabbers. They burned the city outside the library.”

Livira’s gaze flitted to the surface of the pool. “You were in there? Your tracks ended here.”

Evar nodded. He didn’t want her to ask questions. Somehow talking about it might be worse than seeing it happen. The difference between being slashed with a knife and slowly dragging that same blade through your own flesh.

“It must have been centuries before my time. Even more years before yours.” She frowned. “History might be going to repeat itself though. They’re back again, camping within sight of the walls, raiding across the kingdom. If it wasn’t for what the library’s taught us, they’d have overrun us already.”

“No?” Evar’s stomach contracted to a cold fist. The idea of such slaughter being visited on Livira wouldn’t fit into his mind. Unbidden images flashed across his thoughts, and he tried to close his imagination against them. “That can’t happen.” His eyes prickled with unwanted tears, and he looked away from Livira, staring down at the grass between them, ashamed of his weakness.

“I won’t ask if you’ve found her.” Livira changed the subject. “If it’s only been a day. It’s been years for me. Nearly seven years!” Her eyes widened. “Arpix! I forgot Arpix!”

“Who’s Arpix?”

“A friend.” Livira spun around trying to look in all directions at once. “ARPIX!” The girl could shout.

“I don’t see anyone.” Evar cast about, more worried that Livira’s shouts might summon Escapes than about the whereabouts of her friend.

“We drew a portal,” she said. “In Chamber Sixteen, so we wouldn’t be trapped if the Raven wandered off while we were gone. And we came through together. Only he wasn’t here when I arrived. I went back and he wasn’t there either. So then I hunted the wood for him, but he’d just vanished. And so I followed your tracks to this pool. I knew you’d have to come back through it, and I’d have the best chance of finding you if I just waited...”

“And then you fell asleep,” Evar finished for her.

“I didn’t mean to. It’s this place.” Livira shot him a fierce look.

“You came to the time you wanted to this visit. On your first visit the pool must have somehow chosen the ‘when’ for you. Maybe the pool—the portal—sent this Arpix to a time that was more important for him?” Evar offered. “And that’s why he’s not here.”

Livira twisted her mouth, seeming a little comforted. “Well, he’d better come back in one piece and the same age, that’s all I’m saying. He would never have come except for me. It’s my fault if anything happens to him.”

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