Page 27 of The Book that Broke the World

She advanced on Evar, the crop not so much as rustling as she passed through it.

Evar turned away from his brother without answering his question and walked off towards the Soldier, who had found Malar in his path and stopped.

“Did you find it in this tower of yours?” Kerrol called after him, still talking about the book.

Livira took her chance, hurrying to walk alongside Evar. She glanced up at him, wondering what he would think now, knowing she was with him back before he had ever met her. The thought made her dizzy, turning wheels within wheels as she considered how many ghosts might have watched her through her life, might even be watching her now, and how all those moments were threaded through time.

The assistant was right—too much of this would cause problems—reality had indeed begun to feel very delicate. She reached for the book, hoping that bringing it forward, out of the loop that wrapped it around two centuries, might be as simple a matter as just taking hold of it. Her fingers brushed the cover and she felt a buzz in her fingertips, as if they might actually be able to touch something in this place. Hope swelled. She tried to take a grip of the book and, much like turning a page, she was gone.

—

A high-ceilinged drawing room painted itself into being around Livira. A room large enough to contain all the trainees’ sleeping chambers but decorated with the detailed intricacy that a master craftsman might spend on a jewellery box. A table stretched nearly the length of the chamber, covered with white lace, painted porcelain, crystal goblets and flutes, with scrolled silver tureens and wide silver platters whose edges frilled and cavorted in the ecstasies of design. In the gaps, candlelight reflected from the depths of the darkest and most polished mahogany.

Ornamentation reached the rafters, or would have if they could be seen behind a flat plaster sky whose whiteness had been moulded into an upside-down landscape of raised patterns, a deep relief whose architecture radiated outwards from a central boss in ever more extravagantly complex circles. Livira’s experience of interiors ranged from the mud-walled huts of her infancy to the rectilinear utilitarianism of the librarians’ complex. None of the great and good had ever invited her into their homes. The closest she’d got to genteel living was the comfortable chaos of Yute’s five-storey home. But she had, once, been beneath the roof of the king’s lesser palace and this dining hall that she had written herself into must be, she surmised, based on that experience and on her imagination of what such places looked like—augmented by her own voracious reading.

The other diners, who had up to this point been blurs upon the scrolling excess of their high-backed chairs, began to solidify into real people who could have been plucked from the glittering crowd that had stood at the steps before the fifth door of the Allocation Hall on the day Livira had so rudely pushed in among the darling children of Crath City’s aristocracy. That act had been impulsive rather than considered. She’d had no specific goal in mind, simply the desire—or perhaps it had been closer to a need—to rebel against the judgements that had been placed upon her merely because of her appearance.

Ten years later, many of those same people had sat beneath the king’s roof and watched as Yute presented Livira before the throne to mark her elevation to librarian. Now they sat at her right and at her left, reaching for dessert wine in sparkling crystal flutes.

With a shock Livira recognised Lord Algar, one seat down from the head of the table, a most honoured guest. He still wore his customary crimson eyepatch, but his diplomat’s robes had been replaced with a dark velvet dinner jacket whose cuffs and lapels were edged with piping the colour of dried blood.

“Gods of death. I’m so bored.”

The mutter came from the seat beside hers and Livira glanced round to discover Meelan lowering an empty glass.

“Meelan!” For a moment all Livira could think about was the small group of her friends huddled at the centre circle as flames and smoke surrounded them. That frantic ever-changing mix of fear and bravery, hope, resignation, worry for each other, disbelief. At the time she had been armoured in the numbness of the assistant that had almost sealed her in, all her focus upon drawing that last circle to save them. The memory hadn’t had the opportunity to resurface since, but it did now, a leviathan cruising from the darkness that lies beneath imagination towards a distant glimmering light, bursting through the mountainous tide of its own arrival, making every other wave no more than a ripple. “Meelan!” A shout, a sob, a desperate gasp as she threw her arms around him and squeezed with a passion that was two hundred years in the making.

Genteel conversation stopped, sliced through and unsustainable in the face of such drama. Livira felt Meelan struggle for a moment, then stop, and finally return her squeeze in an embrace that while a pale shadow of her own was at least not a rejection.

“Sister?” Meelan extracted himself with gentle strength. “Are you unwell?” Compassion softened his habitual growl.

“Sister?” And for a moment Livira was distracted by the discovery that she wore a gown that would put any of Carlotte’s to shame, a confection of ivory silks, lace, silver wire, and river pearls. “Sister?” The hair that hung around her face in coils was the deep auburn of season’s change, rather than her own black shock, which stood rather than hung. She grabbed a handful and pulled, wincing at the immediate pain in her scalp.

“Madam! Calm yourself!” An older man of considerable girth sat on the opposite side of the table, his own grey hair poked beneath the grey coils of his wig.

Livira set her hands to the polished wood of the table to steady herself. Her hands? Serra Leetar’s hands. In this tale she’d taken Leetar’s role, sister to Meelan Hosten. The chatter re-established itself like a fire returning to an insufficiently doused blaze, a wisp of smoke here, a glow there, a chuckle of flame igniting some far corner, kindling others to life. The library is always burning. Had Yute said that? It felt like a metaphor for... everything, really.

She’d fallen into a story that she didn’t remember writing. How much of it was invention, how much based on her own truth, and how much might have flowed from the timeless knowing of the assistant, Livira couldn’t say. But she felt the tale seeping into her, regardless of whether it was fact or fiction, filling her with understanding.

Livira looked up. The man opposite, the fat, greying man who’d called her madam, was Dantal Creyan, and it was to him that her father would marry her off in order to cement his long-sought alliances. Unless she took the only position offered to her following her showing at the Allocation Hall. She had wanted a position at the university and, having met Lord Algar and seen how his singular eye studied her with unhealthy appetite, she would even accept a place within the laboratory before taking up a commission among the diplomats. But no such offers had been forthcoming, and Leetar strongly suspected the long reach of Lord Algar had closed those doors to her.

Everyone had the right to be allocated even without the blessing of their family, but in this instance her father would accept the alternative to Dantal Creyan without raising a storm. Lord Algar lacked the man’s wealth, and indeed had a fortune that paled in comparison to her own father’s, but Algar’s was old money. Lord Algar’s aristocratic roots reached back at least as far as the king’s and quite possibly further—though no one would ever say that out loud. If he put his long reach into her father’s service, as he seemed to have intimated that he was willing to, that would compensate the loss of a marriage alliance.

Livira shot a scowl at Meelan and stood sharply from her chair. “How could you have let them do this to your sister?”

Meelan, looking confused and worried, was saved from having to reply by a muffled commotion out in a nearby hallway that ended suddenly with the leftmost door bursting open. The newcomer, who strode in with a slight sway to his walk, as if on the deck of some modestly sized boat, was another grey-wigged man somewhat past his prime, red-faced and moustached. He seemed to be a guest, likely the owner of the empty place at the elbow of Leetar’s prospective husband. The cut of his dinner jacket and the large gold-rayed medal pinned to his breast marked him out as a military man.

“What the fuck is going on?”

However many social niceties Leetar, under Livira’s control, had trampled upon with her own outburst, the sudden appearance of a grey-whiskered general, apparently the worse for wear, was more worthy of attention.

Heflin Hosten stood up at the head of the table, shot a narrow glance in his daughter’s direction, then approached the general with outstretched arms. “General Charant! Allow me—”

“You!” The general, who Livira suddenly understood to be the man who had organised the city’s defences against the canith invasion, pointed at Leetar’s father with outstretched arm and accusing finger.

“My dear Rodcar.” Heflin continued his approach, seemingly blind to the other man’s anger. “Let me show you this new weed I’ve got in from Tronath. Your pipe’s going to thank you!” He reached a calming hand towards the general’s shoulder.

For an older man the general’s speed proved remarkable. Livira barely followed the fluid motion with which he seized the ornate hilt of the sword at his side and swung it with sufficient force to embed the blade in Heflin’s neck.

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