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You need not look for sorrow, it will always find you.

Zen and the Art of Skateboarding, by Tommy Hanks

CHAPTER 39

Livira

I can’t leave him here.” Livira knelt beside Malar’s body. His blood pooled around her knees. “They’ll eat his body.”

“Won’t they kill someone else to eat if they don’t get this?” The white child—Yolanda—gazed down at Malar with dispassion.

Livira didn’t answer. She was too numb, too lost to find a counterargument. Dragging Malar away, saving him from the indignity of being devoured by filth like the king and Lord Algar, would condemn another to death. Maybe Katrin or Neera or Leetar had been hidden in one of those cells, waiting to have parts of their bodies carved off.

She nodded and stumbled away, blinded by tears, her chest emptied of air by a long-hissed-out breath of anguish and yet too paralysed by hurt to draw in any replacement. Yolanda passed her and led on. Livira followed, hitching in her breath at last. She had had three fathers—one out on the Dust that she barely remembered, and two from the city. A good one and a bad one, though they were both good to her. Yute had been the voice of reason, and Malar had been her lesson in heart.

Shouts and the sound of pounding feet came from behind. Yolanda started to sprint, her bare feet making no sound. Livira stumbled after her then broke into her own run and found that running was all she wanted to do. With her librarian robes fluttering in protest Livira overtook Yolanda and tried to outpace her own grief, tried to leave the sorrow and the nightmare behind her, veering this way and that, ricocheting from the shelves on one side then the other.

A figure loomed in her path, strong arms caught her, lifting her from her feet. She screamed and fought, ready to die rather than be taken by Oanold’s men once more.

“Livira!” The arms held her without violence. Her kicks and punches were not returned. “Livira!”

And there he was. Evar. Holding her close. His mane in her face. He squeezed her hard enough to make her ribs creak, and pressed his mouth to her neck, breathing her in. He had thought her dead and his relief trembled through him. The sheer physical reality of him overwhelmed her. They had parted hundreds of years ago, though it only felt like days. And from within the prison of the Assistant she had watched him grow, watched his whole life from behind the bars of her timeless cage. That had seemed like an eye-blink until he wrapped his arms about her, and now it felt like the lifetime it was.

Others surged around them, and Evar was setting her to her feet. She held him a moment longer. “I missed you.”

She was standing once more and old friends surrounded her, joy and tears on lean, dirty faces. Meelan, Jella, Salamonda!

“Arpix!” Livira released the others to throw herself at the over-tall librarian. She clung to him as if he were a tree and a flood raged around them. Amazingly, she felt his arms enclose her and return the embrace with a fierceness she’d never thought he had in him.

“It’s good to see you.” Arpix sounded un-Arpix-like too, his voice choked by emotion.

She looked up at him, blinking away tears. The face that peered down at her across the length of his chest was gaunt, and somehow older than the one she remembered. Even so, it was him: her unwilling partner in crime, her moral compass. Her Arpix.

Two more canith approached. Dark-maned Kerrol, who made Arpix look short, and Clovis with dust taming the redness of her mane. Livira saw them with a kind of double vision: through her own eyes as Evar’s siblings—the enigmatic brother, the fierce and dangerous sister; and more dimly, through timeless eyes, she saw the children who had grown in her care and felt an echo of the love for them that had taken root even past the impervious skin of an assistant.

“The Soldier saved me,” she said. “Malar died fighting. Twice.”

And even though she didn’t explain herself, and despite the foolishness of it when the enemy might be close at hand, all three canith put back their heads and howled to the unseen moons.

Livira added her own cry of sorrow to the canith’s howls, her heartache lost in the resonant depths of their howl, then carried on its rising note. Others in the party exchanged worried glances, fearing the sound might draw the king’s soldiers. Arpix and Meelan, who among Livira’s friends had known Malar best, both looked stricken.

As the howl fell to silence Livira saw Yute, though he must have been there all the time, his whiteness hard to miss. The grief on his face was underwritten by older lines of sorrow that had not been there when Livira had last seen him. Malar had never spoken of it directly, but Livira had come to know that he did other jobs for Yute, not just shepherding trainees across the city. There were probably senior librarians who had spent less time in Yute’s company than the soldier had. The nature of their relationship remained a mystery to Livira, but she thought that they were each, perhaps, the closest thing that the other had to a friend.

Yute set a hand to Salamonda’s shoulder. The woman had not known Malar well, but she knew him as one of Livira’s protectors and had tears in her eyes for him.

“The Soldier died well.” Clovis raised her sword. “But those who killed him will not. They will fall before me like wheat before the scythe.”

“The man who killed him is dead. By Malar’s hand,” Livira said.

“And the others?” Clovis’s gaze snapped round to fix on Livira.

“There were no others.”

“One?” Clovis asked, disbelieving. “Only one?”

“He had a ’stick. A projectile weapon. The Soldier refused to run. He stayed to save me.”

Clovis spat. And the fury on her face was something terrible to behold. All the worse for Livira understanding the grief it was trying to keep at bay. The Soldier had cared for all the children in his way. He had trained them. Tolerated them. Taught them more than they knew he was teaching them. But it had been Clovis with whom that bond ran deepest. They shared warrior souls, and like reaches to like.