Isaiah lay on the ground, barely conscious, his head ringing with the force of the blow.
“That was for all the people you left behind,” Hereward said. “If my point hasn’t quite been made, I don’t mind hitting you again.”
Isaiah managed to raise a hand to ward her off. It trembled badly, and that made him furious.
“Did you think I wanted to leave everyone behind?” he said, trying to sit up, only to slump to the ground again as he almost blacked out with the movement. He fought unconsciousness, and only barely won. “Did you think I wanted to leave a single person behind? I had no way to get everyone out. All I could do was to evacuate as many people as—”
She hit him again, this time with her open hand. Isaiah’s head snapped back, and his neck cracked, but at least this time he didn’t end up in the dust.
“Have I made my point sufficiently now?” Hereward said.
Isaiah opened his mouth to hiss at her that he was doing all he could, had done all he could, then thought better of it. Gods, the woman was mad.
“Yes,” he said.
She sank down into the dirt beside him, crossing her legs, arranging her skirts modestly, and laying the book in her lap. Isaiah peered at it, sure he would see his blood smeared across it—the woman might have been thin, but she was well muscled—but the leather cover was unmarked.
Isaiah very carefully managed to sit upright without having to lean on one or both of his hands, and tried to regain control of the situation. “Why are you here?” he said. “Why—”
“Why am I here, Excellency?” Her voice cracked with sarcasm on that last word. “Oh, the small matter of Aqhat being overrun with horror. The desire to escape. The desire to live. The desire to—”
“Hereward, please, I am truly sorry for what has happened and, yes, I bear responsibility for every person who was lost. I cannot even begin to imagine the nightmare that you, as everyone left behind, has had to endure. How is it you have ended here, on this deserted stretch of the Lhyl? And how is it that the Skraelings leave you be?”
Isaiah watched the emotion play over Hereward’s face, and knew she was battling the desire to berate him yet more. But she didn’t, and for that Isaiah was grateful. Very slowly, and with a fair degree of prompting, Hereward told of her escape from Aqhat on the riverboat, and of the subsequent slaughter of her companions when the river turned to glass and the Skraelings surged onto the vessel.
She paused at that point, and Isaiah saw in her eyes and across her face a partial reflection of the terror, the horror, that she must have endured.
“I knew I was dead,” she said, clutching the book in her lap with white-knuckled hands. “There was nowhere for me to run. I had backed up against the bulkhead, and in my terror dislodged this book from a shelf above me.”
She glanced at it. “I had never seen it there previously.”
Hereward looked at Isaiah. “The book knocked me to the deck…and when I managed to regain my senses I saw the Skraelings standing about me in a semicircle, pointing at the book and whispering, ‘A nasty, nasty.’ Then they turned and filed out. They haven’t bothered me since.”
“A ‘nasty, nasty’? Hereward, can I see the book?”
Hereward’s hands tightened on the book, and Isaiah could see she struggled with herself. Finally, after a long moment, she lifted it and gave it to him.
He knew as soon as he took it in his hands that it was an object of great power, and he knew as soon as he opened the leather binding and looked at the chapter page what it was.
It was the Book of the Soulenai, lost now for many hundreds of years.
Lost, or merely biding its time?
“What is it, Isaiah?”
“This book…I know of it. It is many thousands of years old, and originally came from the north…from a place called Elcho Falling. It came to this land in the possession of a man called Avaldamon, who passed it to his son, Boaz, and his wife, Tirzah. The woman who came to Aqhat, my new wife, Ishbel…you remember her?”
“Yes.”
“Ishbel is the descendant of Boaz and Tirzah.”
“The book is mine, now.”
Isaiah gave her a gentle smile. “The book is its own, and chooses who it stays with. For the moment, yes, it has chosen you.”
He ran his fingers down the list of chapter titles.
The One walks north.
Prepare for confrontation.
Isaiah and Hereward meet with the glass man.
Feed the pretty kitten.
Those four chapter titles were repeated down the page. The first three Isaiah could understand, but…feed the pretty kitten?
He closed the book and handed it back to Hereward. “A visitor comes, Hereward. I fear he may not be very pleasant.”
“A visitor?”
The One. Isaiah knew instinctively who that must be.
“The pyramid walks north, Hereward. It wants to talk with me. It wants me. I’m sorry, my dear, but I think your life is about to get immeasurably worse, and that is, again, all my fault.”