Once Upon a Broken Heart

Chapter 9: The Librarian in the Map Room

Soren was twenty-four and looked younger—the particular youth of bookish people who have spent most of their time in library light, which preserved them without exactly aging them. He had earnest brown eyes and ink on the right side of his jaw and the specific manner of a person who was very frightened but had decided to be organized about it.

He was hiding in the cartographers' quarter, in the vacant studio of her father's old colleague Renn, which still smelled of India ink and the particular oils used for map reproduction. Petra had brought him tea. He had three books from the palace library that he'd taken when he fled, and two of them were histories of the northern border disputes that had nothing to do with anything, which told her he'd grabbed them blind in a panic.

He looked at Isla, then at Cassian behind her, and said: "You brought a Fate."

"I did," Isla said.

"Is that—" He looked at Cassian with the expression of a scholar encountering a primary source. "Are you the Prince of Ruin?"

"Yes," Cassian said.

"Do you mind if I—" Soren made a gesture suggesting he wanted to take notes. Cassian, to his credit, looked more amused than offended.

"Later," Isla said. "Tell me what you saw."

Soren told them.

The crown prince had been alive at midnight. Soren had been in the palace library, two corridors away, cataloguing. He'd heard a noise that was wrong—not a shout, nothing dramatic, something more like the sound of a conversation ending very abruptly—and he'd gone to look.

The guard who had done it was named Corvin. First-rank palace guard, twenty years of service, no previous incidents. He had been standing over the prince's body when Soren reached the doorway. He had seen Soren.

He had not moved to stop him. He had said: "Go, boy. This isn't yours."

Soren had run.

"He let me go," Soren said. "That's the part I don't understand. He could have—" He stopped. "He chose not to."

Isla thought about this. He let me go. A guard who kills a prince but allows a witness to escape.

"What do you know about Corvin?" she asked.

"He's—" Soren hesitated. "He lost his daughter last year. To the sickness in the lower quarters. She was nine." He looked at the table. "He's been—different, since. People said he went to the Fate Quarter. Made an offering."

Isla looked at Cassian. He was already looking at her, and his expression had the quality of a person who has located the piece that organizes the other pieces.

"An offering to Hunger," she said.

"Hunger would have promised something," Cassian said. His voice was very controlled. "The grief of a father who's lost a daughter is—specific. Hunger would have found it. Offered comfort, or purpose, or the promise that the loss meant something." A pause. "And the something it meant would have been—"

"An act of destruction," Soren said quietly. He looked at Cassian with the direct gaze of a scholar who has followed an argument to its conclusion. "Hunger offered him a reason for the grief. A purpose for the pain."

"What did Corvin get from killing the prince?" Isla asked.

Soren was quiet. Then: "His daughter. Hunger promised—that much grief, from the whole kingdom, might move the balance. Might bring her back." He swallowed. "He told me. Not that night. But he found me, two days later, before I'd decided what to do. He found me and he explained." A pause. "He wasn't—he wasn't evil. He was a father who had lost a child and been offered a transaction by something that feeds on grief."

The map studio was quiet.

Isla thought about Hunger at the Court, the way he'd looked at her. Secondary grief—the grief of things never begun, never risked. The crown prince was twenty-two. The grief of Aravel for him was tremendous. And underneath it, feeding on it, Hunger had grown stronger while the loop continued.

"Can Hunger's promises be fulfilled?" she asked Cassian.

"No," he said. "Hunger doesn't fulfill. Hunger offers." A pause. "Hunger feeds on the wanting, not the having. Fulfillment would end the appetite. Hunger has no interest in endings."

"So Corvin killed the prince for a promise that was never going to be kept."

"Yes."

"And Petra was the nearest available person to blame, which extended the grief and the public trial and the secondary suffering—"

"Yes."

The room was very quiet.

"We need Corvin's testimony," Isla said. "Not just Soren's account of what he said. We need him to speak."

"He won't," Soren said.

"He let you go," she said. "He could have—" She looked at the table, at the books Soren had grabbed from the library. "He let you go because something in him didn't want to completely eliminate the possibility of truth." She looked at Cassian. "A man who does something for love—even wrong love, even manipulated love—still has something of himself left. If he understands what Hunger actually gave him versus what it promised—"

"It might not be enough," Cassian said.

"It's what we have." She stood. "Where is Corvin now?"

Soren told her.