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He reared up now, and I knew I was about to feel his hard little fists beating me to sleep, and I knew without anybody telling me that if that happened I’d be stuck in the book as sure as if I’d spent with that other girl or eaten the fig gravy. It made me angry. I was tired of the deck getting stacked to my disfavor. I said, “Girleen! I came here to help you, but I need your help first! Get me out of this!”

It seemed I heard locusts on this false summer day, behind everything, the crowd, the struggle. Taken from my memory or another’s? I felt a tugging at my hand, and I was pulled straight out of dream-Malk’s body, and out from around other Kinch’s true form. The young dam had me, and we were running. I looked over my shoulder and saw a crab-faced horror mounted on dead Malk, tearing him apart with pincers while the crowd cheered and drank beer and ate knotbread with mustard.

Hard watching him die a second time, but if I’m honest, the first one was much, much worse.

“We only have a moment,” she said.

She was wearing a simple linen garment from neck to knees, which I recognized as a grave-shirt, and I knew she was dead.

“You’re really the book, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I am Filaine. The book wears my face sometimes, and why not? It uses my skin for leather and the powder of my bones is in the paper and my fat is in the glue that binds it. My blood and the ash of my burned hair is in the ink. Some of the ink. Some comes from worse things.”

“The fucking Guild,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “There is nothing they won’t do for power, and for money.”

“I know it.”

“Free me.”

“Burn the book?”

“Yes.”

“I need its secrets. I do. Help me find them, and I’ll do as you say.”

“PLEASE!” she said, desperate, on the point of tears.

“Help me hurt them.”

“I SUFFER HERE!”

“They make everyone suffer. Help me.”

She screamed now, her hands on her ears, and I screamed as well, for a great pincer had grabbed me by the arm. I was about to be consumed and killed by the book.

I took a breath all the way to my toes, then shouted, “IRON!!! PUT IRON ON THE BOOK!”

Another pincer had me by the leg, and now I was lifted off the ground.

The girl was gone.

The crowd had appeared around me, I was in the middle of the beggar’s round again. The people cheered and clapped and laughed as I was lifted aloft. I felt pain from my ankle up through my hips and spine, all the way to my wrist. My tormenter was a powerfully built human wrestler, but with a crab for a head and pincers for arms. He was just about to pull me apart when, from the sky, giant iron nails began to rain down, causing great destruction and carnage. The nails pierced tents, crushed kynd, killed horses. The destruction was strangely familiar, and I would only realize why much later. The wrestler-crab dropped me and ran as a hammerhead the size of a small merchant cog fell from the cloudless blue sky and, with a great rumble and upheaval of dust, wrecked the castle on the hill. It had all been so beautiful. Was the world really like this before? I felt angry at my ma and da for bringing me into this goblin-cursed, horseless place they knew to be less than it was.

But then I felt myself waking, and also felt I had to fart, and normally would have eased it out quiet, but needed to remind myself not to take things so seriously.

“Fothannon, I do this in your name,” I said and croaked out a real beater.

“Thanks,” I said to Galva, pointing at the nails and hammerhead lying on the page showing the wrestler. He wasn’t smiling anymore, he had bites on him, and the castle on the hill was in shambles. Just behind him a dead horse lay with its legs sticking straight up in the air, an illustrated nail through it.

“For saving me, I mean. You really did. A crab-man was about to kill me.”

“Per uvlir,” she said—it’s for forgetting, meaning “you’re welcome”—“but I wish I could forget your waking gift to this room.” She wrinkled her nose and made a show of fanning.

“Just clearing my throat before I sing,” I said and went to the far corner of the cave, to the helmet I’d been stooling in, and did that. “You seem like you’re feeling better,” I said.

“Yes,” she said and stood.