Excerpt from The Book That Wouldn't Burn by Mark Lawrence, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"There are no useless skills, girl. Only talents that have yet to find an application."

"Well ... Acmar can fart a tune."

Ella looked up at that, lips pursed, dark eyes unreadable. Livira glanced down, noticed the bucket at her own feet, and, thus reminded of her task, opted to skip away.



The well was a yard wide and a hundred yards deep. Livira had asked a thousand times how they ever managed to dig it. She'd scratched holes in the hardpan herself and never got deeper than the width of a hand. The well lay outside the settlement, beyond the bean rows. The scent of water attracts all sorts in the Dust, and rarely the sort you want wandering around your huts at night.

There was a wetness in the air above it, as if the well itself were a great throat. Livira could feel the dampness of its breath on her skin. She liked to lie on her belly with her head over the edge and stare down into the blackness. The children said Orrin had fallen in and that's where he went last month. But the water had stayed clear and sweet. Livira thought that a dust-bear had taken Orrin. The boy had never looked where he was going. And whilst that might lend credence to the idea that he could have walked into the well, there were, Livira said, many more dust-bears waiting just beneath the surface than wells.

Livira cranked the windlass, lowering the attached bucket towards the unseen water. She liked the well because it kept them all alive, but that wasn't the only reason. In her mind it was a connection to another world, out of reach but most definitely there. A world where what they needed most was commonplace, a world of darkness and flow, full of its own secrets, home to wet things that swam in blindness, tasting their way through unknown caverns.

"What you doing?"

Livira jumped, startled out of her daydreaming. She saw it was Katrin in her shapeless, dusty smock, hands crimson from shelling jarra beans. "I'm juggling elephants."

Katrin frowned, considering the statement. Katrin was loyal, kind, but really quite slow sometimes. "You're not ju-"

"It was a joke." Livira rolled her eyes and spun the windlass. "You can see what I'm doing."

"Oh." Katrin's frown deepened. "Why did you fight Acmar?"

Livira kept turning the handle. The rope spooling off the windlass was darker now-the new length that Old Kern had added so that the bucket would be able to reach the water again. The level had been sinking ever since Livira could remember. "He called me a weed."

"But ... we all call you Livira."

"He called me weed." Livira shook her head. "It's not the same."

That had been part of the reason, the spark that had made her throw the first punch. But the real reason was that he had tried to snatch her scrap from her. That's what Aunt Teela had called it when Livira showed it to her. A scrap of paper. The wind had revealed this treasure to Livira months earlier, pushing aside the dust to expose a corner. A torn triangle, no larger than the palm of her hand and, like an old man's skin, thin, wrinkled, discoloured by age. Dark marks patterned it. Her aunt had shrugged when Livira showed her and had grown inexplicably angry when Livira persisted in asking about the marks, saying at last, "They're just scribbling. Tally marks for counting beans at market."

"But-" Livira had wanted to protest that there were so many different marks, they were too beautiful just to be counting, but Teela had cut her off and had set her to her least favourite chore: cleaning out the cookpot.

Livira shook off the memory. "See what Ella gave me!" She lifted the wind-weed that she had tied to her belt with a cord.

Katrin narrowed her eyes at it. "It looks like what we give Ella in the first place. Did it go wrong?"

"No!" Livira started to rotate the ball, searching for the best angle, but Katrin looked away.

"Did it hurt," Katrin asked, "when Acmar hit you?"

Excerpted from The Book That Wouldn't Burn by Mark Lawrence. Copyright © 2023 by Mark Lawrence. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.