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Moments of reunion and parting bracket many relationships. It is not unusual for the punctuation in such love sentences to carry more meaning than the words.

The Language of Love , by Anne Le Knocks

Evar

Evar had thrown himself down the narrow stair to buy Starval time. He hadn’t expected to survive. He didn’t expect that Starval could free Oldo, even if he wanted to. It wasn’t really the point. The point had become lost somewhere along the way. Killing the potentate had become the point. Striking a blow against an obvious evil felt like a relief after the confusion of infighting that had torn his little family open seemingly from the moment they’d escaped the library. The big picture was too big. Evar had been unable to step far enough back from it even to properly see the problem, let alone to divine some solution that had evaded Irad, Jaspeth, Yute, Mayland, and everyone else embroiled in the war.

Evar had thrown himself into the fight on the stairs with an almost-glee that Clovis would have appreciated. He’d needed this release. Even if it killed him, he needed it. He launched the first of the potentate’s palace guards back over the head of the second and into the crush behind. He’d slammed the second man into the wall, squeezed past, scraping the brickwork, and stabbed into the space beyond.

His sense of time had escaped him. His world reduced to one of swinging lights, thrusting weapons, the concussive boom of guns, fighting with every part of his body and every ounce of his frustration.

When and how battling down a tight-packed stair had turned into battling up one, Evar couldn’t say. How the straight path he remembered climbing within the thickness of the potentate’s walls had become an ever-curving stairway, he had no idea.

Was he carving a path back to the balcony he’d left Starval on? Had he lost himself in the maze of secret passages? Were these armoured soldiers the same force as the uniformed palace guard? Was that daylight streaming in through a doorway above him? He was too busy staying alive even to guess at answers.

The opposition thinned, and suddenly he was lifting a blanket, looking for the man who, wrapped in its folds, had tumbled down the remaining steps to fetch up at his feet. The last of the foe? Either way, he’d pulled off quite a magician’s trick since only stone steps lay beneath the blanket. The last man? No, someone else had fallen on the stairs ahead and was getting up.

Without his nose sifting her scent from the stink of fear and blood, Evar might have stabbed her. The awfulness of that thought set his blades falling to the floor.

“Livira?” It was her. Dishevelled in a thin white gown reaching to her neck. She picked herself up with a wince, tugging at the nightdress where it had rucked up around her knees. She steadied herself with one hand on the wall. “Livira? How are you here?”

“I’m not quite sure.” She straightened, with the sunlight reaching down behind her, brilliant at the margins of her hair, casting her face into darkness. The sunlight made a ghostly nothing of her nightdress, spelling out her shape with sharp delineation. There was less of her than her librarian’s robe had suggested, slender curves subtly different from those Clovis owned. Human curves. She stood there, staring at him, her eyes a gleam in shadow.

A moment later he had his arms around her, pressing her to him, careless of the blood that might be his and was certainly others’. The suddenness of it all, the surprise, erased the awkwardness, the hesitation, the worry of overstepping this mark or that mark. It wasn’t until her arms tightened around him and she buried her face into his chest with a fierce inhalation that even the possibility of rejection caught up with Evar. They had been so long apart, with such distances between them, and so much had filled the spaces that had opened up.

“Don’t. Ever. Leave. Me.” Livira’s embrace tightened more than Evar had thought a small human female could manage and he gasped. She released him at once. “Are you hurt? You’re hurt! Where are you hurt?” She stepped back, gaining another step’s worth of height, her touch light, tentative.

“I’m not hurt.” Evar closed the gap, gathering her to him again. “Well…I was shot. And then Starval stabbed me. And I think maybe I took a few cuts back there—”

“Enough!” Livira broke free and grabbed his hand. “Come with me. Right now!”

Without waiting for an answer, she marched back up the remaining stairs, towing him through a doorway into a small book-lined room at the top. “It’s a tower…” he murmured.

Livira shut the door behind him and, from one moment to the next, the nightmare on the stairs became something distant. Even though he was still sticky with their blood, he could no longer remember a single face among the many who had opposed him. In fact, as he turned back towards the door, he couldn’t even find it, just bookcases.

“I…Where—”

“On the bed!” Livira gestured. She started to tear strips from a sheet that had fallen to the floor. “Take those leathers off.”

“I really don’t need—”

“Bed!” Livira pointed. “Now!”

Evar started undoing the ties and clasps holding his book-leather shirt in place. He felt he might have left some important memory on the stairs, that there was something he should be doing. But Livira’s tone brooked no argument. He gritted his teeth against the pain that the necessary stretching caused him, then let the battered garment fall to the floor. It had saved him from a few sharp edges. Others had made it through, and he bled from several nicks and shallow cuts.

Livira produced a large earthenware jug of water and a white cloth. She seemed mildly puzzled by their existence. “And the rest. You could bleed to death and not know it.”

“Who told you that?” Evar gripped his belt defensively. “It doesn’t sound very likely.”

“I read it in a book.” Livira swept an arm at the walls.

Evar fumbled with his buckle, feeling suddenly self-conscious. Her nearness had already had an effect on him.

“Hurry!” Livira clapped her hands as if to instil urgency into him.

Still he hesitated, then turned his back on her and started to wrestle with the buckle more seriously.

“Come on. It’s not like you’ve got…” Livira trailed off, as if in that moment she had come to the same realisation that Evar had already reached. However experienced she might be—and he expected her to be considerably more experienced than he was, having grown up with the whole world before her rather than one sister and three brothers—it was still a very distinct possibility that he did in fact have something she hadn’t seen before.

Evar finally won the buckle battle and got onto the bed, pulling up the sheet before rolling to his back. He couldn’t hold back a small snarl of pain. Of all his injuries it was the stab wound from Starval that still hurt the most. If not for the library’s blood filling his veins, Evar was certain he would never have reached Livira.

Livira pulled down the sheet that he had pulled up, first exposing his shoulders then chest. She frowned down at him with obvious concern. “What were you thinking?” Finding still more to concern her, she pushed the sheet down further, exposing his ribs, belly, the top of his hips. Evar, conscious of his increasing involuntary response to her curiosity, caught her hand and stopped her further advance with the sheet’s folds rucked up over his groin. Livira tutted but relented. She touched a finger to his blood and raised it towards her face, tilting her head in curiosity. The blood that had been red shed its disguise and smoked blackly on her fingertip. “How is this possible?” Livira looked at him with new eyes. “You’re full of stories.”

“May…” Evar had a name on the tip of his tongue, but somehow the memory wouldn’t surface. “May…Maybe I fell?”

Livira began cleaning a slice on his shoulder, wetting her cloth and dabbing at the wound. “A fall wouldn’t have left you like this. So many cuts. How did all this happen?”

Evar started to say, through teeth gritted against the pain of Livira’s cleaning, that she had seen exactly how he’d been injured, but found that he wasn’t even sure himself.

“You look like you’ve been dragged backwards through the worst hedge in the world!” Livira continued her ministrations. “How did you get here?”

“Thorns.” Evar had other memories, but a different story was coiling through the back of his mind. A tower surrounded by nearly impenetrable thorn bushes, that he had fought his way through. He liked that one better. Nobody died, the only pain was his. “I climbed up.” One story felt as real as the next. Livira was the only constant, the linchpin, the reality. “I was looking for you.” He closed his hand around her wrist, engulfing it. She looked so frail, though he knew her strength.

Livira drew her wrist, and with it his hand, to her mouth. She set her lips gently to his knuckles, letting him feel their softness and their warmth. He inhaled, slow but deep, drawing in her scent, complex, varied, as uniquely hers as her face, and similarly expressive.

Evar’s life had not equipped him with any measure of comparative beauty. He hadn’t grown up amid crowds in which such judgements held sway. Livira had been the first human he’d seen. He didn’t think in terms of whether she was pretty or whether the black shock of her hair was more or less attractive than the crimson tangle of Clovis’s mane. Livira was simply vital to him. His eyes wanted to rest upon her. He needed the living pulse of her body pressed to his. He required that when she filled her lungs, he felt it, and that when she exhaled, that her breath caress his skin.

Livira smiled a slow smile and continued, with her free hand, to clean his wounds. Every place she touched him, the pain ceased. Evar would not have been surprised to angle his gaze down across his chest and discover that each cut had closed behind the passage of her cloth. Instead, he kept his attention on her face, her black eyes, skin still bronzed by the pitiless sun of her childhood, the firm but delicate line of her jaw, the slight asymmetry of her nose, as if it might once have been broken and reset.

Livira, realising herself to be under study, paused and returned his interest with a bold stare. “You don’t look so big lying down.”

“You don’t look so small up there.” He released her wrist and traced a gentle finger from the corner of her eye, following the line of her cheekbone, coming to rest at the side of her mouth.

Without speaking, Livira climbed onto the bed, hitched her nightdress up above her knees, and straddled him, the white fabric straining across her thighs. His hips moved, testing her weight.

“Sorry.” Evar wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for.

He tried to sit up, but Livira pushed him back. Despite her boldness, he could see she was trembling. Fear and desire mixed in equal measure within her scent and lay written less clearly on her face.

Evar might have taken comfort in Livira’s nervousness, knowing her as unsure as himself, but somehow, he just added it to his own, wanting to reassure her, but not knowing how. She might share his own fears, of rejection, of having misread the signs even though they seemed so plain, of discovering humans and canith were more different than either of them had thought, more incompatible.

“I—”

Livira planted her hands to either side of his head, just above his shoulders, and leaned in close, sealing off his question with a kiss. Her breasts grazed his chest, nipples firm through the sheerness of the fabric. Evar wrapped his arms around her, pulling her against him, eliminating any space until her body met his along its whole length. Kissing they had done before. Kissing Evar understood. Their questions were silent ones now, asked tongue to tongue.