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Despite their phonetic similarities “consummation” and “consume” share no common linguistic root. And yet in the marriage bed there is considerable overlap.

Bedding Ceremonies , by Prudence Smith

Livira

Livira had written stories and become lost in them before. She had not always felt that she was the master of those stories, but she had always known that however deep she might plunge into them she would resurface in time.

The story that held her now, though, was something different, something that twisted, changed direction, tried to shed its skin and abandon its past. She had been a princess, though she was far from that. She had been trapped in a tower with no door, though in truth it had been a wasteland that had first trapped her, and it hadn’t been a door she’d needed to leave it, just a push.

A man had come to kill her, but Evar had arrived in blood and fury, and the man had fled into nothingness. Had Evar come to save her, or had she brought him here, written him into her own story?

She had him now, where she had wanted him for the longest time, pinned to her bed by the weight of her body. And it was her body, should she let it, that would write the rest of this story for her. The urgency with which it moved against him knew nothing of the hesitation, awkwardness, and fear that had so often kept her tongue tripping over the easiest of words, skirting around the things she had wanted to say and sidetracking into the pathless wilderness of small talk. Her body knew how this ended. Her hips thrust against him, a stranger to shame, and as she slid down to kiss his chest, her softness pressed against his answering hardness, and her heart’s pounding fluttered, losing momentary tempo. His kisses had undone her.

The knowledge that something wasn’t quite right had been nagging at Livira. The story wanted her to forget things. To accept changes that didn’t make sense. But then Evar had arrived, bloody from his battle with the thorns, and suddenly the rest of it had ceased to matter. The world owed them this moment. The world that had held them apart could now pay off its debt if only it would take itself away for a short time, look away an hour, for a few hours, look the other way and let them be, let them at least reach for happiness. Look away and let them find the comfort and haven of each other’s arms.

Look away.

“It’s a good thing this tower doesn’t have any doors.” Livira returned to the bed, tossing aside the cloth with which she’d cleaned herself.

Evar lifted his arm and she laid her head on his chest. He had, she now noticed, six nipples, the top pair most like a man’s, the lower two pairs hardly noticeable. But she was now in a mood for noticing the small things about him, having dealt with the big ones.

“Why is that a good thing?” Evar murmured sleepily.

“Imagine if someone came calling.” Livira’s research and earlier worries had proved to be half-right. Towards the height of their union, it felt as if they had become physically locked together. A state that would make answering the door, or even leaving the bed, impossible. In many ways she had liked it, after the initial surprise. The physical fact carried with it an idea of being bound together, of being a single entity, both parties committed to the act, neither going anywhere until a conclusion had been reached.

Livira hugged him, more comfortable and more relaxed than she could ever remember. It had been more than she had expected. More intense and emotional. More physical. More exhausting. And entirely more wonderful. When he had finally left her it felt like losing some vital part. “I wish this—”

“—would last forever.” Evar squeezed her gently and knowing what a tiny fraction of his strength lay within the action somehow made it all the more tender.

“But we need to leave.” Livira frowned as she found the unwelcome words in her mouth.

“We do?”

“The others need us.”

“Others?” Evar echoed her as though the concept were foreign to him, as if she and he were the whole of the world, and the room was all of space, this moment all of time.

“Others.” She wanted to join him in that abandoning of everything that was neither here nor now, but some iron at her core refused to bend to the story’s will. She couldn’t even name the others, but she could still name the word that tied her to them: “love.”

Evar shook his head, confused, and wriggled comfortably into the mattress. “There’s only me and you.”

Livira kissed his cheek. His blood had been changed. Somehow. The library’s essence ran through his veins, and the story had him entirely in its grip. She, however, had written this story and would not allow it to contain her.

“If there’s no door then we can climb out.”

“That sounds dangerous.” Evar squeezed her. “We could stay. I think in just a short while I could do all that all over again.”

“Mmmmm.” Livira stretched. “But it can’t be that dangerous. You said you climbed up.”

“I did?” He rumbled in his chest. “That sounds more like…more like something…something my brother would do.”

“You did say so.” Livira slipped from his embrace and left the bed. She went to one of the windows with its view of wild heath, lone trees leaning into the wind, and an untamed sea.

“Why doesn’t your tower have a door?” Evar sat up and swung his legs off the bed. “Who builds a tower like that?”

“I’m a prisoner.” Livira knew it to be true as she said it. She remembered a pale king with a blade in his fist and murder behind his eyes.

“A witch kept you here,” Evar said, yawning.

“What? I never said anything about a…” But he was right. The story needed a witch. And as the sky outside darkened, and a distant thunder rolled in, Livira knew that the witch was coming.

Rain hit the windows as though the waves had swept ashore and were beating against the stonework, turning the tower into a lighthouse far from land. Within her bedroom the light had grown so dim that a candle would be needed if she wanted to read.

“Get back from the windows.” Evar stood and patted his hips before realising his nakedness. “I had knives.” He hesitated, then shaking off his confusion, grabbed up his trousers. “I don’t need knives. If this witch comes anywhere near you, I’ll break their neck.”

“The knight can’t always save the princess.” Livira remembered another time, the same tower. “Generally, princesses need to save themselves.”

Thunder boomed, rattling rooftiles. Day became night-time. Shadows flooded the room, and as the lightning struck, its flash painted a figure against the far wall.

The witch was a narrow twist of a man, sinister in the lightning’s frozen moments, terrifying in the blindness that followed. He pinned Livira with a hungry stare, eyes a little too close together below a wide forehead.

In the space between one blinding flash and the next, the witch moved. Like a spider advancing every time you looked away. In one hand he held a knife. A small, cruel curve of steel that Livira somehow knew had, from the first moment of its forging, been meant for cutting throats.

Without warning, the storm fell silent, though the darkness intensified, only to be broken by the coldness of witchlight that limned Livira’s foe, glimmering around him, making her squint.

Evar had, this whole time, remained by the bed, one hand in the act of hauling his trousers to his hip, seeming mired in some private hell of slowness, all his speed undone, as if the witch had moved him from the current of time and set him adrift in the doldrums, each action taking a hundred times longer than it should.

“I felt you trying to escape,” the witch said. “That’s not allowed.”

“I hadn’t even begun trying.” Livira pulled a book from the nearest shelf, not taking her eyes from the witch and his knife. “When I start, you’ll know all about it.”

“You’ll do what I say. Stay where I put you. This is mine. All of it. I hold the power here.” The illumination swelled around him, a corpse-light not born of flame.

Livira shook off the tendrils of fear trying to invade her. “You tell your story. I’ll tell mine.” She held the book before her, a shield against his blade. “The foundation of this tower is a page I stole. Its bricks are ink, laid by my hand.” In defiance of her fear, she advanced on the witch, and with each footstep the whole structure trembled, more deeply than when the thunder had spoken.

The witch struck as she closed on him, throwing himself forward, his robe a flowing tatter of night. If he had been a warrior, she would have had no chance, but he swung overhand, announcing his attack well in advance. Even so, she barely managed to interpose the book and found herself staring at two inches of bright steel protruding from the back cover just a foot from her face.

With a scream of effort, she struggled to prevent the knife’s advance towards her flesh as the witch bore down on her. A moment later she understood that it didn’t need to be a contest of strength. She rotated the book, twisting the trapped blade out of the witch’s hand.

The pair of them stood at the centre of the room, locked in a struggle for control of the book. Livira snarled, drawing energy into her rapidly tiring muscles, pulling it from the stories lining the walls, from the stones of the tower itself. This was hers. All this was hers. The witch was the interloper here.

The witch, his pale brow beading with sweat, began to lose his grip. In a moment of cunning, he swung his attention to Evar, still mired in slowness, barely two steps from the bed, the horror of his situation beginning to dawn across his face. The witch jerked his head and Evar slammed into the ceiling, rattling the boards, plaster dust pluming around him.

“Give. Me. The. Book.” The witch tried to wrest it from her grasp.

Livira felt herself weakening as Evar’s pain flooded across the room in waves. The book started to slip from her fingers.

“You can save him.” The witch grinned over the cover as they struggled. Evar, still pinned to the ceiling, smashed down. Only a partial collision with the bed saved him from an instantly fatal impact. He broke both the bed’s legs on that side, and an unknown number of his own bones, and lay like a rag doll.

Livira knew it was true. She could save Evar. She could write them both into the story they had started here. They could live a life in this tower with the witch banished forever. All it took was surrendering the rest. All it required was that Evar’s blood run through the story, and the acceptance that should the fiction be broken, he would die.

“Isn’t this enough for you?” the witch panted as he tried to shake her loose.

Wasn’t it enough? There was a war outside. She remembered that much. A chaotic, confusing, unwinnable war. One that had swallowed her up and demanded she take sides. One that had broken so much that she loved and was in the act of breaking the rest.

The witch’s eyes met her own. They had no particular colour. Like a stagnant pool lingering too long after the rains, they promised a corrupt reflection of anything shown to them. And yet, what Livira saw in them made her grip turn to iron and brought all of her resolve to bear on the matter of keeping the book.

What she had seen in her opponent’s unremarkable eyes was a familiar look. This man wasn’t Oanold. In the maybe from which she’d been so recently stolen, Oanold had titled himself the Saviour, and whether his motivations were selfish or selfless or something in between, he had placed himself between this man, this witch, this potentate, and the murder of children. But the look—the look in the potentate’s eyes—was all Oanold. It was the look Livira had seen when standing with Yute before the throne where Oanold had practised his own tyranny. A tyranny that the potentate’s made small, but a murderous, corrupt abomination even so.

“No!” Livira wasn’t having it. “No!”

And in that moment of rejection the tower melted away, taking Evar with it. Livira was still struggling with the potentate for the ownership of the book, but now it was very definitely her book, and the stage on which their contest played out was one reclaimed by memory: the throne room into which the Saviour’s raiders had forced their way.

Livira stood on the dais, facing the potentate before the throne, both with their hands gripping her book. The Saviour and his supporters lay scattered around the great doors that had fallen in, all of them struggling as if wrapped in invisible sheets, their eyes focused on nothing. Livira imagined that until very recently she too had lain there, trapped in a fiction, albeit of her own making.

And even as she wrestled for her book, Livira wondered if she, along with everyone else, was not still trapped, at least to some degree, in stories of their own design.