Page 148 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“No!” Livira interposed herself between them, though she could hardly shield all of him with her slight frame. “He saved Malar’s life!” It seemed enough—for now. The weapons were lowered slightly. Turning to her two friends, she started to introduce them. “This is Evar Eventari, Neera.”

The girl, with what humans must consider a mane of black hair, looked up at him with a nervous cough.

“Evar, this is Neera, one of my oldest friends. And Katrin.” Livira pointed to the broader girl with browner hair who had continued to edge away in the arms of her mate. “And... there are others coming. Soon.” She looked with concern at the humans stumbling from the portal, all of them coughing and stinking of smoke. “Katrin and Neera grew up with me before... before—”

“Before my kind drove you from your homes.” Evar bowed his head. “As Master Yute is explaining to my sister that you are not the humans who murdered her family, I hope you will accept my sympathy and sorrow and accept that I share nothing save my shape with those who came against your people.”

—

While Evar addressed her friends, Livira’s gaze kept straying to the fading portal where any moment now Arpix, Jella, Meelan, and Salamonda must surely arrive. She caught Serra Leetar’s eye in the small crowd behind them. Leetar had broken away from Lord Algar’s side and seemed to be struggling with conflicting emotions while she watched the portal, looking for her brother among the thinning stream of people. The doorway’s light was guttering now, like a flame at the limit of its fuel. Livira stepped past Neera, brushed by Katrin and Jammus, and approached the diplomat.

“Was Meelan with you?” Leetar demanded. “Have you seen him?”

“I...” A smoke-blackened man collapsed through the portal, his skin red, clothes smouldering. He fell to the grass choking as others tried to help him. Livira’s voice broke. “He was with me. Meelan and the others. I don’t understand. They were right behind me. Right behind me.”

Livira met Leetar’s eyes and found them full of tears. Their hands hovered, inches apart, then met, each trying to wring the strength they needed from the other.

“They... they might escape,” Leetar said hopelessly.

It was true that they might have lost their way but still have escaped the smoke and still be ahead of the flames, but they couldn’t outpace the inferno in the long run. And they wouldn’t be coming through the portal Livira had drawn. Even if there were enough power left in it after the passage of so many people, the aisles had been thick with smoke when she left. Nobody could cross that chamber now. It would be as bad as the otherworld library Livira and Evar had once stepped into where the air had begun to kill Livira’s lungs on her very first breath.

“It didn’t hurt you though...” Livira turned back towards Evar.

“What didn’t?” He looked confused.

“The air in that other world. The one where I was poisoned.”

“I was a ghost.”

Livira shifted her stare to Malar. “We’ll all be ghosts if we go back through there.” She pointed at the portal. “You, me, and Evar.”

It was Malar’s turn to look confused.

Evar shook his head. “I’ll come of course. But if you go back, all you can do is find their corpses, or worse, watch them die. You can’t help them.” His face showed only sympathy, and a wince of pain as if imagining what she would feel.

“At least I would know!” Livira had raised her voice unintentionally and now became aware that Yute, Clovis, all of them really, had stopped talking and were looking at her. She looked at Yute and understood in that moment the sorrow which had walked with him since the first day she had known him and for long before. His daughter had vanished in the library. She wouldn’t ask him if seeing her body would have been better than all those long years of not knowing. It was too cruel a question and she already knew the answer. “At least I would know...”

Livira went to Yute, careless of the red-maned canith looming over him. She took his cool, white hands in hers, shocking both of them. Yute had never been one for touching.

“I’m going after Arpix and Salamonda and the others,” she said. “I can make it so that when I come back, you’ll still be here, can’t I?”

“You can.” He nodded. “In this wood you can’t go back to what has already been, but you can slow time’s march to the flow of resin down a tree’s trunk.”

“I won’t ask you to wait for me then.” Livira managed a smile. “I’ll make you wait.”

Yute’s answering smile was smaller and sadder. “I see you followed my advice.”

She followed his gaze to the book poking from her satchel where she’d stuffed it as Neera and Katrin had rushed at her. “How did you know? It could be any book I picked up.”

“Books in the library are my speciality.” No smile this time. “That one is perhaps the strangest of all of them for its story is woven through the Exchange, a place where creatures in time’s flow were never intended to tread. Guard it well, Livira.” He paused then squeezed her hands in a most un-Yute-like gesture. “It has been an honour.”

Livira gave him a puzzled smile. “I’ll be back. You won’t even know we’re gone.” He looked so solemn that she felt an odd compulsion to cheer him up. “I’ll be a ghost. Nothing can hurt me. And I’ll have Malar with me.”

She backed away, letting his hands fall from hers. Passing Yamala, she shot the woman a glance and spoke in a quiet voice. “Look after him for me. He seems sad.”

Yamala didn’t smile either. “We stepped into time’s fire but even as we burn, we still see an echo of what’s coming at us through the flames.”

Livira shook her head. She’d have time for the couple’s curious melodrama when she came back. She wouldn’t let a single breath pass their lips before her return.

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