Page 153 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“You don’t think I have the same one?” She answered as if he’d spoken his heart rather than just let the edge of its shadow fall upon her.

The shore had dwindled in the distance, the jetty a narrow line, though it seemed their drifting had been as languid as a leaf on a millpond. “We’re getting...” He was going to say they were close to the island, but it seemed just as far away as when they started.

A cloud moved in front of the sun and the day dimmed. Livira looked up at him. “I worry that the Exchange tricked you into liking me.” She raised a tanned arm, looked at it, let it fall. “I think that when you saw me truly your stomach turned. That I’m ugly to your eyes. I tell myself that if you were someone I should be interested in then you wouldn’t care what I looked like. You’d care who I am.”

Evar couldn’t help the laugh that barked from him. “You really are reading my mind!” The wounded look in her dark eyes as she sat up suddenly, rocking the boat, made him scramble to explain. “No! I didn’t mean that I think those things! I meant those are my thoughts, my fears, mine.” The words were out. He’d handed her a knife to gut him with. She hadn’t said any of it wasn’t true. Just that she thought the same of him.

Across the bow a storm cloud could be seen moving in their direction, small, black, trailing veils of rain across the surface of the lake. The island seemed no closer, the shore just as distant. Evar glanced back to find Livira watching him.

“I don’t know how long we have.” She held the side of the boat as a small wave rocked them, then stood up.

Evar hesitated, surfacing once more from the belief that the place had bred into him, like a dreamer understanding that they were dreaming. He stood up too, a cool breeze riffling through his mane. “Are we in your book, or am I in my memory of it? Have you even written this part yet? Are you even you, or just the story you’re telling about yourself?”

“We’re all the story we tell about ourselves, silly.” Another wave rocked them. “That’s all anyone ever is—the story they tell, and the stories told about them. Fiction captures more than facts do. That’s why the library keeps it. It’s the most important part of our memories.”

The boat jolted and water slopped over the oarlocks. Evar stumbled against her, unused to the instability of the planks beneath his feet. Livira caught hold of him, stronger than she looked. The closeness of her against him felt like something he’d needed all his life and never known he was without. A breath drawn after a life of suffocation.

The breeze grew colder but carried the taint of smoke.

“The library’s burning.” Livira looked up at him and he could almost see the flames reflected in her eyes. She lowered her head and rested her face against his chest.

“I’d forgotten.” The weight of loss was all around them. It had been there in the forest when he woke, but now he understood it. The library was burning. “I...”

“I’ve lost too much,” Livira finished for him. “And I don’t want...”

“To lose you too,” Evar said.

Livira raised her head again and this time she didn’t need to reach up to pull his mouth to hers.

I’ve fallen out of this book before.

The main comfort in maintaining a journal is not that those who come after you may read through the progress of your life. Nor is it that, however faded, flexible, and fallible your memory may become as the tide of years washes over it, you will have this record to look back upon. It lies primarily in the illusion that were you only to press on at the end of this Tuesday and write your way into Wednesday, you would become the master of your life, subject to no bounds save those of imagination.

The Journals of Samantha Peeps, by Samantha Peeps

CHAPTER 65

Livira

Livira stumbled, caught for a moment between the conviction that she was falling from a boat and the certainty that she’d been held in the warmth of Evar’s kiss for hours. Neither turned out to be true. Evar, who’d crashed into her, fell away, losing his grip on the book he’d been trying to pull from her hands. Livira felt the leather covers pulled from between her fingers, the book sliding from her grasp. It fell a couple of feet into the dust drift she’d been standing in. The loose pages almost came free, several of them half out of the covers. Another boom sounded and a muffled cracking rang out behind her—a projectile penetrating the dust and hitting the library floor. If she’d still been holding the book—still been solid and visible—there might be a hole through her now. A wave of snarling canith came forward in a rush and dust engulfed everything.

For a hellish moment Livira was back in the settlement on the day her life changed. Lost in a dust cloud. Sabbers on every side. Holding her aunt’s hand as if it were her chance to escape the madness—only to have it torn from her grasp.

This time her hand was empty from the start, and in the blindness someone’s fingers found hers. Before she could cry out, Livira was hauled skywards. A heartbeat later she emerged into the light again, flying with Evar just as they had centuries before above a city where canith and human lived in peace.

For a moment two Evars held her: one the stranger who so swiftly became a friend and then her love; the other a stranger still, a savage beast, kin to those beneath them, the same sabbers who had smashed her childhood apart and slaughtered her family.

“Livira!” Evar seemed frantic, patting her all over, turning her in the air. Below them the shouting and chaos continued as the canith fought to tell friend from foe amid the dust. “Are you hit? Are you hit?”

“I don’t think so...” Livira pushed him gently back as his concern bled the anger from her. She looked down at herself. “It would hurt, wouldn’t it?”

“Sometimes not at first.” Evar calmed. “That’s what Clovis says, anyway.”

Livira pressed her hands to her face. They’d been kissing. Again. She couldn’t tell if Evar had shared it with her, or whether it had all flowed from her imagination and hers alone. She felt she should be able to tell by looking at him, but she couldn’t.

“It was the book,” Livira said wonderingly. “It’s real here. It made me real too. A little bit when I had it next to me. A lot when I touched it. I sank into the dust when I held it. Look.” The lower part of her robes was dusty. Nothing had touched them before, not solid objects, not dust, not smoke. “Yute said it was special. It’s got the future wrapped into it.”

“It has?” Evar looked confused. Did he look happy too? She couldn’t tell. He’d seemed happy. In the boat. In her arms. Or was that just what she was going to write?

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