Page 94 of The Book That Held Her Heart

She ran her fingers up into her hair, trying to squeeze the sleepiness from her head. The dream had seemed so real, and although she could remember no detail from it, a sense of urgency remained, as if she should be somewhere else, doing something important.

“I hate that…” She muttered the words to herself, still staring into nothing as if she might force the fleeing nightmare to unveil its secrets. But no, it was gone.

At the back of her head Livira’s hair seemed to end in a single shock, as if a great thickness of it had been shorn away with just one cut. Livira looked down at herself. She wore a plain white nightgown, thin with age and reaching down past her knees. It didn’t feel like hers. None of this did. The dream appeared to have been so determined to make off with its secrets intact that it had stolen most of hers as well. For the moment at least, Livira couldn’t remember what she was doing here, or where “here” even was. She stood, unsteadily, taking some small comfort in the fact that she had woken up with a similar confusion in the past, infrequently, and never this profound, but memory had always returned.

The path to the nearest window required that she negotiate her way overand around several stacks of books that seemed to have no place on the curving shelves.

“A tower…” The window afforded her a view of a heath and beyond it a line of sea where white-topped waves speckled beneath a grey sky. The view held her gaze for a long time, at once unchanging but all in subtle motion. At last, she drew away and returned to the bed, trailing her fingers across book spines. That at least felt familiar.

A book lay open on the bedside table, a picture book. The page showed a fairy-tale tower and in the single room at its top, a sleeping princess, a great length of hair coiled beside her bed.

“Sometimes the knight is too late.” She ran her fingers beneath the words on the page. “And the princess can’t be saved.”

The door to the room burst open, taking Livira’s eyes from the book. Had there even been a door? Filling the frame stood an armoured figure. A stranger, but one Livira felt she had seen before. A narrow twist of a man despite his blackened breastplate and chainmail sleeves. Eyes of an indefinite colour, and set slightly too close together, watched her from beneath the rim of a helm that doubled as a crown, each of its jagged spikes gilded. Somehow, she knew the forehead hidden behind that steel was large and pale and that behind it cruel thoughts multiplied.

The man took a step forward and she noticed the blade in his gauntleted hand. Soldiers crowded the space behind him as far as the stair’s curve allowed her to see.

“Amacar whore!” A snarl twisted the man’s mouth, and he advanced another step, raising his sword.

The first scream, distant and echoing up the spiral of the staircase, made him pause. The second and third made him glance towards the door. Sounds of fighting reached them, steel on steel, cries of pain and rage, and above it all, beneath it all, a roaring that made her would-be murderer’s snarl seem like a puppy’s first attempt.

“Stop him!” The king turned back towards the doorway, urging his troops to stand fast.

Stop who? Surely one man couldn’t be fighting his way through the dozens queued behind this familiar stranger who had come to kill her?

One man had no chance. And yet, with surprising swiftness, the clatterand clamour of battle advanced towards them, seeming to circle them, as if a lone wolf were running the perimeter.

Closer, closer now. The soldiers cried out in fear but the presence of the king at their rear prevented them from running.

The king cursed in frustration and ran metal-clad fingers down the length of his blade, setting black flames dancing along the length of steel. Livira felt the sucking void of those flames even from halfway across the room. This was why his men would rather die than retreat. However great a warrior was coming up those stairs, the flame would end them.

With a yank Livira pulled the topmost blanket from her bed, and giving herself no time to reassess her plan, threw herself at the king’s back. The jarring collision spilled both of them through the doorway and down the stairs. The king’s sword didn’t so much burn the blanket as decay it where they touched. The blade hit a soldier’s back, reducing him to bones and skin that tore like paper. At that point the king tripped. Both Livira and the blanket-wrapped king went tumbling.

The king, now swordless, crashed into the legs of another soldier and knocked him over just as something large and dark threw itself onto the man. Livira arrested her slide down the stairs with a groan. She managed to focus in time to see the last soldier stabbed half a dozen times before being tossed behind the oncoming attacker.

Uttering a guttural snarl, the warrior reached for the blanket covering the king. When he snatched it away…there was nothing, just the stone stairs and an abandoned sword, smoking gently.

The figure looked up. “Livira?” The bloody daggers dropped from his hands. “Livira? How are you here?”

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

Chapter 42

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 rememberedclimbing 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.

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