What was I to him? I wanted so badly to know. There were times I felt it was a balanced thing between us. When he’d come to Vilahna, he’d brought the stack of sketches Liro had drawn of him. They were tacked now above the mantle of the fireplace. But among them, directly in the center, was a small painting of me. Liro painted it from one of the sketches he drew of me the day Nuri died. He painted it for Sorcha, and Sorcha carried it across deserts and mountains with him all the way here to Vilahna. Sometimes, when he did not realize I was watching, Sorcha gazed at it. Sometimes, when he didn’t think I could see, he gazed at me. The way he felt then, what I was to him, was obvious.

But there were other moments, and there were other people. Life in Alamadour was not like life in the City. There was no ailing parent; there was no terrible well of grief. He had long ago decided he and I were platonic. Several times I’d come home to find him in the throes of someone else or lounging with some red boy or girl, both of them stark naked on the floor. Once or twice he’d come home very late smelling of someone else. Once he did not come home at all. Those nights, the bed felt foreign and large.

I am not a red elf. I wasn’t steeped in their flexibilities. I did not know what it meant to be so curious about him in this terrifying way, to need him so much, and to see him so indiscriminately generous with his time and affections. He was my roots. I woke next to him and knew, with unwavering certainty, that I was more myself when he was there beside me. That with him it was not a matter of getting swept away, or lost: he pulled the slippery, shy me-ness to the surface. I didn’t know why it was him that did it instead of someone else, and I didn’t know how he did it, but I knew he did it. And I knew that being apart from him had taken a toll, and that I didn’t want to brave a separation again. But what was this life I led with him? I had no word for it, no understanding of it. More than friendship. Was it love? Yes. What kind of love? I didn’t know. I think it seemed simplest to me if sex was involved. There’s no understanding of romance without sex for a Semadran, and no conception of romance with a friend. There are just spouses. But the specter of rejection was paralyzing.