A Broken Paradise (The Windows of Heaven Book 3) (14 page)

Following false copies of the good, that no

Sincere fulfillment of their promise make.

—
Dante

6

Aeden

T
iva’s paradise started to dissolve, just as surely as if she had eaten the forbidden fruit herself. She didn’t tell Khumi that she had overheard his conversation with his father. For one, she could not risk angering him. Two, she figured it would be a perfect opportunity to test him on whether or not he would report the whole matter to her, lie, or not even mention it at all.

At least he was truthful when he laid things out.

Tiva just couldn’t believe her ears when he told her he wanted to take her up to his father! She had been so sure of herself when she found Khumi waiting for her, panting from his run up to the Hollow. She had followed him, at a discreet distance, and then circled around through the greenery to approach from the north. After making him wait long enough for her to catch most of her breath, she staged her own return to the Hollow from “a stroll in the upper foothills.”

Finally
, he finished presenting his father’s terms.

“Is this really such a good thing?” Tiva said
softly, for fear she might push him away.

“It could be. I mean, it took me by surprise too, but it wouldn’t be so bad. My father may be a Lit, but he’s
mostly fair. He even lets my brother and his fiancé play a kind of Iyu’Buuli music and stuff.”

Tiva didn’t want to hurt him,
but the discovery that his father was A’Nu-Ahki the Heretic had shaken her—even more, the more she thought of it. She had escaped the home of one angry World-end prophet and could not risk being tangled up in another, even if her own ears had confirmed Khumi’s words. She knew instinctively that she was now in a tug-of-war with the Old Man—one she could not afford to lose.

She knew it was t
ime for her to up the ante. “Why don’t you take him up on his offer? Move up here with me. You’re a good carpenter. There’re wild fruit trees in the woods for when work’s light. We could build a tree house near the Hollow. It’d be Aeden all over again!”

He hung his head. “Look, I know you don’t get along with your folks. But mine still care about me. I don’t want to hurt them.”

She spoke with a calculated petulance, “But you don’t mind hurting me!”

“Of course I won’t hurt you!”

“Then stay with me up at the Hollow. Later, if we feel it’s a good idea, we might go to your father. He said the door would be open.”

She kissed him longer than she had ever done before.

“I want to,” he said softly, when they came up for air. “I want to. But he also said that things might not be so easy if we waited until later.”

“What things?”

Khumi just stared off into space, unable to answer. Tiva gambled and won on the fact that A’Nu-Ahki had not mentioned any specifics.

“Just let me think about it.”

She cooed in his ear, “What’s there to think about?”

A rustle in the ferns disrupted the desired response.

Tiva turned to glare up at whoever had just entered the clearing.

Moon-chaser stood over them, light-brown hair hanging over his face like a mop, and smiled innocently. “I’m not interrupting, am I?”

Khumi said, “Nah!”

For the first time,
Tiva felt like smacking him.

Moon-chaser said,
“You’ll never guess what I found growing underneath the resin giants!” His excitement succeeded in totally postponing Tiva’s campaign for control over her situation with Khumi.

“What?”

Farsa’s brother pulled a mushroom from his belt satchel and held it up almost reverently to the filtered sunlight. “Seers’ buttons; I found a spot where the forest floor’s covered with’em! Do you know what this means?”

Tiva’s decided to join in Moon-chaser’s fascination with the dirty brown fungus. It might prove more useful than showing
her displeasure.

She
asked, “What does it mean?”

“These are the very food of heaven, people! The seers in Khavilakki eat them and have visions. Lovers take them and… well, you’ll just have to experience that one
for yourselves. Colors get brighter, the air gets lighter, and tonight the Hollow’s gonna festival the moon!”

Tiva wondered if this might not be just another one of Moon-chaser’s
elaborate fantasy-jokes. But if not, she saw a new opportunity to direct Khumi’s attention back to the matter at hand with just a little more patience on her part.

Moon-chaser said,
“Go to! You two want to sample the merchandise with me right now?”

Khumi seemed a bit hesitant.

Tiva was now ready to try anything that might bring her, and thus her fire sprite, closer to the Hollowers. She reached for the mushroom and popped it in her mouth.

When Khumi saw her chew and swallow, he slowly did likewise.

Tiva smiled
. After all
,
this is the only way for him to put off making his decision.
The seers’ button tasted like moldy soil, but Tiva pretended to enjoy the flavor. “These are good!”

Moon-chaser laughed. “They taste like behemoth manure, which is probably what they grow best in.”

Khumi burst into laughter.

Tiva blanched.
No problem. Better not take things too seriously.
She began to laugh along with them.

“I’ll leave you two alone in the moss.” Moon-chaser gave an obliging smirk. “Let me know how it works out,” he added with a wink.

Tiva watched him saunter off into the trees—too soon for her liking. She had wanted first to determine if this was one of his strange jokes. Now a good chance stood that she would need to resume their interrupted conversation—a tactic she was now sure would be to her disadvantage.

As they sat in silence, her anxiety grew with each passing minute she felt no change. She had expected it to
resemble the friendly warmth brought on by ale or
dragonfire
. Everything now depended on this seers’ button thing being exactly what Moon-chaser claimed.

Khumi fidgeted for a long time, his arm half around her.

Still no effect!

Gambling on Moon-chaser now seemed like total folly. That clutching “don’t let go of Khumi” urge washed over her again, but Tiva fought it back.
It’s not time yet!

Unable to wait any longer, she reluctantly resumed her first tactic of direct persuasion. “Look, I’m sure your folks aren’t near as bad as mine—probably great people and all. But these are our friends! I don’t want to leave them! Making that the condition for accepting our marriage is
vulpin’ cold, if you ask me. If your father can do this unilateral thing, then why can’t we just do our own lateral up here and declare ourselves married?”

Khumi furrowed his brow.

She leaned into him. “Please don’t leave me. You’re the only one who’s ever cared about me. And I care about you more than anything!”

He faced her fully and then pulled her all the way to his chest. “I won’t leave you. That’s never been a question. And you do have a point
—it is cold.” His mouth drooped into a frown.

Tiva exploited the break in his wall. “Then you’ll stay?”

Khumi gazed at her strangely, eyes deeper than she remembered them ever being. Star clusters, with each star an alternate world, inhabited the black holes at the center of his pupils. His body somehow took on a glow of extra animation.
He’s so alive
—
so irresistibly alive!

“I’ll stay,” he said with a far-away echo as green and feral as the primeval forest.

Diffuse golden skylight glistened through the trees, as the bruises stamped on Khumi’s face by his brother melted away. Tiva could hear the colors of the night skies inside his eyes sing out to her. His black curls turned into living moss on a firm sculpted head of dark mahogany. The wiry muscles of his bare carpenter’s shoulders became forest paradise. Textures and scents from fine polished wood reached her nose and ran beneath her fingers as she brushed them across his smooth skin.

Tiva felt her new Aeden come back to life with a vibrancy she had never been able to feel before. She could actually smell its sounds and hear Khumi’s hardwood fragrance. She smiled at him with coercive abandon.
Now the time has finally come!

Everything became clear to her.
The control of Farsa is mine! No one will ever play me as the puppet again
—
not Yargat, not my parents, and not Khumi’s father!

Khumi responded to her silent commands with an immensely satisfying servile clumsiness. She gently pushed him over backward into the ferns, and followed him. A rush of uncontrolled sensation followed
; an odyssey of sight, sound, and touch—a disjointed reality that ran parallel to the familiarity of Tiva’s former life, but not bounded by its limitations. Here she experienced pleasure without guilt, meaning without words; and words without meaning… Every common detail came alive. The unthinkable became not only thinkable, but also do-able!

“This is real! It’s all so alive and real!” she whispered, when she gave herself to him for the very first time.

iva did not quite expect the guilt that compressed her chest when she opened her eyes the next morning. She had to wake up and consciously think things through to get the palpitations of shame to subside even a little.

Khumi had left the tent early to go tell his parents about his decision and to gather his things for the move. Tiva tried to remember yesterday’s events, which now seemed disjointed and unreal.

After spending all afternoon in the moss together, they had met the others at the Hollow at sunset. As Moon-chaser had promised, the festival was like no other. Tiva had seen and done things last night with a laughing
, shame-free abandon that days ago would have shocked her into trying to return home—even to the wrath of Henumil.

No. It wasn’t shame-free.
The black foamy shame had actually fueled her night of bliss with its combustible tar-like vapors. Fortunately—she now realized—Khumi had led her off into the forest at some point, where they didn’t just talk, but they would at least be by themselves.

Why should I feel guilty? My father’s rules are based on lies! Lies about life
—
lies about love
—
lies on the Divine Name
—
lies on everything! Last night was crazy, but Khumi’s love for me is real. The rest can eat dung!

The guilt didn’t exactly go away, but it settled somehow into something she could manage.

She donned her wrap and crawled out of her tent to face the day.

The Grove Hollow campsite was a mess. Many of last night’s celebrants had already left for jobs or classes back in the valley. Others
lay strewn about the clearing, still asleep, like human flotsam from some horrendous explosion.

She picked her way past them, down to the waterfall pool, and washed her face and arms.

Excess baggage on a surly pack-beast,
she mused, remembering something Farsa had told her on the day they had first met.
“First ya gotta decide whether or not you’re gonna drag the Lit baggage around with you for the rest of your life, or join the real world.”

“It’s just a bunch of Lit baggage,” she said to herself, while she dried off. “I can’t drag it around with me the rest of my life.”

Yeah, but how do I really let it go?