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 time 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.
T
iva did not quite expect the guilt that compressed her chest when sh
e 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?
T
he hilly trails above Grove Hollow extended into a forest labyrinth as winding as Tiva’s mind. The other Hollowers had families, academy, or jobs in the lower valley during most days. Only Tiva dared not show her face in the village. She wandered the trails from morning to early afternoon, alone with her thoughts. She had come to hate the long silences.
I wonder what Tsuli and Weri are doing? They must have broken down and told my father something, else how would he have known to visit Farsa? Tiva couldn’t blame her old friends. Henumil could be imposing, especially when he was angry or wanted something.
She turned and headed back through the greenery. The birdsong in the trees kept the silence from becoming total emptiness. When she reached the Hollow, she looked down the side path to find that nobody was there yet. Normally, she took a nap this time of afternoon, but today she wasn’t sleepy. Instead, she kept walking toward Q’Enukki’s Retreat and beyond.
Occasionally when Tiva felt restless, she would go down the trail almost to the Shrine. The little branch path she and Farsa had used to avoid Yargat’s haunt on Tiva’s first trip to the Hollow wound around a grassy overlook before crossing the brook toward the Immigrant Quarter. Today Tiva risked climbing the knoll to get a look at the village and her old life.
She lay on her belly in the grass, with her head propped on her hands and elbows to peek over the gentle ridge. In the distance below, the academy ziggurat released its students. Some of them ought to reach the Hollow in about an hour or so.
Her eyes wandered past the ziggurat to the Altar Square. A pang of loss almost brought an involuntary tear at the sight of her father’s house.
“Stop it, you silly rag!” Tiva hissed to herself. “Why should you weep for such a dungeon?”
She had to turn her head and slide a little down the opposite slope to head off the emotions. She got to her feet, brushed herself off, and trudged down the backside of the hill to the path back up to the Grove Hollow.
It was stupid to come down this close to town! What was I thinking? Then it dawned on her that in daylight Yargat might actually see her rejoin the main trail, if he stood outside the Shrine cave as he often did, and faced the right direction.
Terror froze her in place less than fifty cubits from where the paths met. Something rustled in the bushes behind her.
Tiva wheeled around and peered down the way she had just walked. A gentle breeze moved the trees overhead. The lighting seemed odd, but she saw nobody behind her.
She continued toward the main trail, trying to catch a glimpse of the Shrine through the leaves. Reassured that a green wall masked her approach; she tiptoed up the slope to the junction.
She had just about made it to the main trail, when again she heard motion in the bushes behind and to her right.
Tiva stopped. Sweat dribbled down her spine between her top and bottom wraps. She felt the same as when Yargat used to stare at her from behind—a frozen panic that always left her helpless.
She turned, but again saw no one.
Taking a minute to regain her composure, she crept up to the main trail and bolted until the path wound upward away from the Shrine’s line of sight. She kept a brisk pace until she had climbed past Q’Enukki’s Retreat, where the forest hemmed in on both sides again. Only then did she hear the rustle once more and the snap of a twig in the greenery behind her.
Tiva turned and shouted, “Who’s there?”
The ferns moved. She was sure Yargat was going to jump out at her, and pull her into the green. Instead, a small hand appeared, and then a face Tiva did not expect.
Tsulia stepped onto the trail, eyes wide with a quivering chin.
“Tsuli! You scared me to death!”
“I’m sorry,” cried Tiva’s old friend, “I didn’t mean to.”
“Why did you sneak up on me then?”
“I was afraid. If my father knew I’d wandered all the way up here, he’d absolutely kill me and feed my body to the wurms!”
“You still didn’t have to creep behind me all the way up from the Shrine, girl!”
Tsuli scratched her head. “I didn’t follow you from the Shrine. I left academy early and was wandering the hills all afternoon looking for you. I got lost, and only found the trail again when I came out of the trees just now. I didn’t know it was you at first, Tiva—honest!”
Tiva’s heart almost stopped. Who was following me then?
“Sorry I jumped at you, girl. I’ve missed you.”
Tsuli asked, “You’re not mad?”
“No; just startled.”
“‘Cuz, I guess you’d have figured that I told your father you went with Farsa a few months back. I’m sorry, he was so angry…”
“It’s okay, Tsuli. You were scared. I would have been too.”
“Did he come up here?”
Tiva laughed. “No. He caught Farsa at home. She told him I ran off to the Farguti Girl’s Shrine or something. I figure he’s given up on me.”
“I don’t think so.”
“At least he hasn’t been up here. Come on, I’ll show you where I live now.”
Tsulia hesitated. “I better not. If my father finds out…”
“Go to! You’ve already left academy early. Why worry now?”
“I told them I was sick. They hardly ever check up on that anymore. I can’t get home any later than I normally would, though.”
Tiva pitied her. “I want you to know that life is good for me now. Better than it ever was before.”
“Really? You seem so different. I was afraid they’d be making you do stuff.”
Tiva smiled. “They don’t make anybody ‘do stuff’ up here. I’m much better off, really.”
Tsulia looked down. “I-I better go now. I can’t get caught.”
“Who’s going to catch you?”
Tsuli shook her head. “I’m sorry. I can’t be friends with you any more if you don’t come hom
e. I’m glad you’re doing better, though. Don’t be afraid. I won’t tell your father we talked.”
Tiva watched her old friend turn and scurry back down the main trail. It was all she needed to remind herself that life at the Hollow really was better—even during the long empty daylight silences.
T
iva’s world exploded again with the enhanced colors of the woodland glade. She floated in the afterglow of Khumi’s sleeping embrace, and tried to find her way into what should have been satisfaction.
Frustration lurked, a subtle creature, like a pair of eyes peering out at her from a tree-root-forced crack in a lonely corner of her personal fortress—small, but all too real.
What can possibly be wrong? I’m in control now—I have the perfect weapon for my tug-of-war with A’Nu-Ahki built right into me! I am that weapon! Khumi might miss his family, but he’s chosen me!
Then it came to her. Is it taking us more seers’ buttons to experience the “Forest Wild,” or is Khumi starting to lose interest? The second possibility made the crack in her fortress widen, as a tentacle-like tree root pushed inside. Khumi was less responsive to her today and in too much of a hurry. They had barely talked.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Moon-chaser, always hard-up for silver, had taken to selling the buttons rather than giving them away as friendship tokens. Tiva had once tried to follow him out to one of his little patches. Farsa’s brother didn’t just go to great lengths to throw her off his trail. He had also confided to her some “friendly advice” that night, by the campfire, as if he had known she had tried to follow him all along.
“Unless someone knows what to look for, the button is almost identical to a fatally poisoned kind,” Moon-chaser had explained with an air of botanical erudition that would have sounded strange coming from anyone else at the Hollow. “I know what to look for because my father used to sell them back in Erdu. He had to give it up by law when we moved to Sa-utar, just before coming here. Tell me something Tiva; don’t you think a little expert protection from a deadly mistake is worth a tenth-skel of silver?”
A Broken Paradise (The Windows of Heaven Book 3) Page 11