The Forbidden Fruit

by S. K Munt

  Karol’s face went white. ‘It’s not rape!’

  ‘It’s not consensual either,’ I pointed out. ‘You ask five year-old girls to sign a contract that forces them to become sex slaves, and threaten to kick them out to face off with worse predators if they buck against it later!’

  ‘That’s not-’ Karol raked his hands through his dark hair, looking agitated and averting his eyes and I knew I was on dangerous grounds but I pressed on while he was speechless, enjoying that element of our interaction very much!

  ‘I don’t care if they end up calling to you, I don’t care if you wait until they’re of age to penetrate them and I don’t care how hard they come after- we are not Companions to you, we are things! Stolen little girls trained to be princesses only to become sticky with your seed, abused, brainwashed little dolls that YOU punish for marital sins committed in the time before! And the ones you deceive into believing that they are loved better here than they could be anywhere else are the most abused of all!’ Karol opened his mouth but I raised my voice and screamed: ‘And if God is okay with it, then he can go fuck himself TOO because I will give my heart to SATAN before I give my body to a Barachiel against my will, especially one who would wish for a lustful encounter on his birthday- instead of something positive for his people!’

  Doors opened around me, and with those damning words expelled from me, I began to shake with fear and exhaustion. Karol staggered back as though I had struck him and satisfied by that, I turned on my heel and fled.

  ‘Bolt your doors everybody!’ I cried as I ran past the pool, where Kelia was sitting with her radio on beside her, humming while painting her nails. ‘There is a wolf in the halls ready to huff and puff and blow your pride down in his anger with me- possibly with three of you at once!’

  ‘Larkin calm yourself!’ Karol bellowed after me. ‘I do not want to have to punish you for this conduct, but I will report your foul language to Shep if you frighten your friends!’

  I pivoted, my ponytail whipping around my shoulders, my breathing haggard. Adeline was right on Karol’s heels and her eyes were so bright with anxiety, and so like Martya's in that moment that I couldn’t keep the next words in: ‘I don’t believe it was an accident,’ I said, my throat tightening around the words. ‘And when I die, don’t YOU believe it was a coincidence, no matter what your lover whispers to convince you otherwise!’ And then I turned again and bolted.

  ‘Oh, God…’ Adeline whispered, and for the first time ever- she actually sounded troubled. ‘Lark…’

  ‘Larkin!’ the wolf howled my name and, feeling genuine fear for my life, I doubled my strides and slammed through the north wing door and straight out the back, ready to hurtle myself into the electric fence before I allowed Karol to place even one fingertip on me.

  Banishment it is!

  22.

  I spied the duchess sitting by Martya’s old pumpkin garden as I galloped by, which served to further enhance my paranoia that she’d had something to do with my friend’s death, because she was the only person other than me who went there. I stampeded towards her, breathless, then reached down and picked up a handful of leaves. With a trembling open palm, I scattered them to the wind.

  ‘This is my future,’ I croaked, watching the ochre and golden leaves whip past and out to the rear stone fence. ‘Martya foresaw it! If I don’t get out of here while I am still a sapling, then one of them will see that I grow roots and die behind this fence. And after the scene I just caused in the harem, I’ll be lucky to have that sort of fate, and not Martya’s sort!’

  ‘What do you know of Martya’s fate?’ she asked me quietly.

  ‘What do YOU know?’ I demanded.

  ‘Nothing,’ she smoothed out her skirt and sighed, not looking up at me. ‘Always nothing.’

  ‘Then why are you here? It reeks of a guilty conscience!’

  Constance shrugged. She looked as beautiful and fresh and as crisp as the air, in an ice-blue gown that was fitted tightly around her torso, cleavage and wrists, but then flared out in multiple layers of a soft fabric in various shades of pale blue which seemed to deepen with every layer, then pooled around her like a downy cloud where she sat. Her hair was swept up in the sort of top knot that would have looked too severe on anyone else, but it took years off her, as did the delicate blue ribbon-bow perched at the base of it, which matched the elegant sash fastened around her tiny waist. ‘I do have a guilty conscience, because I wished her dead when I learned that she’d found a cure for the damage I planned on continuing to do for many years to come.’ She picked up a shrivelled cherry tomato. ‘But I did not kill her, Larkin, and neither did my husband. I was going to Pacifica that night and that was all I cared about and as soon as I’d set sail, it was the last thing I wanted to talk about, and all that he did. But we were at sea, so we were not involved in her accident.’

  ‘But you don’t believe that it was an accident, do you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She lifted those pale topaz eyes to me and held up her hands. ‘I really don’t.’

  ‘But you don’t feel badly about it, and neither did Elijah when he learned, right?’

  ‘He was more dismayed than anything else- about the cure, and I did hear Karol and him discussing it privately one night: Elijah said that he felt bad for threatening her and my son told him he ought to because if anyone found out...’ she glanced over at the garden, her lips turning down into a frown. ‘I feel worse about it now, and am sorry for having wished her ill-will as she was the only girl in here who I’d never seen as a threat to my son’s future wife. And, truth be told, I am glad that I have been weakened by her cure; too many good turns for the sake of an ideal lead to, well- religion, and I was becoming a devoted follower of causing mayhem, until her cure forced me to stop.’ She glanced at me. ‘What was the ingredient, by the way? The missing one? I know you managed to give Karol a list of things that she had tried in the past to find the missing ingredient. And that one of those things was the last piece of the puzzle but...’

  ‘You don’t know?’ I said, surprised that she didn’t even know that two were missing, not just one.

  ‘No, Karol guards that formula jealously. Or, that one ingredient anyway.’

  She was being vague, and so I would extend the same courtesy to her, I shrugged, even though I knew damn well what had been missing, and how ironic it was. ‘I wrote down dozens of things, and I don’t understand what half of them are. He found it by a very long process of elimination, I believe but I couldn’t possibly recall so many things a year later: I gave him my only list.’ I paused. ‘Why do you want to know?’

  She threw the tomato back into the withering garden. ‘It would be nice to know what I’m allergic to.’

  That made me blink. ‘Nephilim get allergies? I thought you were supposed to be super-human in that way?’ I snickered. ‘It’s not garlic is it, or a crucifix?’

  ‘Not allergies that affect us personally,’ she said, plucking a fresh cherry tomato and handing it to me. It was the only thing she’d ever given to me so I took it, but I didn’t dare bite into it until she took one for herself and popped it into her mouth. ‘Just ones that can repel our powers. Elijah and Kohén’s is rubber, obviously because it blocks electric current, and as you’re probably well aware, Kohl weakens on large bodies of water that he can’t control, or in very dry heat. There are certain things that make it hard for me to do what I do, but they make sense from nature’s prospective- it’s difficult for me to channel insects when it’s raining or boiling hot or during fierce winds, and I thought maybe that was my only limitation. But no, she found something to spray that completely repels them- they turn to dust if they get close.’

  ‘How did you do it?’ I asked her, settling down. ‘Those plagues were everywhere when you were-’

  ‘Ekita,’ she said, smiling a small smile at me, and I felt my eyes widen. The princess of Tariel!

  ‘Her too?!’

  ‘She has been travelling for years, which made
it handy. She is much weaker than I, but yes, her father is my father’s cousin, and that’s where my power comes from, but it skipped the king and went straight to her.’

  ‘That’s why you wanted her to marry Karol? To keep one like you in power here?’

  ‘Yes- if you could call my position here powerful, which I do not. But she’s also very sweet and very lovely.’ The duchess licked tomato juice off her fingers. ‘She’s retired now though, and happily. With the spray there’s no need for her to continue, or for me to push her to Karol and I’m glad… they really didn’t hit it off as I’d have liked.’

  ‘Only person who’s ever going to hit it off with Karol is going to be a deaf mute…’ I muttered. She shot me a look so I rolled my eyes and asked: ‘Can you only do locusts?’

  She leaned over and pressed her hand to my arm. ‘No, duckling.’ She pulled back, smiling secretly. ‘I can do many insects-’

  ‘OW!’ I slapped my arm, and then looked down as a giant mosquito rolled off it. ‘Hey!’ She started laughing and, snarling because there was already a welt on my arm, I leaned over, and enjoyed the disgusted downturn of her mouth which accompanied the gentle ‘Slosh’ sound of the cherry tomato in my hand popping against her skin.

  ‘Oh!’ She began to wipe her arm free of the juicy red flesh. ‘Larkin! How dare you? I am your-’

  ‘No we’re equal,’ I told her, rubbing my palm on her pretty dress. ‘Remember? Not because of our castes, but because you owe me one. And like I said, I’m running out of time… as of five minutes ago, in fact.’

  ‘What scene did you cause?’ she asked, looking irritated as she wiped her arm on the grass.

  ‘I renounced God,’ I said, sighing and wiping my hand on the grass too, ‘and basically pledged my allegiance with Satan. Oh, and I called Karol a rapist… Kohén too.’

  She looked up sharply. ‘You should not do that!’

  ‘They are,’ I said stubbornly. ‘The fact that Karol just broke a law to lay one on me is proof of that. Some Prince!’

  Her lips quirked. ‘I meant the other thing.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it, so it doesn’t count,’ I said, rolling my eyes. ‘I just wanted to see if there was anything I could say that would shut Karol up.’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Did it work?’

  ‘Quite well.’

  ‘Then I will keep that in mind.’

  ‘No, you need to keep ME in mind,’ I said, taking her hand and not allowing myself to be distracted by the solitaire on her finger. ‘I need to leave here and soon. Karol is losing his control around me now, as Kohén began to, and I’m scared. If Karol gets joined soon and not married, he’ll be eligible for the crown, right? And if gets that kind of power- and sway over the harem- while I’m still there...’ I shuddered. Elijah was protecting me now because he wanted me for Kohén, but Karol wanted me for himself and what was worse, he thought that made him a hero.

  ‘Karol will not do that, Larkin,’ she said, sounding snippy. ‘He is a good boy, and one who is full of God’s light.’

  ‘Are you a deaf mute?’ I asked her, wrinkling my nose. ‘Because the Karol I just saw in the hallway threatened to birthday wish me into sexual bliss.’

  She sighed again. ‘I am well aware that you inspire grotesque thoughts in his being but he is only jesting-’

  ‘Stop saying things like that!’ I complained. ‘You speak of me as though I bewitch them on purpose!’

  ‘I cannot help it,’ her eyes shifted to mine, and I saw fear within them. ‘There is darkness in you Larkin, and it has been a stronger influence on the men within this castle than my divinity ever has.’

  ‘No there’s not!’ I protested, shocked that she’d think such a thing. ‘You hated me from the moment you saw me but I was just an innocent little girl, and if you help me now, I could leave here and be one still! And I want to be innocent and light for Kohl, I swear it! If you try to block my escape with your divine being because you believe that I’m the bad seed, YOU will BE the shadow that darkens me!’

  The duchess pulled her hand from mine and clutched hers together on her lap. ‘I agree that I need to get you out of here, and I would bless you and Kohl coming together if it has inspired more of a thirst for love than for power within his soul... but I will not be blamed for the way my sons have acted to win your favour-’

  ‘I only tried to win Kohén’s friendship!’ I protested. ‘Like I was told to do!’

  ‘But he wants more because you solicit more with every thing you do and say. In fact, I do not doubt that if you gave him one of those vulnerable, but sensual smiles of yours, my own spouse would-’

  ‘Stop!’ I pressed my hands to my ears and squeezed my eyes shut. ‘I don’t want to hear this.’

  She took my hands off my ears. ‘There is Nephilim in you,’ she whispered. ‘Fallen in origin. It’s only a trace-’

  ‘How could you possibly know such a thing?’ I demanded, heart racing as though she’d read every thought in my mind concerning my biological parents. ‘Only the Soul mates with feathers can sense godlessness in people!’

  She shrugged. ‘You don’t need to have absolute powers to have instincts, Larkin. I’m good at reading people, and your aura sparkles like stars in an inky sky and it tempts a man’s soul- as extremely as Shep’s presence invokes feelings of warmth and sunlight. And I believe that power has something to do with how well you make things grow, and always have been able to, according to your mother...’ she nodded to the garden, and my throat tightened around a scream of outrage, suppressing it. What the fuck did giant pumpkins have to do with dark juju? It wasn’t like they grew so big- no one had tried to carve a carriage out of one for me yet! ‘With your blonde hair and golden skin, you radiate a sunny glow- an angelic one on the surface- but I think we both know that you are anything but. I saw it the first moment that I happened upon Kohén playing with those cards and breaking our rules-’

  ‘We were children!’ I cried. ‘I was bored and heartsick.’

  ‘He was five and you taught him how to play a forbidden gambling game,’ she corrected me. ‘And he’s told me that you were his first kiss, as you were Kohl’s. You were the first girl to orgasm during that heinous ritual, the only one who makes Kohl lose control of his temper-’

  ‘Shut up!’ I hissed, jumping to my feet. ‘And how do you know all of these things?’

  She shrugged. ‘I overheard some, saw others and a few months ago, before we left, Karol came to my room to confess that he’d had thoughts of betraying Kohén for you- which is why I’m not surprised to learn that he threatened you so today.’

  ‘He DID?’

  ‘Yes. Karol has always sought my advice when he finds himself tempted, because he wants to please me. Why do you think he’s considering looking for a wife and not a spouse?’ She sighed. ‘But he will only marry someone that he is certain that he can be faithful to, and now that I know that he’s stolen a kiss from such a young little temptress, I do not have much faith that he will-’

  ‘Stolen!’ I repeated. ‘Stolen, not given or accepted!’

  ‘I know. But can you not see how every slip of judgement within Eden’s walls has you as the common denominator as cause?’ Her eyes were too clear- so clear that I could see her version of me in them. ‘Larkin I am not saying that you are a fallen woman or that you are destined to be, and I know that the situation you’ve found yourself in here does nothing to encourage holy thoughts or actions for I hate it as you do- to the point of conjuring up the darkest thoughts imaginable. In fact, I know that I’ve probably pushed you as close to the brink of darkness over time with some of my actions, and I am sorry for that. But I did it intentionally, waiting to see if you’d reveal yourself to be more than what we all supposed you were: a scared, lost little girl. I can see now that you have no power and genuinely strive to be good and loving, because lord knows that you’ve been pushed beyond any human’s ability to cope without lashing out as a Nephilim would, but you are still a temptress by
nature, and a rebel and an agitator! You curse, you speak inappropriately, you constantly go over the lines of conduct and then you make everyone who is drawn to you feel inadequate by comparison. And though I can see that you hate the effect that you have on people, you cannot look me in the eye and deny that evil runs in your blood, can you?’

  I stared at her, at a loss. ‘Where is all of this coming from?’ I asked, on the brink of tears again. ‘Why didn’t you mention any of this on Caldera when you had the chance? Of all the things you screamed at me, ‘evil blood’ was not one of them!’

  ‘I did not know for sure, I have only ever suspected it. But I’ve been out here for about two hours now, thinking everything over, and that man has not budged an inch since your name came to my mind.’

  I frowned at her. ‘Who? Karol?’

  ‘No,’ she lifted her eyes and gazed over my shoulder. ‘The Nephilim man standing behind you at the fence. I do not question that he bears me ill will, and now that I’ve seen him for myself- I do not doubt that he is your father either. Like you, he glows golden and yet the warmth he radiates is hatred-hot.’

  I spun around and there he was, up against the metal fence, sandwiched between it and the fields beyond Martya’s garden, staring at us. Staring and saying nothing- just smiling, and it was the creepiest thing I’d ever seen. My heart tripped over. ‘Oh my God! It’s him!’ I turned back to her. ‘The security tapes! We have to show them-’

  ‘He won’t register on them, Larkin, and is probably very selective about who he shows himself to.’

  ‘What is he then?’ I demanded, looking back and feeling so chilled by his wide smile that my teeth could have chattered together.