She ducked her head. “Clearly I didn’t spend enough of my youth here.”
“Oh yeah, seeing as my dad sort of took you hostage and all.” He grinned. “I am really, really blind, huh?” Kip said.
“Only wh—” She stopped herself.
‘Only where I’m concerned,’ she didn’t say.
Shit.
She was right. And she’d stopped herself from saying it because she was kind.
Somehow the ice was melting, and more than that.
“You do realize that I love you, right?” Kip said.
It was, now that he thought about it, actually the first time he’d ever said it. Somehow he’d thought his actions should have made it obvious.
She burst into tears.
Kip was no expert, but he didn’t think these were the good kind.
“You big idiot,” she said through her tears. “That’s not how you tell a girl you love her!”
“I thought it went without saying!”
“Those words never go without saying!”
“Well!” he shouted. Then he got quiet. “Now I know.”
She hesitated, uncertain where he was going next.
“First time I ever said it to anyone,” he said.
The future was a chasm, and her love was a plank, and he didn’t know where it ended. And he’d just run three steps blindly into the darkness.
“You know I love you, too, right?” she said.
“Well, now I know,” he said with a half grin.
“I’ve said it before,” she said. “Pretty much.”
You won’t accept a tacit ‘I love you,’ but you want me to? But he didn’t say it. It wasn’t exactly analogous anyway. “I didn’t believe it,” he said.
“Oh, Kip, you make me want to take this big knot of all these feelings I can’t even name and have gneas sáraigh.”
“That was… not clear,” Kip said. He could memorize foreign terms, but he didn’t think this was one he was going to want to ask anyone about.
She exhaled and reached under the covers. She grabbed him and squeezed. Not softly or erotically, either, though there was something inescapably and confusingly erotic for Kip in having Tisis grab him.
She said, “I am so frustrated and I want you and I want to hurt you and I love you and it’s all such a jumble—”
“No, I think I’ve got the feeling pretty exactly. It was the phrase I didn’t know. Ow.”
“Oh.” She loosened her grip, but didn’t let go. Better. “Closest I can translate it would be ‘fucking it out.’ It’s when you make love after you’re angry and then you feel better. It’s different than caidreamh collaí feargach, which is just angry lovemaking, where afterwards you feel better because you just had passionate sex, but you’re still mad at the other person.”
“That sounds good,” Kip said. “I mean, the former. I mean, the latter sounds not too bad, either, but only if after a few rounds of it you eventually got to the former. So, uh, let’s do that—the former, I mean.”
“I, um.” She cleared her throat. “I said I really wanted to—and I do! Not that I can. Because I can’t. And if I get even a little bit nervous—well, we’ll fail. Again.”
“Very… well…” Kip said. “You just tell me what to do that will make you happy, and I’ll do that.”
“Can you, like… hold all that grab-me-andhold-me-down-make-me-quiver passion in your eyes, but not actually do anything to scare me?”
Now Kip cleared his throat. “You’re asking a lot of a man.”
“You are a lot of a man,” she said with a naughty little grin.
It was as if they were playing roles for each other, but all in all, being silly and out of your depth was better than being angry and confused, wasn’t it?
He kissed her, and slowly, the inner turmoil vanished. Then, slowly—more slowly than either of them wanted, but as slowly as was necessary—they made love.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was good. It was halting, and it was asking questions, and it was some answers that would not appear in one’s fantasies. But Kip shut up and he began to listen, and once he began to listen, he began to hear snippets of her song, and then all he had to do was hear the ever-changing verses of her heart’s desire and sing them in a refrain to her body.
Though perfectly attentive, perfectly diligent, Kip was not a perfect lover yet. But love doesn’t demand perfection, only focus and time and effort. And before the night had passed, they had finally, joyfully, consummated their marriage.
It was a beginning, and it was a promise, and it was love; it was what had been broken fused together anew.
As the dawn rose, they lay head to head, staring up into the center of A World Begins, and Kip understood why this was treated as a honeymoon chamber. For a wedding was a world’s beginning, a start from which all was possible, and a couple would lie head to head like this only after the lovemaking and after the cuddling, after their desires were sated, and their hearts were full, and their minds at ease, and their bodies at rest, and now they could be refocused together to a single purpose.
As the light rose like gold through the mirrors and lenses channeling the light above, Kip felt open to all the world, at peace, and in that morning color, he intuited another truth, coded there in the luxin itself: even perfect repairs must be tended.
The golden yellow was a mere hair’s breadth from perfect luxin yellow, and, seeing that, Kip looked for superviolet, and it too was there, and a smidge of orange, and even the tiniest slivers of red and sub-red. There was blue for some stars, and red for others, there were nubs of paryl and triggers of chi.
He wouldn’t have understood, much less attempted, such delicate work if he hadn’t worked on the rope spear.
Orholam wastes nothing, not even our errors.
With superviolet fingers, he traced out lovingly where the luxins had been, and simply copied them, listening to their song, simple as refilling the lantern, and cleaning out some soot and the dust of centuries from a few plugged channels.
His Turtle-Bear tattoo filled with each color in turn as he used it, and glowed.
Simple. Simple for a fearless nine-color full-spectrum superchromatic polychrome who didn’t stop to consider that if he botched anything, he could set the whole room on fire and destroy an entire culture’s most treasured art.
You dare to use sub-red, Kip? On centuries-old wood?
But he knew he could do this, and he couldn’t stop himself, not with beauty so close, not with his gifts so fully engaged.
In a moment, in an hour, in an eternity, in a wink of Orholam’s eye, Kip finished.
Tisis gasped, and Kip did, too. It was one thing for Kip to put the luxin paints back onto the palette of a great artist, it was quite another to see what Phaestos and the drafters had done with them.
The room lit. Sunshine shimmering on ocean waves, a mirror, in this darkest forest, to the stars and then the rising sun. A world beginning. This light was a gift of man and Orholam, once broken apart fused together anew, what had been flawed now rejoined in gold perfection.
“Oh my God,” Tisis whispered, but in her hushed tone, that holy word wasn’t blasphemy but reverence. “Kip. Heart of my heart. You have brought light.”
Author’s Note