Eve smiled at the way he phrased the question and leaned her head into his shoulder, looking through the trees to the lake. “You have not spoken of your father,” she pointed out.
Khiva made an amused trilling in the back of his throat. “Answer my question and I will tell you of my father.”
“Fair enough,” she replied. “I do not quite know if my parents were a great ‘love pairing’ as you put it,” she teased, nudging his shoulder lightly, “but they held a very deep mutual respect for one another, a friendship that they’d had together all their lives.”
He made a sound. “They knew one another as young?”
“Yes,” Eve said, remembering everything her father had ever told her about her mother. “They grew up here, on Everton. They lived next to one another, near the Boulevard, and played together often. They were the greatest of friends. Over time, when my mother came of marrying age with no suitable partners in her circle, my father proposed to her because they both knew they would make excellent life partners. It might have not been an overpowering, romantic kind of love, but I personally think what they had was better.”
Eve smiled softly, remembering fondly the way her father had spoken of her mother…with warmth in his gaze, but a sadness, an emptiness that had never quite disappeared after her death.
Eve had never truly thought of it before, but in their own way, theyhadbeen one another’s soul mates.
“What became of her?” Khiva asked softly, stroking his fingers over her hip.
“She died from complications after my birth,” Eve said, her smiling fading.
Khiva inhaled an audible breath.
“I never knew her, but I felt like I did, from the stories my father told,” Eve told him. “Did you know that for Everton’s population, only two mothers every year die from birthing complications? And she was one of them.”
“I am sorry you never knew her,leeldra,” he murmured. “I am sorry she never got to know you.”
The way he arranged those words pulled at her heart.
“Me too,” she said softly, turning to look at him. “I was lucky enough with my father though. He never made me feel like I’d done anything wrong, once he told me how she died. He cherished me more, if anything, because of our loss. I was lucky to have him as a father.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Evelyn,” he argued.
“No, I know,” she said. “Sometimes it’s hard though, knowing that she died to give me life.”
“It is the nature of our universe,” he told her gently. “Sacrifice for gain. It is a law, as old as time itself.”
Khiva was an expert on that subject, Eve thought. He’d sacrificed so much, too much. His planet, his family, his past life…all for the gain of a war that hardly anyone spoke about anymore.
She reached over and gently pulled back his hood so that she would see the entirety of his face. Unable to help herself, she tugged him down to press a small kiss to his cheek, the sharp bridge of his nose, his forehead.
Khiva was trilling by the end of it and he laid back, pulling her down with him, until they lay side-by-side, on their bed of moss and dirt and grass. Eve thought it was better than the most comfortable, most luxurious bed imaginable. She would have laid with him anywhere.
“Your turn,” she whispered to him.
Khiva huffed out a small breath and told her simply, “My mother and father’s union was one of situation and circumstance. My father’s line descended from wealth and as I told you, my mother’s line invented and created firestones. Two powerful lines, joined together by their union. It was a celebrated pairing. However, my father was much older than my mother. He died simply of the aging process before the Great War. While my mother mourned his death, she did not love him. As for my brother and I, our father was a figure only. He left us with my mother’s line to be raised and reared properly until we came of age, as was the old Keriv’i tradition.”
“Did you ever truly know him?” Eve asked.
He thought about it and finally said, “Veki. I saw him only at celebratory feasts and rare occasions. I respected him, naturally, because he helped give us life, because he was honorable and just and he treated my mother with respect. Beyond that, I did not truly know him.”
“I cannot imagine only knowing my father in passing,” Eve confessed.
“It is an old Keriv’i tradition,” he murmured. “It is the mother’s line that nurtures the young.”
Unable to help her curiosity, she asked, “If you had a child, would you be content to never know them the way your father never knew you or your brother?”
Khiva stiffened slightly but seemed to ponder her question thoroughly. Finally, he said, “No, I would not uphold the old Keriv’i way if I had young.”
Why did that make her pulse flutter?
He’d told her a couple weeks ago that Madame Allegria had all the Keriv’i injected with contraceptives on a yearly basis, rendering them infertile for that brief amount of time. But now, Eve wondered if Keriv’i and humans were even compatible in that way. She knew of many mixed human and alien hybrids. She knew that humans and Luxirians were the first documented inter-species breeding case and that many more followed when humans unlocked the power of space travel.
