Page 25 of These Immortal Truths
Anna hugs him, her arms wrapping around his middle and squeezing tight enough to ground them both. She can feel his every shaky breath as easily as the lean arms returning her hug. “No.”
Hours later, when the goodbyes run too short to stretch any longer, Anna leaves the home they’ve made just as the day’s first light touches the earth.
Each step feels like heartbreak, another fissure cracking and spreading until she feels like she’s just a touch away from shattering. When she rises over the city, steps away from disappearing into themountain pass, she turns. Looks over the city that she has called home for thirteen years, eyes following the ships coming in and out of port, and thinks of the son she’s leaving behind. She’s rooted, her very being tangled in the soil and refusing to let go.
A gentle hand rests on her shoulder. Anna’s too numb to even jump.
“Come,” Khiran encourages. He wears the same form he showed her that night so long ago, when the winter was cold and things felt hopeless. The one she asked him to wear when it was just them, when he could look like himself. His blue-green eyes are soft with pity.
“It hurts,” she rasps, the words as raw as the pain lancing her heart.
“I told you it would.”
She shakes her head, because no warnings could ever amount to this. “Not like this,” she whispers. She thought her tears had run dry, but she feels them slipping down her cheeks, dripping off her chin. “I didn’t think it could hurt like this.”
He says nothing, only takes her shoulders and steers her away with hands so gentle, Anna thinks he must know how close she is to breaking.
They walk the mountain pass till the shadows become too deep to see by. She doesn’t expect him to stay, but he does without any explanation. When night spreads its wings across the sky, dotting her vision with stars and a crescent moon on the horizon, Khiran makes a fire from nothing with little more than a snap of his fingers. A bedroll she never packed gets unrolled, a pheasant she didn’t bring appears between one blink and the next over the fire. Its fat sizzles as it hits the flames, the smell making her mouth water despite the fatigue in her heart.
He asks nothing of her, only turns the bird so it cooks evenly and hands her a plate of it once it’s done. Perhaps he realizes she has nothing to give.
She isn’t hungry, but she eats even though she can hardly taste it. The silence presses on her, but it’s comfortable instead of straining. Grounding and familiar. Anna’s grateful for the weight of it. Shefeels like a ghost of herself, a paper thin piece in danger of blowing away at the smallest breeze.
She stares at Khiran’s hands, the long and elegant fingers folded loosely together as he stares into the fire and feels something in her shift.
“Thank you,” she murmurs, waiting until his eyes lift to hers. “For being here.”
For a long moment, he says nothing, but it’s a thoughtful kind of silence. The kind that speaks of contemplation and not dismissal, and Anna knows he is only considering which words to say. “The pain you feel … it’s something I am at least partially responsible for. It would be cruel to let you suffer it alone.”
She’s not sure if she believes that, but she doesn’t have the energy or the heart to argue. “Why me?” she asks, voice soft. Her eyes raise, imploring. “Why did you choose me?”
He shakes his head and prods the fire, the sparks that fly up reflect in his eyes. “That isn’t a story for tonight.”
“Why?”
“Because tonight you are grieving.” He sighs, regarding her carefully. As if he knows his next words could break her. “Ask me again, on a day when the gift I’ve given you doesn’t weigh on you like a curse.” He must catch the flash of doubt in her eyes, because his answering smile is soft. Reassuring. “It will come.”
She scoffs, holding herself tighter. Bitterness drips from her lips, a slow poison. “In time?”
“Yes,” he answers. The sincerity touching his eyes soothes the sting. “In time.”
That night, Anna goes to sleep unsure if she believes him, but drawing comfort from his words anyway.
CHAPTER EIGHT
He promised that death would not come for her, but as she shivers and sweats in the cradle of his arms—stares at him with fever glazed eyes—he is uncomfortably reminded that there is nothing to prevent Death from knocking.
Venice
1348
Anna has sat through more sermons of brimstone and smoke than most. Since calling a monastery home a few years ago, she is subjected to it more than not. It still doesn’t prepare her for the Hell that’s slithered into Venice’s ports. She has seen sickness, has treated it, but she has never seen anything like this. They’re calling it The Black Death.
Anna hates how well the name fits.
There seems to be no end to the suffering. No end to theinfected coming into their care. No end to the bodies leaving it. The stench is awful, foul in ways that make her stomach churn the moment she steps into the sick house. Several of her sisters routinely lose their breakfast upon the first opening of the door. Anna can’t say she doesn’t understand the temptation.
It’s only been a few weeks, and already the number of bodies crammed into the space is staggering. The walkways are so narrow, the patients so close together, Anna often finds herself stepping over limbs just to get from one end of the room to another.
