Page 33 of These Immortal Truths
She screams until her voice breaks, cries until his shirt is sticky with tears and snot, and his hold stays steady. The only fragile tether she has to the earth. When she’s reduced to whimpered hiccups and swollen eyes, when her breathing goes from sharp and violent to shaky and stuttering, he is a constant pressure keeping her from flying away in all directions.
Strange that the god that saved her from the fire would be the same one to keep her from drowning.
CHAPTERTEN
There is still a void in her heart, a sadness that lingers like bruises around her eyes. He brings her gifts from all the places she has yet to see, tells her stories in hopes they will inspire her, but her smiles still never quite reach her eyes. The fissure in her heart started with a child. As he overlooks the house she once called a home, its garden full of laughter and life, he wonders if her surviving family can heal it.
Genoa
1439
The years have been kinder since she screamed into the night, the smell of all her labor burning hanging in the air and Khiran’s arms quietly holding the pieces of her together as she fell apart. The dawn came and the village mob never descended.
No one can hear you. No onecan see.
Anna knows she has him to thank for that.
He held her through the night, shrouded them so she could break without fear of being found. Anna didn’t recognize it at the time, but it might have been one of the most merciful gifts he’s given her—outdone only by the food and funds he’d left her and Piers with in her moment of desperation. There was something cathartic about vocalizing the pain she’d held for so long, something that healed the raw jagged edges of her heart.
Over the next weeks, Khiran flitted in and out of her travels. Always bearing gifts of food and stories from lands so far from her own. She tried dishes that looked to be fit for kings and others that looked unassuming and homely but tasted just as delicious. He told her their names, their origins. None of them were from places she’d been, and most were from lands she’d never heard of.
Moqueca, a fish stew, from an island called Marajó. Kaeng lueang from the kingdom of Ayutthaya to the east. Doro wat from Abyssinia to the south. Every dish was different from the last; the flavors as rich and varied as the lands they hailed from. During their meals, Khiran would point out constellations and tell her how every culture looks up at the same night sky and finds different stories written in the stars. He even showed her some of the ones named after him.
She had known what he was doing—realized that the things he brought were meant to inspire her to see the wonders the world still had to offer her. It seems strange, to find comfort in the vastness of the world. Yet, somehow, it does.
Anna stands, the sun warming her shoulders and the white clouds casting moving shadows over the graves. Khiran had urged her to find something beautiful to chase away the nightmare, to force her to wake up. Genoa is the first place she thinks of—it’s one of the few places she remembers feeling at peace. So, even though the city carries old ghosts, that’s where she goes.
Fresh from the road, she hasn’t even stopped to think of a plan. She has nowhere to stay, nowhere to go. In this moment, staring down at the headstone with the name of the man she called a son, none of it matters.
The date of death stares back at her, an accusation:
1348.
The year she was in Venice, when the dead were intent on outnumbering the living. She thinks of rotten flesh and black, puss filled boils and feverish eyes. She knows, without being told, what took Piers from this world.
He was only forty.
A good life. Longer and more full than the one fate would have handed him should she not have stumbled on his dirty, tear-streaked face peeking out between the roots of that ancient forest. Long enough to marry, to have children. Comfortable enough for the family to afford a burial in a sea of mass graves.
Somehow, none of it provides the comfort it should.
“Good man, that one.”
Anna frowns, looking up to find the groundskeeper staring at her. He’s older, hair white beneath his cap and face lined with years. “You … knew him?”
No, that would be impossible. It’s been nearly a hundred years since his death.
The groundskeeper laughs, no doubt thinking the same. “No, no. He left this world long before I was born, but my mother told me stories.” He smiles, and despite never meeting him—despite his yellowed and missing teeth—it feels familiar. “Piers was my grandfather.”
The air leaves her lungs in a rush, her chest aching around the emptiness. “Your grandfather?” she echoes, the words strangled by the knot in her throat. She looks back at Piers’ headstone, drowning in a wave of mixed emotions.
The plague claimed Piers, but somehow his family survived.
She wets her lips, looks back up and finds the groundkeeper’s gaze. “What’s your name?”
“Franco.” He tips his hat, his worn hand gesturing to the headstone of his grandfather. “Would you like to hear about him?”
The offer is a kindness he will never understand. Anna nods, fighting to find her voice. “Yes. Thank you, Franco.”
