Page 31 of These Immortal Truths
And he does. He places a coin in her palm—less than a doctor’s wages but more than what she’d ever earned as a midwife—and marches off with the rest of them. Word must get around, because the next troop that comes through asks for her by name, and she treats two soldiers for similar ailments. Soon, the commanders begin to stop for the day instead of passing through, just so their soldiers have the chance to receive treatment.
She provides treatment for everything from fungal infections to colds, rashes to fevers. The next morning they leave, and Anna hopes what she’s given will be enough to see them to wherever they’re going. Most of them offer payment, but not all. Some send allthey have back to their families, others see her for what she is—a lone girl with no power over them—and keep their coin.
Even so, it still earns her far more than being a midwife ever did. She hides the coins away beneath a loosened stone in her hearth, knowing that when her fire burns through the day—boiling water—it’s too hot for anyone but her to touch without burning. It’s a precaution only, one she never thinks will be needed. Then a stranger opens the door to her home without invitation, a sneer on his face and violence in his eyes, and she knows she was right to hide what she has.
“Where is it?” The words are spitting, a serrated threat in each sharp syllable. He shouldn’t waste his time. Anna feels too numb to be afraid.
She stands, her hands dropping away from the herbs she was preparing. “Are you ill?”
His hand is at her throat, squeezing hard enough to bruise. “The money?Where is it?” Anna’s nails sink into the skin of his wrist, and he hisses. “I watch the soldiers coming in and out of here all day for yourservices. I know you have a stash of coin around here.”
She looks back at him levelly, realization making her lips thin. A local then. “I’m a healer,” she says, because she knows what he’s insinuating. Knows he has assumed that the comfort she offers comes from between her legs. “The money I earn goes to buy more medicine.”
“Medicine,” he sneers, eyeing the hanging herbs lining her walls. “Or witchcraft? Is that what you do? Lure the soldiers in with a quick swiving and then sell them your charms on the way out?”
“I am a healer,” she repeats. Even though she knows it’s useless. Even though she knows he’s already decided, and that weak minds are always the last to change.
He scoffs, shoving her aside with enough force for her stumble back into the wall. One of her jars falls from the shelf, lavender spilling across her feet.
The stranger looks at it. Anna watches as the thought catches, quick as a fire and just as destructive. “That’s where it is, isn’t it?”His arm swings over her shelf, sending dozens of jars crashing to the floor. “Which one is it?!”
Anna doesn’t tell him it’s none of them. Doesn’t bother. She lets herself slide down the wall and watches as her efforts the past few years splinter across the floor, the smell of every herb she’s gathered perfuming the air with a thickness that makes her dizzy.
It’s only when he’s destroyed every last one, his chest heaving with furious breaths, that he pulls her up by her collar and slams her back into the wall. “You stupid bitch, I’ll kill you right now. Where the hell is it?!”
Anna laughs. Shelaughs.
Because killing her is the last thing he’lleverdo, and somehow in some twisted place inside her, him believing it—him thinking he has that power over her—is the funniest thing she’s heard in years. “You won’t,” she says, her smile dark. His hold loosens, a prick of fear in his eyes. Light brown—they’d be pretty if it weren’t for the hate in them.
Anna likes it. Likes that she can dose him with the same poison he tried to force on her. Likes the power of knowing that this moment, when the woman he threatened laughed in his face instead of cowering under his hand, willstay with him. His fist is still tangled in the front of her shirt. Anna wants it gone. Wantshimgone.
She holds up her arm, rolls up her sleeve, and exposes the pale patched skin and watches as the fear in his eyes bleeds into horror. His hands drop her as if she burns, backing away so quickly he trips over a chair in the process. Anna stands, looks down at him, and takes pleasure in how small he looks. How scared. “You should leave,” she says, and hopes he hears the threat in it. “Maybe you won’t catch it.”
She takes a step closer, and he scrambles toward the door, cursing her under his breath.
Anna knows he’ll be back. He’s probably on his way to rouse the entire village, so they can light their torches and ready the stockade. Anna stands amongst the ruins of five years’ labor, mourning the waste of it.
She’s so, so tired.
The hearth is still hot; it sends pain across her palms when she lifts the stone and takes the bag of coin from its hiding space, but no blisters erupt and the only blackened skin is from the smear of soot across her fingers. She doesn’t dare stay long enough to pack. There’s nothing left of any worth, anyway. The would-be-thief has destroyed everything of value.
Anna reaches the foothills a little over an hour later. No one follows her, but she can smell smoke on the air. She knows, before she turns to look, what she’ll see, but it doesn’t hurt any less. Sinking into the tall grass, she pulls her knees up to her chest and watches the house she lived in burn—a bright spot of hungry light in the darkness.
She has given aid to those same people, offered the same treatments she did the traveling soldiers despite most of them being unable to pay in anything but labor or small goods. And yet, so easily they turned against her.
Looking up at the heavens, she wonders how long she has before they start hunting her down.
The ache starts in her chest, hollow and fragile, a fatigue that drags on her limbs with a force that’s painful. She wants to cry. She wants to sleep. She wants to curl up in the field and not move for days.
There’s a whisper of grass behind her. Considering everything else that’s happened tonight, it should frighten her, but she’s too exhausted to even bother looking. Let them kill her. Let them try. Maybe she’ll rise from the ashes as someone different. Someone whole.
He kneels in front of her, dark brows furrowed over familiar blue-green eyes. Khiran’s hand slides along her jaw, tipping her chin up so his eyes can trace over the skin of her neck. “Let me see.”
There’s nothing to see, she knows there isn’t, but somehow he knows anyway. “I don’t bruise,” she murmurs. A truth he should already know.
His touch is gentle where not an hour earlier another pair of hands were not. “Not that they can see,” he says, voice soft with regret.
“And you can?”
