Page 94 of These Immortal Truths
The brandy burns. By the time it grows dark, the jug feels suspiciously light and her vision swims. It doesn’t stop her from screaming up at every constellation that bears one of his many names.
She picks up painting.
It’s not something she’s ever really tried. Her hands aren’t skilled in making beauty after lifetimes of labor, but her garden is thriving and she’s already caught and cured enough salmon from the river to last her months. Even if it wasn’t, she still has more food stored away than she knows what to do with. It feels like a good time to try something new. Particularly since she found a collection of paints, small canvases, and a folding easel tucked away under some spare blankets in the wooden chest at the foot of her bed.
She takes it into the garden, tries to capture the way the light plays off the greenery, the depth of the reds in the strawberries. The result is abysmal, a vague impersonation of the real thing, but there’s a beauty in the process. A serenity in searching out and finding the tiny details that make a scene beautiful.
Her hands commit to doing a little artwork every week; sometimes simple sketches with charcoal, sometimes watercolor or oils. By the end of the summer, she’s drastically improved. Though, the end results are still far from what she considers good. She continues the ritual anyway, finding peace in it.
In the spring, she convinces one of the local beekeepers to sell her a hive. She carries the humming box eight miles; feels the energy and life thrumming through the wood. She’s not sure how a mild curiosity and a stray book about beekeeping and pollination led to her committing to building a bee box and purchasing a small colony, but here she is.
She finds them fascinating.
The way each individual works for the good of the colony—the way the entire hive will revolt if the queen fails to help them thrive. She reads that a sick bee will go out into the world and die alone instead of risking the health of their hive. When it comes time to harvest, she watches the golden honey drizzle into her jars and thinks of all the effort nature has put in to it.
She finds far more enjoyment out of it than she anticipated, and over the years the colonies split and grow and one hive becomes two, then five, then ten. Soon she’s producing far more than she can eat—both in honey and in the garden.
So she buys a donkey and a cart, starts loading it up every few weeks, and brings it to the communities that need it. The donkey, to her dismay, is as stubborn as he is clever. It takes her three tries to fashion a latching system for the garden gate before he stops breaking in.
She names him Loki.
Partly because of the trouble he likes to cause, but mostly because she finds a great amount of amusement in imagining Khiran’s facewhen he discovers one of his many names has been bestowed, by her, to an ass.
Seven years on her own, with no Khiran in sight, and she looks around the cottage grounds and realizes it’s the first place she’s made for herself that feels rooted. Sometime when she wasn’t looking, she stopped carefully planning for when she’d need to pick up her life and move, and started building a home.
Sitting on the front step, her hand wrapped around the white-painted spindles of the railing, she wonders how it happened.Whyit happened. She’s never grown so attached to a place, never nurtured a garden with plans that outlive a few seasons, never let herself paint pictures to hang in the greenhouse.
For the first time, she feels like she’s living for herself.Onlyfor herself.
Her purpose is in the budding greens in the soil, the buzzing of the hives she’s helped grow. It’s in the books she reads in the firelight, the poetry she recites under her breath and feels in her soul. It’s in every stitch of the blanket she knit to curl up with when the mornings chill.
She’s close enough to society to visit, but far enough that she won’t be forced to leave.
Far enough from pain and suffering, that she doesn’t feel compelled to sacrifice her own happiness to fix it.
It’s both a freeing and guilty realization.
The next time she sees him, her hands are covered in dirt.
It’s been thirteen years. Her garden and her hives have expanded.She’s taken to drawing murals on the empty cottage walls—delicately painted bees flit down the hallways and gather in the doorways, vined flowers creep over the windowsills. Recently, she’s taken to embroidering similar little joys into the hems of her dresses and collars of her shirt. It’s entirely out of fashion with what’s being displayed in the town windows, but it brings her joy regardless.
There’s magic in those few hours before the sunset—when the sun dips low and the world turns golden. When the tiny specks of dust become glitter and the leaves shimmer in the breeze. It’s a fitting time for him to choose to walk into her life.
She’s digging out potatoes, her nails black with soil, when she feels him. His gaze is a familiar weight, his magic a soft scent on the breeze. Her hands still, a smiled breath, and she continues plucking plump tubers from the earth.
Her anger, herhurtat his abandonment, has healed into resignation. She’ll never believe he was right to leave her, but she understands why he did. The haunting pain in his eyes, the sorrow, when he said goodbye haunts her often enough to see the love behind it. To see the sacrifice.
Anna doesn’t turn around. She lets him find his courage privately; lets his words be the first spoken since he was the first to leave.
“You stayed.”
She smiles, pulling two more potatoes before leaning back on her heels. Her garden is still in full bloom, the warmth of the July sun fueling bursts of color throughout. “I did. I’ve seen a good bit of the world. Someday, I’ll see more. But, for now, this is as good a place as any.” She pushes her hair away from her face, admiring her work. “Besides, it’s rather beautiful here, and the weather’s mild.”
Finally, she gives herself permission to look at him. She thought she was ready, that seeing him wouldn’t hurt like it does, but the truth is that a century could have passed and seeing him would have still knocked the breath from her lungs.
He wears the same face that stars in her favorite memories; the same full lips she devoted an entire year to kissing. The same eyes,staring at her with such hopeful desperation. She smiles. Hopes he sees the forgiveness in it. “You chose well.”
He can’t hold her gaze, looking away from her and surveying the expansive changes she’s made. “I didn’t expect you to stay.”
