Page 3 of These Godly Lies
The child did not answer.
Eira tried again, and again, in every language she knew. Despite looking as old as four summers, the boy showed no sign of having understood any of it. The hardened shell protecting Eira’s heart cracked. “Let us warm you up,” she soothed. “Get you fed.”
She held out her weathered hand, waited for him to take it. Some things are universal. Her smile, her patience, needed no translation. He put his hand in hers and didn’t flinch when she led him to the door.
From that day, Eira found new life. The masses no longer wanted her help or her mercy, but the childdid. She fed him and bathed him, taught him what she knew about language and healing andlove, and the creases in her face smoothed and the silver in her hair warmed until it was as blonde as honey. By the time the child grew a few years older, only the lines around her eyes and the calluses on her hands remained.
And they were happy.
The child grew from an illiterate half-starved creature to a boy that questioned everything. With a warm bed and a full stomach, he began to see beauty in the flowers he once trampled without thought, admired the way birds dipped and swerved in flight without scheming for a way to catch them. He learned to smile. Learned to laugh. Under Eira’s care, he found the childhood life had denied him.
They spent four years like that—finding happiness and connection in each other. Four years of plucking fruit from the trees and harvesting roots from the earth, of meals shared and evenings sprawled in front of a fire while Eira wove stories for the boy to get lost in.
He never realized what she was—never knew enough to question the differences between them. When people gradually began stumbling down her path again, he didn’t understand how strange it was that they spoke different languages and prayed to different gods.The world he knew fit in the cradle of Eira’s meadow. How could a child comprehend the scale of the world outside it?
So he learned their languages and their customs, began to recognize the deities they worshipped. His young mind rationalized it—looked at his life, his experiences, and fit them into the mold he knew. When your world is small, it’s easy to find strangeness in differences. To put your likeness on a pedestal. When you’re young, though, those differences don’t carry the same weight.
The boy did not see Eira’s visitors as strange orother. He only assumed that differences were the natural order of things—that neighbors sang different songs but gathered at the same table. That the outside world operated in the same laws as the meadow. Everything grew under the same sun: the flowers and the trees, the grass and the seeds sown in the garden. The boy decided early on that people must be the same.
It was, of course, incredibly naïve, but it was a beautiful belief. One he’d struggle to shed. Belief can be tricky like that—it can burrow itself so thoroughly that it becomes part of you. Centuries of horrors could never burn it out of him. Even when he saw that the world wasn’t what he thought, that small part of him never stopped believing that itcouldbe. Eira’s care had doomed him to forever hope for the best, while the world prepared him to expect the worst.
But there, in Eira’s meadow and with a childish understanding of how the world worked beyond it, the boy feared no one and no thing. It never occurred to him that something as innocent as truth, as well meaning as good intentions, could lead to a sinister outcome. So, when he met the only woman his caretaker called a friend, he held her in the same regard as the healer herself.
Seeing her for the first time is a memory he held on to—hard to forget the way she came to The Meadow not by path but by river. She emerged from the deepest part with the water rushing around her, frigid and unforgiving from the snowmelt, but her steps were sure. Confident in ways that commanded. The river bent itself to her whims, curling around her feet like a cat begging for affection. Over the tall green grasses, the spring flowers he’d collected in his hand,he watched as she made it from river to shore with no more than a wet hem to show for it.
She returned his stare with eyes reminiscent of the night sky, dark with pinpricks of light. When she smiled at him, her round face reminded him of the moon set against inky black hair.
She only spoke to Eira, that first time. Her lips moved around a language that was new to him, but Eira understood and responded in the same tongue with the same ease she seemed to carry with every other dialect that happened to come through her door. Later, he would ask to learn it and she would tell him dead languages weren’t worth teaching when he still had so many living languages to master.
A year passed, and the friend returned. The boy met her at the door, Eira busy with a laboring mother in the back.
She asked him a question in a language he couldn’t interpret. When he didn’t answer, she studied him a moment longer before trying again, in English. “You were here before.”
It was only an observation, but the boy heard the question in it. “This is my home,” he answered.
“Home.” The way she echoed the word was odd, as if it tasted strange on her tongue. Foreign. “How long have you called Eira’s home your own?”
The boy hesitated, not because he sensed danger in the question, but because he simply didn’t know the answer. “For as long as I remember.”
She stared at him a few moments longer, a crease developing between her brows. The boy thought it looked a little bit like worry. “How many summers are you?”
He shrugged. It never seemed like an important thing to know. “Seven?”
She gave a slow nod, as if tucking the information away. Later, the boy would catch them talking quietly amongst themselves in that same language he had no hope of interpreting. His name was never used, but he knew by Eira’s shadowed glances that they were speaking of him. The stranger’s voice was soft, coaxing, but therewas a tension in his caretaker’s shoulders, a bite to her words, that set him on edge.
Eira refused to tell him what it was regarding, even after her friend returned to the river and let the current carry her away. He wouldn’t understand, not until months later, when Eira left to get supplies and never returned.
One day stretched into two. Then three. Then four. Worry was a weight on his chest as he watched her trail slowly get swallowed by the forest. On the seventh day, he found Eira’s friend on the shore with her hand outstretched and a promise on her lips. “I can take you to her.”
For the first time since luck had him stumbling into Eira’s meadow, since he found a home under her roof, he found himself following a stranger out of it. With his small hand in hers, the woman led him into the river and into a world that looked so unlike his own. A world made of branches instead of sky, of roots so large they rose from the earth like twisting paths all leading to the same destination—a tree so magnificent, he knew it must be one of myth.
Then he saw Eira—saw the heartbreak in her expression—and any sense of wonder left him.
She was surrounded by strangers, but there was only one she knelt before. Only one she begged to leave him be. A man of white—white hair, white skin, white robes. A man of snow and ice.
He didn’t look at her as he reached his hands into the branches and pulled a golden fruit from its limbs. Didn’t look at her while he inspected it. “Really, Eira,” he crooned, but there was cruelty coiling beneath the words. A slow poison disguising itself as a cure. “You should be thanking me. Imagine how hard it would be for a heart as tender as yours to say goodbye once his time came? I am giving you a gift.”
The boy watched the woman he knew as family, stomach twisting and heart in his throat, as Eira’s knees remained firmly planted. Her voice was raw in ways that felt as futile as begging for rain from a clear and cloudless sky. “Please, at least allow him the chance to grow,” she pleaded. “Allow him to choose it.”
