Page 6 of These Godly Lies
“The First, too?”
He goes quiet. “No. I suspect fear is an impossible feeling for someone whose power is beyond everything.”
Anna frowns. Khiran’s words are soft, but they ring with the bitter edge of belief. Still, she can’t help but feel that they don’t ring quite true. “Not everything,” she muses, her eyes tracing the limbs of the branches overhead. “How could he possibly be stronger than the source?”
Khiran follows her gaze. “A tree is still just a tree, Anna.” He shakes his head, his words laced with regret. “Even when its roots cradle the world.”
Anna keeps staring, watching the way the naked branches sway, a whisper in the wind. “I disagree.”
There are questions in his eyes, but they lack the serrated edge of skepticism that would make his gaze feel mocking. His voice is soft, open and curious, when he asks, “What makes you say that?”
It’s silly, but she knows he’ll trust the truth of it, anyway. “It’s just a feeling.”
He tilts his head, studying her. “Try to explain it to me.”
Anna sighs, looking up at the sky as if she could find the answers in the clouds. “Power isn’t always loud; sometimes it’s quiet. Subtle. You have the ability to sway the course of history with the right face and some well placed words. Maybe you aren’t a soldier, but not all battles are won by brute force alone.”
“Try,” he corrects, voice soft. “I have the power totryto change minds. My failures outweigh my successes.”
“Your successes save more than my hands ever could,” she counters. A reminder, because there are moments where she’s certain he forgets. It must be hard to measure lives when he savesthem from so far—when they are numbers and not names. Not faces.
His expression darkens. “And my failures lose twice as many.”
Anna has stopped thinking of the moments he was unsuccessful as failures. Every life saved is a life that would have been lost were it not for his influence. The only way he could fail, in her eyes, would be to sit by and do nothing.
She nods toward the old oak at the back of the house. “That tree has stood for at least a century,” she murmurs. “It’s survived that long without magic and on its own strength. It has shaded this patch of land, has sheltered and fed generations and generations of wildlife, which in turn fed countless people. There’s a power in that. Even if it’s quiet. Even if we can’t see it.” She turns back to him. “Maybe The Tree is like that. Likeyou.”
For a moment, he’s silent, his eyes measuring hers. “Maybe,” he concedes. “But it isn’t sentient. It doesn’t choose the hands that pluck its fruit from its branches any more than it can choose to do something about it. In The First’s care, it is a tool and nothing more.”
Anna doesn’t argue. He’s right on every point and she has nothing to counter with. Still, she can’t seem to shake the doubt rooted in her heart for reasons she can’t explain.
That night, she dreams.
She’s in the ground, thick roots twisting and spider webbing through the earth. They’re everywhere. Tangling in her hair, twining between her fingers. She can feel them fanning across her back and curling around her chest like a rib cage fashioned of gnarled wood instead of bone. She looks down, feeling some of the fine roots along her jaw snapping like a thread pulled too tight.
A root, as thick as her arm, coils across her chest and over her shoulder, pinning her in place. Beneath it are clothes worn thin and centuries out of style. Her toes curl, sockless, in shoes that feel threesizes too big. She hasn’t seen it in nearly a millennium, but she knows with a level of certainty only possible in dreams that it is the exact same thing she wore when Khiran offered her forever in the shape of a peach—henna swirling over his hands and bangled bracelets winking as brightly as his dark gaze when he promised death would never come for her.
Around her, the roots pulse.
The rhythm is too familiar to mistake—she hears it every time she presses her cheek to Khiran’s chest.
A heartbeat.
It is not roots that surround her, butveins. Arteries.
They all lead back to her.
CHAPTER THREE
He knows it can’t end well—it never does—but she is still achingly human in ways he finds simultaneously frustrating and admirable. It is a strange thing to love the heart that invites pain under their roof.
CALIFORNIA, UNITEDSTATES
SPRING1956
Anna doesn’t make a habit of going into town.
The cottage and the gardens she’s surrounded it with provide her with most of her needs. The fields, forests, and coastline are bountiful with the rest. However, there are some things she simply isn’t equipped to provide for herself—flour and rice, fabric and thread. Since Khiran returned to her, he’s made a point to bring whatever she needs just to spare her the necessity of the journey. It’s unfortunate that she hadn’t realized she was low on sugar beforehe left yesterday, but she supposes it gives her the chance to see how the town has changed since she’s last visited in the fall.
