Chapter One #3
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.”
When The First laughed, the boy felt it in his chest. It snared around his heart like iron left in the snow, the sound of it so bitterly cold it burned.
He pressed the fruit into the boy’s hands. “Eat.” When the boy hesitated, he added promise to the command. “Eat it, and you shall be able to stay by Eira’s side forever. You would like that, wouldn’t you?”
It was, of course, the right thing to say—there was nothing the boy wanted more.
So he brought the peach to his lips, took a bite, and tried not to notice the look of defeat deepening the lines of Eira’s face when he swallowed it down.
Anna lays, the echoes of the story still settling around her.
There are so many questions clamoring around her mind, but the unnamed character stands out the most. The betrayer.
The one Silas must have been speaking of when he told her that trust takes more time once it’s been broken. “Who was she?”
“Kaia,” Khiran murmurs. There is a sadness in the way he says her name. A regret. “She and Eira were best friends before it happened.”
She studies his expression in the dimming light. The fire needs to be fed; the last of the flames are listless with hunger, but she makes no move to get up. “You feel bad for her.”
“She didn’t mean the harm she caused,” he says, fingers trailing absently over Anna’s skin.
“She confessed to me, much later, that she was a mother before she was a god. She knew the heartbreak Eira would face and tried to protect her from it. Unfortunately, intent weighs little when faced with the consequences.”
“You forgave her.” A statement, not a question. His words are too rooted in certainty to be anything else. Anna recognizes it in the softness of his expression, the truth of it folded between words spoken and words held back.
“There was never anything for me to forgive. I was never angry with her.” Under her palm, his chest rises and falls with a hollow laugh.
“What child doesn’t revel in the thought of playing at something they’re not?
To have the power to follow the threads of their curiosity no matter how many miles or oceans it may cross?
No. I could never regret the door Kaia opened for me.
Not as a child, and not now. She gave me an existence I never knew to dream of. ”
“Is she one of the few you call a friend?”
“No, friend isn’t quite the right word for her,” he confesses.
“I suppose, if I were to call Eira a mother, Kaia would be an aunt. Things were… difficult after I gained immortality. The Meadow was my home, but The First knew where to find me. After that, he had someone capable of retrieving me when he wished. Kaia was the only other one to offer me a haven when she saw I was in need of one.”
Anna frowns. “Difficult how?” When he hesitates, she knows it was the right question to ask.
The smile twisting at the corners of his lips is sharp with resentment.
“The First wasn’t as pleased with my capabilities as I was.
” The hand at her spine stills, fanning between her shoulder blades.
Anna wonders if he can feel the ache of her heart beneath his palm.
“He was hoping for power and was instead delivered a boy with parlor tricks.”
The need to see him, to gauge his expression and measure his hurt, is too heavy to ignore.
She sits up, the quilt pooling at her thighs as she straddles his waist. His eyes drag down, admiration intertwining with devotion.
Anna has lived through more lifetimes than any mortal should, but she has never felt like a goddess, not until Khiran started looking at her like this.
She waits for his gaze to meet hers, fingers slipping between his own until their palms kiss, before she speaks. “He’s a fool.”
His eyes spark, as if she has discovered one of his favorite pastimes. Perhaps she has. “Wise words for someone who has never met him. I wholeheartedly agree.”
Anna leans forward, their noses brushing and their clasped hands pinned on either side of his head. So close, she can see the shadows in his eyes—the ones he wishes to hide even from himself. “Then why do you sound as if you believe him?”
He stares up at her, gaze hooded and lips turned up in a somber smile.
“I know what I am, and what I am not.” He sits up, their chests touching as his fingers slip from hers, trailing up her arms with a whispered softness.
“I am a master of deceit, of plucking and pulling at strings and making those in power believe it was choice and not influence that shaped their decisions.” His palms cradle her jaw, thumbs stroking the ridge of her cheeks.
Outside, the thunder rumbles a split second after Anna catches the flash of lightning reflected in Khiran’s eyes. “I’m not a soldier, Anna.”
She frowns, hands reaching for his wrists. The fire is only a lick of flame, more light than heat. Without it, she’s starting to feel the chill seeping between the crack under the door, but his palms are warm against her cheeks. “Why should you need to be?”
“Because, when the time comes, that is exactly who he will send. Soldiers.”