Chapter Twenty #3
Her hand reaches, blindly, into the cracked wood and grasps something hard. It burns in her palm, but it’s a different kind of heat. One of magic. Of success.
Anna tears herself away, tripping over the roots in her haste to get away. She can’t see. The smoke is burning her eyes, making the world blur. She closes them against the pain, eyelashes wet. Arms wrap around her, guiding her. Khiran. It has to be. No one else has ever held her so close.
But the arms feel different.
They don’t sit as high up on her shoulders, don’t engulf her in the ways her heart intimately remembers.
When he’s guided her far enough from the fire, she falls to her knees, eyes still screwed shut as she coughs so violently that her entire chest aches with it.
For all that she gasps, she can’t seem to find the breath her lungs are starving for.
Khiran’s hand rests on her back, a comforting weight.
Someone hands her a flask. Shakily, her hands close around it, feeling the stitched leather pressing into her fingertips. “Drink,” he says, voice deep and familiar. Silas.
Anna is relieved to find it’s water.
She takes a long drink, blinks her eyes open. They still ache, but the tears have lessened enough for her to make out Silas’ face. He’s kneeling in front of her, soot streaking his cheek, his clothes. “You had us worried, my friend. What possessed you to run into the flames?”
Her right hand still grips the treasure like a lifeline.
Anna looks down, trying to uncurl her fingers with a wince.
She sucks in a breath, reveling at the jolt of pain.
The back of her hand, her fingers, are burnt.
The skin blistered and raw. She can’t bring herself past the point of pain to open it.
Someone shouts for water, but she’s too engrossed in the sight of the burns across her knuckles to pay attention.
Her healing is gone.
Mortal. She’s mortal again.
She turns, searching for Khiran’s gaze. For his comfort.
But when she looks, it is the face of a stranger that stares back at her.
His eyes are too dark, his hair a dark blonde that is a dozen shades too light.
He’s thin and sallow, like a wisp. All sharp lines and swollen joints.
He looks nothing like the man she loves.
Nothing like the face that stars in all her favorite memories.
Anna recognizes him anyway.
Her empty hand traces the gaunt line of his cheek, leaving a trail of ash in its wake. She breathes his name between them. A question. A confirmation. “Khiran?”
A scream pierces the air, shrill in ways only small bodies seem capable of accomplishing.
Malik lays on the ground, face and clothes streaked in ashes and soot, his small fists and feet striking the ground in a tantrum.
The words that leave him are so tangled up in emotion, it takes Anna a moment to decipher them.
When she does, her heart gives a painful twist, regret coating her tongue in bitter understanding.
“My fault,” he screams. “It’s all my fault!”
Anna knows she’s to blame for it—that she used him the same way The First has for thousands of years. As if he were a weapon instead of a boy. Instead of a child.
Anna stands, her burned hand curled protectively over her chest and feeling every bruise and scrape with a permanence she hasn’t felt in nearly a millennium. Strange how something so universal can feel so new. She wets her dry lips, tasting ash, and steps toward him.
A hand on her wrist, gentle and unfamiliar, stops her.
“Leave him,” Khiran says, but his voice is as foreign to her as his features.
He winces, as if the change surprises him, too.
Frowning, he releases her wrist to look at his hands, leaving a smudge of ash where his fingers curled around her pulse.
A shadowed bracelet forged from everything she’s destroyed.
Slowly, his fingers close into a fist. The sinewy tendons of his arms flexing just beneath his skin.
Over his shoulder, Anna sees the look in Kaia’s eyes.
The same frozen promise as the moment the tide swept The First to his end.
Anna’s not sure how fast or how far her current traveled before the magic burned from their veins, but she doesn’t doubt that Kaia’s delivered on her threat.
Somewhere, The First’s screams are being swallowed by an ocean, his lungs filling with salt water.
Anna has always feared drowning—feared the agony of it.
She thinks it’s a fitting end for a man who would happily let the world burn.
But not for Malik.
She steps to the side, putting her body between the boy who has nothing and the woman who has lost everything. “He’s a child,” Anna says, looking between all their faces. She expects to find sympathy, to find an ally, but even Silas averts his gaze.
Cassius is the one bold enough to voice what they all must thinking. “He’s a monster, Anna.”
“Only because he was never given the chance to grow into anything else!” She looks to Kaia, but she won’t return her gaze.
She’s too busy staring down at the child pounding at the earth, body pale with ash, as if he’s an obstacle to overcome.
It may have been on The First’s orders, but it was Malik’s fire he weaponized.
Malik’s hands who killed Eira. “Kaia,” she says, a plea threading through the woman’s name like a prayer.
“He never had someone like Eira to teach him. To love him.”
Anna takes a deep breath, hands fisting at her sides. “He deserves that same chance. Please.”
Cassius shakes his head, his arm cradled against his chest. The First must have landed a blow before Kaia’s waters swept him away. “You’re a few thousand years too late, Little Bird.”
“You’re wrong.” Anna looks to Khiran, her gaze steady and her voice strong. “Time touches everything. He deserves the chance to grow. To change.”
He can’t hold her stare, his eyes dropping. Anna feels his doubt like a betrayal.
“He killed Eira,” Kaia says, but the edge in her gaze has dulled into something thoughtful. Pain mixed with reflection.
“Yes.” She won’t deny the truth of it, as partial as it is. Anna glances at the smoldering ruins around them. A throne of roots and ruin smoldering into ash. “In a way, he helped you kill The First, too.”
They all go silent—Malik’s tantrum and the hiss of the waning flames the only sound between them.
Khiran wets his thin lips, shaking his head.
“Anna’s right.” He looks over at the boy, measures the way his tiny fists and feet beat against the ashes of a stolen temple.
“If oppression can breed cruelty, then perhaps empathy can heal it.” He reaches for her, fingers trace the line of her jaw and meeting her gaze.
“He suffered as we did, but without the freedoms. Without the friendships. He deserves a chance, and we owe it to him to give it.”
Silas’ expression is weighted with understanding. “I agree.”
Eyes rolling, Cassius does little to rein in his skepticism.
“That’s all very touching, but that doesn’t really solve anything.
Which one of us is actually willing to take him in.
” He looks between them, his uninjured hand splaying over his chest. “Because I’m certainly not.
I refuse to be responsible for a child, let alone one with thousands of years of emotional baggage. ”
“I’ll do it,” Anna offers. “I’m the one who hurt him—who used him. The least I can do is try to teach him how to live a normal life.”
“No,” Silas murmurs, a furrow in his brow. “That’s why it shouldn’t be you. He’s been angry for so long… looking at you is more likely to remind him of what he’s lost instead of the freedom he’s gained.”
Anna winces, hearing the truth in it. “But—”
“I’ll take him.”
The words are quiet, but they ring in Anna’s ears like a promise. When she looks, Kaia doesn’t meet her eyes. She’s too busy looking at the boy.
Khiran is the first to react. His brow creases, his dark eyes anguished. “Kaia, you don’t—”
“I do,” Kaia says, cutting him off. She turns to him, her face softening in ways Anna hasn’t seen since their time below the waves.
“I need to be the one to take him in. I need to be the one to ensure something good comes of all of this. So I can heal, too.” Her hand rests over Khiran’s gaunt cheek, her eyes glassy. “It’s what Eira would have wanted.”
Her hand slips away, her gaze resting on Anna. Something passes between them, so heavy it takes Anna a moment to put a name to it. It’s more than understanding; more than something shared.
She remembers the feel of warmth from the hearth, the way a quilt stitched by her hands covered their bodies and Khiran’s fingers trailed over the patterns on her skin. Remembers the way he told his and Eira’s story and Kaia’s mistake. Remembers the reasons Kaia gave him for interfering.
She confessed to me, much later, that she was a mother before she was a god.
The tension spills from her chest like coiled wire set loose, tangled and chaotic. A mother. Kaia was a mother. Of everyone here, they are the only ones who understand what parenthood means. The only ones who understand the pain and joy of it. The responsibility.
And Anna knows, with a certainty that leaves her breathless, that Kaia wouldn’t offer to take in a boy with bloody hands if she didn’t believe there was room in her heart to forgive him.
They have to pry her fingers away from her palm.
The pain is unspeakable, a scream in her lungs and a sob sticking in her throat.
Khiran murmurs apologies as he carefully peels each finger away from the burnt and blistered skin.
Then her hand opens, and she sees what she burned for—what she could have died for— and feels her heart race with the implications.
In the blistered cradle of her palm is a peach pit.
Cassius stares down at the grooved and pitted seed, a crooked smile dimpling his left cheek. “I knew it. I knew it chose you.” He looks at Khiran with a teasing glance. “Oh, I will most certainly enjoy holding this over your head for the rest of our pitiful mortal lives, dear Brother.”
Silas shakes his head in disapproval, but there is a fond smile pulling at his lips. He still wears it as he places a kiss to the blonde’s temple.
Cassius stares at her as if she is a dream made reality. Then his grin falters. Fades into something soft. Something warm. “Well done, Little Bird.”
Anna barely hears him. Her eyes are on the pit in her palm with giddy relief. Hope unfurls in her chest, fragile as a sparrow’s wings and ready to soar.