Chapter One #2
Anna swallows, trying to find her voice hiding in the strangle of emotion making her chest ache and her eyes burn.
“Would … would you like something to eat?” She doesn’t have much, hardly enough to share, but there is a sudden desperation building within her.
It has been so, so long since she had anyone to sit with.
To talk to. She will sacrifice a meal if it means this unnamed woman will linger even just a little bit longer.
There’s a pity softening her gaze that makes Anna suspect she knows. “I would like that.”
Tightening the stays on her collar, Anna goes to the corner where she keeps her stores while the stranger takes a seat at her tiny table.
The dried fish, painstakingly caught in the creek, is too precious to offer, but she takes some of the dense acorn biscuits and some blackberries she harvested yesterday.
It’s not until she sets it on the table, eying the sweet, dark berries that she remembers the bounty she left behind.
She thinks of the cascade of red hawthorn berries hitting the dirt—the feel of them crushing underneath her foot—and goes pale.
There’s no way the soldiers will miss it.
They don’t know the forest like she does, but they’d have to be blind not to see a footprint and abandoned food and put two and two together.
They know enough to know where she lives.
“You need to go,” she whispers, fighting to suppress the tremor in her voice. “Before they come. You need to go.”
The woman plops a blackberry into her mouth, her eyes piercingly intense. “You’re afraid.”
Anna swallows, throat tight and chest aching. “Yes.”
She considers her. “Will they kill you for saving me?”
“Yes,” she says, voice shaky. She suspects they may do worse.
Another plump berry disappears past her full lips, but her stare has yet to falter. “But still, you chose to take me in.”
A statement, not a question. Anna answers it anyway, shaking her head and bracing herself against the wall. “You’ve done nothing to deserve the Hell they’d put you through.”
“Neither, I suspect, have you.” Her finger taps, a rhythmic heartbeat against the tabletop. Anna is caught by her stare—entangled by the unspoken decisions shadowing their depths. “Death will not come for you.”
Anna isn’t sure if the words are meant to console her, or if perhaps they’re some kind of prayer, but she knows better than to believe them. Death comes for everyone and often without mercy; she has no doubts that it’s coming for her now, wearing the faces of the Lord’s men.
Her lips part, but she’s unsure of what to say. Then, reaching into the folds of her dress, the woman pulls something from their depths and holds it out in offering.
“For you.”
Hesitantly, Anna takes it from her hand. It’s different from any fruit she’s seen. She turns it around, admires the fuzz of its flesh, and brings it to her nose. It smells sweet—like summer and honey. “What is it called?”
Her eyes shine. “Táo.”
“Tao?” Anna tries to match her inflection, but the word feels strange on her tongue.
She shrugs. “Or Persian apple. Depending on who you ask.”
“I am asking you.” Anna still doesn’t understand why she speaks in these strange riddles, but she’s learning that it’s easiest to play along. “What do you call it?”
Her smile is enigmatic. “A gift.”
More riddles. Time is only growing shorter; Death is sure to knock on her door within the hour. She will not waste the precious moments she has left.
Anna bites into the flesh, juice filling her mouth with a sweetness bordering on fantastical.
She’s never tasted anything like it. She knows she should savor it, but she finds herself taking another bite, and another, and another.
When she reaches the center, the flesh pink but hollow, and she realizes something’s missing. “There’s no seed.”
“No.”
“But … how?”
Her stare lingers on the remaining morsel, a faraway look crossing her face. “Priceless are the treasures that cannot be replicated.”
Riddles, it’s all riddles, but Anna’s too hungry to decipher them. She closes her eyes, lets the last bite sit on her tongue—savors what she knows will be her last meal and tries not to let its sweetness be tainted by the saltiness of the tears rolling down her cheeks.
She doesn’t want to die, but she’s far too tired to run from the inevitable. Too weak.
A heavy fist meets her door, so much sooner than she expected. Anna’s lips part, a warning on her tongue, but it dies before she can speak it. She is the only one in her shack of a home. The woman she saved, the stranger she housed, is gone.
They break the door open, grabbing her roughly by the shoulders and dragging her away. Anna lets them, her eyes trained on the empty space where a woman of beauty and silk stood only seconds before.
It’s not possible, but there’s no sight or sign of her, only the lingering taste of foreign fruit on Anna’s lips. A numbing horror seeps into her bones as she thinks of the riddles the stranger spoke in, her devastating beauty, and realizes the implications.
She wasn’t human.
The reverend always preached to fear the tricks of the Devil and God’s anger. As the soil beneath her feet gives way to coarse sand, as she sees the crude pyre and gathered crowd on the stretch of remote beach, Anna fears she has managed to do both.
Fear floods her. She had resigned herself to death, but not for this—not for torture.
A scream rips from her chest, thrashing against their iron grips, but their hold only tightens.
She can feel the bite of their fingers bruising her skin.
As they bind her hands to the post, the strangled sounds emerging from her lips twist into the shape of words. “Please, please don’t!”
She looks up, tries to find mercy in any of the people’s eyes, and finds none of it.
They look back at her, whispers coiling and twisting like snakes off their tongues as they speak to their neighbors.
And Anna knows she’ll find no kindness from any of them.
They’re all too happy to see her gone. Too relieved to have an excuse to do it.
The leper girl who hid away in the forest and just wouldn’t die.
The one they wouldn’t risk killing in the village square because her blood could be cursed.
Anna chokes on a sob as the bindings around her wrists grow tighter. When he’s done securing her, the man sneers and spits at her feet. “Witch, devil’s whore.”
“I’m not,” she cries. The sweetness has faded from her tongue, replaced with bitter salt from the sea air, tears, and snot. “I’m not.”
From the front of the crowd, the town priest’s voice booms. “Speak no more lies, foul creature.” Anna recognizes him as the same one who screamed she was at fault for the crop’s failure—God’s punishment for harboring a foreign heathen touched by the devil.
He turns to the crowd. “How else would a lone woman survive in the woods if not without the help of the devil? How else would she hide away the villainous whore who brought death to our lordship? How else—”
The blood roaring in her ears, the cold ocean wind stinging her face and tangling in her hair, drowns out the rest. She stares unseeingly at the stretch of beach behind the crowd and remembers the feel of sifting sand under her bare feet when she first arrived.
It’s almost fitting that she lose her life on the same shore she lost her freedom.
A flutter of movement in the deadened tree across from her catches her attention.
Perched on the pale, wind-worn wood is a raven, its intelligent eyes staring into hers.
A bad omen, Fanny used to say, a sure sign that death is not far behind.
There are a few faces Anna recognizes in the crowd, but the old cook’s isn’t one of them.
She wonders if her raven has already flown or if she’s merely the one person who doesn’t wish to watch her burn. She hopes it’s the latter.
A torch is lit, its flames a drop of color in a sea of gray.
Beautiful and deadly, not unlike the stranger that sealed her fate.
The kindling at the base catches, the flames grow higher, licking the straw at her feet.
She screams, the sound muffled only by the swelling in her throat and the cloying smoke in her lungs.
She can’t watch. She can’t let the last thing she sees be the snapping of fire at her feet and the blistering of her skin.
In her last moments, she wants beauty. She looks past the sneering faces, eyes searching for a glimpse of the raven through the smoke.
Instead, sitting on the same lower branch, is the stranger she saved.
She holds a finger to her lips, eyes full of hope and warnings. Trust me, they say.
Anna looks down, sees the flames licking at her skin—eating at the hem of her dress and traveling up, up.
The pain is terrible, but her skin doesn’t blister.
Doesn’t blacken. At her back, the rope binding her hands singes and frays until her knees give and the fibers snap.
Her scream is swallowed by the roaring in her ears until she’s not sure where one begins and the other ends.
When she rises, the town has left. Ashes streak her bare skin, clotting in her hair. She stares at her hands, her body, dirty but whole, and feels her breath come faster.
A cloak settles on her naked shoulders, a whisper in her ear. “Did I not tell you, Anna? Death will not come for you.”