Chapter Six #2
The day he notices the marks on her skin, that smile falls—replaced by a fear so raw it hurts. “Don’t be scared,” she soothes, voice soft despite the vicious pain lancing her heart. “You can’t catch it.”
The pale horror in his face doesn’t lesson, and when his eyes find hers—wide and rimmed with tears—his whispered words make her falter. “Are you dying?”
And Anna feels her heart shatter for an entirely different reason, because his fear is for her.
Not of her. She opens her arms, relieved when he steps into her hug and wraps his tiny arms around her neck.
“No, Piers. I’m not dying.” She murmurs the words into his hair, and fights the tears threatening to choke her.
“You don’t ever have to worry about that, all right? I’m not going to die.”
It’s the one promise she knows she’ll always be able to keep.
The snow comes early.
Anna isn’t nearly as prepared as she’d hoped to be. It doesn’t help that they’d only had from midsummer to start. She knows it will mean a hungry winter. It means an uncomfortable few months for her, but she knows it could spell death for Piers.
Starving bodies do little to stave off chills, little to fight off infection.
Piers rests his head in her lap, asleep.
The fire crackles in the hearth, keeping their small space warm despite the chill seeping through the cracks.
Anna runs her fingers gently through his hair and tries to keep her head above the worry, but it feels as hopeless as treading water while dressed in chains.
Sometimes, when Piers isn’t looking, she feels it crash over her.
It’s in her lungs, drowning her with every choked breath.
She can feel it rising now; a tide rushing toward her with every intention of sweeping her out to sea.
Her breathing comes faster, chest tightening around every inhale. She looks up, eyes searching for something to distract her long enough to fight the current of emotion. She finds herself holding her breath instead.
They aren’t alone.
Khiran stands over them, his rich skin draped in vibrant cloth.
There’s a headscarf wrapped expertly around his head, black curls loose and falling past the gold glinting from his earlobes and ending at his embroidered shoulders.
There are shadows in his dark eyes, a frown under his neatly trimmed beard that speaks of disapproval as he looks around the shack they call a cabin.
His lips thin when his eyes pass over their food stores.
Anna resists the urge to hold Piers closer. “Don’t wake him,” she murmurs.
Khiran spares the child a glance, but nothing more. He seems entirely too focused on her, his eyes catching every invisible ailment with an accuracy she finds terrifying. “You’re not eating enough.”
“There’s a famine.” A simple, painful fact. One she’s almost certain he already knows. “And he needs it more.”
He doesn’t argue, but there’s a tension in his jaw that makes her think he wants to. Eyes drifting down, he watches her fingers comb through Piers’ fine blonde hair. “This will hurt, you know.”
He says it as simply as one comments on the weather. Anna wonders if that’s what Time does—wears the humanity out of you until the promise of death pulls no more emotion than the promise of rain.
Anna doesn’t have to ask him to clarify. It’s a truth she’s already uncovered for herself with every sweet smile Piers gives her, every touch of his smaller hand resting trustingly in her own. There is only heartbreak waiting for her and she knows it. “It already does.”
He looks around the cabin, taking stock of the remaining firewood lining the wall and the depressingly meager baskets of remaining food they’ve stored. “Will this be enough?”
Anna closes her eyes. “No.” Then she shakes her head and looks down at Piers’ sleeping face—watches his body rise and fall with every tiny breath. “Maybe.”
If she doesn’t eat. If she forces herself out into the cold to search for more until her fingers freeze.
Khiran must see her thoughts because his own face darkens. “You plan to starve yourself, so you can feed the child?”
“I plan to do what I must.”
The sigh he gives is deep and heavy; unhappy and resigned all at once. He sits across from her, legs folding elegantly beneath him. “How long do you plan to stay?”
It’s such an unexpected question, it takes her a moment to gather her thoughts enough to answer. “I don’t know.” A truth she hadn’t quite confronted until he forced it on her. “The world right now is—”
She doesn’t have the words for what the world is, but Khiran seems to understand anyway. “Not the world,” he says. “This famine is great, but there are places it hasn’t reached.”
It sounds impossible when all she’s seen over the past two years is hunger. “Where?” Her voice is strained, skeptical and hopeful all at once.
He shrugs. “Most of the world, but if you were still wishing to see Venice, you’ll be pleased to hear that Italy has remained, for the most part, unaffected.”
Anna finds that more reassuring than she should, considering how far she is from seeing it. She looks at the little boy in her arms, his breathing even and slow. “I’m not sure he’d make it.”
“Then you plan to stay?”
Anna looks around their cabin and feels her heart constrict.
She wishes they could, but she knows they’ll need to find something more suitable once the snow melts.
The forest once gave her enough, but she’s struggling to find enough food to comfortably feed them both.
“I don’t know.” She looks up at him, hope so fragile it hurts. “Khiran … what should we do?”
We, because that’s what they were. Ever since Piers took her hand, gave her his trust, Anna has become more than just herself. The child in her arms holds a part of her heart in his tiny hand. Anna intends for it to stay in one piece for as long as time will allow her.
Khiran hums thoughtfully, a frown pulling at his brow.
“Make it through winter. Come Spring, travel as far south as you can.” There’s a warning in his gaze when he catches her eyes.
“The damage that’s been done is too much to fix in just a few seasons.
If you wish him to live well, you cannot stay here. ”
Anna swallows, nodding. She doesn’t know how they’ll do it, but she has months to think on it and she’s seen enough carnage to trust his assessments.
They sit in silence, the fire hissing and popping the only sound between them.
The log she put on was too wet to be ideal, but at least it still burns.
She stares at the embroidery decorating the shawl draped over his shoulder and thinks of the designs that had been inked onto his skin the first time they met. “Where is it from?”
He glances down at himself, following her line of sight. “Delhi.”
It sounds as foreign as his clothing looks; rich in a culture she doesn’t understand. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s outside the world you’ve made yourself,” he says softly, “but I have no doubts you’ll see it. In time.”
Her laugh is strained and without humor.
Time is something she has. There’s a shadow of a smile at the corners of his mouth that tells her he’s caught on to her thought.
She traces the lines of his face, the thick lashes framing his dark eyes and the slope of his nose, and feels the question form faster than she can dispel it.
She has a hundred worries to haunt her, but right now she only wants to escape into a topic that will lead somewhere that is far from the hunger clawing at her belly.
“Which one is you?” Anna asks. She’s always wondered.
Khiran laughs—as if it’s a joke. “They’re all me.”
“There’s not one body that you prefer over the others?”
“Why should there be?” He grins, wicked and teasing. “Am I not beautiful in all of them?”
She stares, thoughts tripping over each other as she frowns.
In her lap, Piers mutters under his breath and shifts before going quiet once more.
Anna brushes the curls from his eyes. “The faces you wear … they’re always society’s standard of beauty.
You … you choose the face that best suits the moment, so you can achieve what you want. I want to know which suits you.”
His smile dims, his head tilting as he regards her curiously. “This matters to you?”
She shrugs, fingers plucking at her hem. “I—when it’s just us, I would rather see you as you see yourself.”
“And if I see myself as a monster?”
“Then I would see that too. I would take your honesty over your pretty lies.”
His stare is weighted. “How I see myself isn’t nearly as appealing.”
Anna squares her shoulders and tips her chin—a weak impersonation of his confidence. “It is to me.”
There’s a thread of laughter in his sigh; a hint of a smile flirting at the corners of his mouth. “As you wish.”
He changes. Not in the slow, shifting way she imagined, but a ripple—the gentle dips and crests of a still pond disturbed—until she’s looking at someone different but the same.
There is nothing monstrous about the face he shows her. His eyes are pale, green teetering on the edge of blue. Against his tan skin and the dark hair curling at his shoulders, they look vivid. Her eyes trace the soft line of his jaw, lingering on his full lips.
It lacks the intense, devastating beauty of his other forms. The face beneath her probing gaze feels real. A blend of masculine and feminine. Anna finds that she prefers it over all the others.
When she wakes, their baskets are overflowing with food they haven’t harvested.
Cured meats and wheels of cheeses, bags of flour and jars of honey.
A feast in which she hasn’t seen in decades and what she’s certain the child rifling through the baskets has never seen at all.
Piers’ laughter fills the room, bouncing off the walls.
When he finds the pouch of gold coins nestled between a jar of hawthorn berries, Anna’s knees go weak.
“God listened!” he exclaims, tugging on her hand. His smile is wide enough to break her heart. “I prayed, and I prayed as hard as I could, and he heard me!”
Anna doesn’t correct him.
A god has answered, but she knows it wasn’t the one Piers prayed to.
The first time Piers calls her mother, is the same day they pack their things.
The snow has melted, leaving only thin patches that shrink by the day.
As they close their cabin door for the last time, Piers takes her by the hand and points out a patch of crocus that have bloomed at the corner. “Maman, look! Flowers!”
There’s a tightness in her throat, a vice over her chest, but she manages a smile through the heartache. She squeezes his hand. “Yes, aren’t they beautiful?”
It can’t last—her immortality has given them the gift of meeting even as it has robbed her of the ability to stay—but she can be the mother he wants for now. She can help him grow, keep him safe, until he has the years and strength to care for himself.
When they find a merchant on the road, Anna inquires how much it would cost for him to take them to the Italian border. The amount he asks is higher than it should be, but there is gold in Anna’s pockets and the promise of more hard times to come should she stay.
She offers double on the condition that they leave immediately and he deliver them safely.
Genoa hasn’t suffered the losses the North has—hasn’t seen famine carving away at their neighbors and children. Anna decides the first day they step into the city square, sees the roundness of the local’s faces and the color in their cheeks, that they’ll stay.
It takes time to learn and teach Piers the language, but they manage to get by—picking up and collecting new words and sharing them with each other.
Perhaps it is his youth, or maybe it is because the local children are more accepting than their parents, but Piers picks it up faster than she does.
Often times, he comes home wearing scrapes and bruises paired with a grin as he regales her with the day’s adventures.
They’ve settled in a moderate cottage just outside the city—close enough to walk to the markets but far enough to keep to themselves.
She grows a small garden in the back to stretch their coins and set food on their table.
It’s enough to give her enough time to learn enough Genoese to begin offering her services as a midwife again with another experienced local.
They are not afforded many of the luxuries the wealthy merchant families have, but their bellies are always full and their shoes without holes. It is a comfortable life. One that brings Anna more contentment than any of her previous ones.
There is only one cloud that hangs, ever present, on her horizons. It’s there when Piers loses his last baby tooth. There when his voice cracks and deepens. There when he hits a growth spurt that sets his height a full head over her own.
Then, in their thirteenth summer together, he falls in love with the baker’s daughter and all Anna can see are goodbyes.