Chapter Nine #2
“We’re in central France, well away from the fighting. Stay if you wish, or continue south to Aragon.”
She licks her lips, hands grasping at the fabric of her skirt to help quell their trembling. “You won’t take me back to Rouen?”
The short breath of laughter he gives is heavy with disappointment. Chastising. “So you can suffer over things you can’t change?” He shakes his head. “No, Anna. I won’t bring you back. It’s time for you to move on.”
She wants to argue, to defend her reasons for wishing to return. He doesn’t give her the chance. Just as her lips part around his name, he disappears; blinking out of her life with the same effortless magic that brought him into it.
It’s five years before she sees him again.
Five years of second guessing and replaying the words they exchanged until they are as committed to memory as her own name.
She hasn’t moved from the French countryside.
Anna tells herself it’s because she’s tired, but part of her has held onto the hope that staying would mean him coming back sooner.
Armies pass through often, soldiers going north in all their uniformed splendor and returning bloodied and beaten with ghosts haunting their eyes.
It seems like they’ve been battling the English for lifetimes. She doesn’t see an end in sight.
The first soldier she offers help to is delirious with fever, stumbling and swaying against his comrades in arms. Some of the men sneer, others laugh.
Most of them believe the only place a woman has healing is the birthing bed, but there’s a desperate sheen in the feverish soldier’s eyes.
Anna knows he won’t last much longer without treatment.
He knows it, too.
There’s not a city for miles, no men of medicine, and eventually they seem to realize that doing nothing is sure to spell death.
Anna brings him herbs to reduce the fever, instructs one of the more kind-faced soldiers (a child, he’s only a child) to fetch water and build a fire to boil it.
The wound on her patient’s shoulder is superficial, a cut along his upper arm, but it’s riddled with infection that he’s ignored instead of treated.
She makes a poultice, brews a tea. By morning his fever has cooled, only a hair’s breath away from normal. Anna sends him off with extra supplies and strict instructions. When he asks how much, the words she gives are an echo from lifetimes ago.
“Give what you can.”
And he does. He places a coin in her palm—less than a doctor’s wages but more than what she’d ever earned as a midwife—and marches off with the rest of them.
Word must get around, because the next troop that comes through asks for her by name, and she treats two soldiers for similar ailments.
Soon, the commanders begin to stop for the day instead of passing through, just so their soldiers have the chance to receive treatment.
She provides treatment for everything from fungal infections to colds, rashes to fevers.
The next morning they leave, and Anna hopes what she’s given will be enough to see them to wherever they’re going.
Most of them offer payment, but not all.
Some send all they have back to their families, others see her for what she is—a lone girl with no power over them—and keep their coin.
Even so, it still earns her far more than being a midwife ever did.
She hides the coins away beneath a loosened stone in her hearth, knowing that when her fire burns through the day—boiling water—it’s too hot for anyone but her to touch without burning.
It’s a precaution only, one she never thinks will be needed.
Then a stranger opens the door to her home without invitation, a sneer on his face and violence in his eyes, and she knows she was right to hide what she has.
“Where is it?” The words are spitting, a serrated threat in each sharp syllable. He shouldn’t waste his time. Anna feels too numb to be afraid.
She stands, her hands dropping away from the herbs she was preparing. “Are you ill?”
His hand is at her throat, squeezing hard enough to bruise. “The money? Where is it?” Anna’s nails sink into the skin of his wrist, and he hisses. “I watch the soldiers coming in and out of here all day for your services. I know you have a stash of coin around here.”
She looks back at him levelly, realization making her lips thin. A local then. “I’m a healer,” she says, because she knows what he’s insinuating. Knows he has assumed that the comfort she offers comes from between her legs. “The money I earn goes to buy more medicine.”
“Medicine,” he sneers, eyeing the hanging herbs lining her walls. “Or witchcraft? Is that what you do? Lure the soldiers in with a quick swiving and then sell them your charms on the way out?”
“I am a healer,” she repeats. Even though she knows it’s useless. Even though she knows he’s already decided, and that weak minds are always the last to change.
He scoffs, shoving her aside with enough force for her stumble back into the wall. One of her jars falls from the shelf, lavender spilling across her feet.
The stranger looks at it. Anna watches as the thought catches, quick as a fire and just as destructive. “That’s where it is, isn’t it?” His arm swings over her shelf, sending dozens of jars crashing to the floor. “Which one is it?!”
Anna doesn’t tell him it’s none of them. Doesn’t bother. She lets herself slide down the wall and watches as her efforts the past few years splinter across the floor, the smell of every herb she’s gathered perfuming the air with a thickness that makes her dizzy.
It’s only when he’s destroyed every last one, his chest heaving with furious breaths, that he pulls her up by her collar and slams her back into the wall. “You stupid bitch, I’ll kill you right now. Where the hell is it?!”
Anna laughs. She laughs.
Because killing her is the last thing he’ll ever do, and somehow in some twisted place inside her, him believing it—him thinking he has that power over her—is the funniest thing she’s heard in years.
“You won’t,” she says, her smile dark. His hold loosens, a prick of fear in his eyes.
Light brown—they’d be pretty if it weren’t for the hate in them.
Anna likes it. Likes that she can dose him with the same poison he tried to force on her.
Likes the power of knowing that this moment, when the woman he threatened laughed in his face instead of cowering under his hand, will stay with him.
His fist is still tangled in the front of her shirt. Anna wants it gone. Wants him gone.
She holds up her arm, rolls up her sleeve, and exposes the pale patched skin and watches as the fear in his eyes bleeds into horror.
His hands drop her as if she burns, backing away so quickly he trips over a chair in the process.
Anna stands, looks down at him, and takes pleasure in how small he looks.
How scared. “You should leave,” she says, and hopes he hears the threat in it. “Maybe you won’t catch it.”
She takes a step closer, and he scrambles toward the door, cursing her under his breath.
Anna knows he’ll be back. He’s probably on his way to rouse the entire village, so they can light their torches and ready the stockade. Anna stands amongst the ruins of five years’ labor, mourning the waste of it.
She’s so, so tired.
The hearth is still hot; it sends pain across her palms when she lifts the stone and takes the bag of coin from its hiding space, but no blisters erupt and the only blackened skin is from the smear of soot across her fingers.
She doesn’t dare stay long enough to pack.
There’s nothing left of any worth, anyway.
The would-be-thief has destroyed everything of value.
Anna reaches the foothills a little over an hour later.
No one follows her, but she can smell smoke on the air.
She knows, before she turns to look, what she’ll see, but it doesn’t hurt any less.
Sinking into the tall grass, she pulls her knees up to her chest and watches the house she lived in burn—a bright spot of hungry light in the darkness.
She has given aid to those same people, offered the same treatments she did the traveling soldiers despite most of them being unable to pay in anything but labor or small goods. And yet, so easily they turned against her.
Looking up at the heavens, she wonders how long she has before they start hunting her down.
The ache starts in her chest, hollow and fragile, a fatigue that drags on her limbs with a force that’s painful. She wants to cry. She wants to sleep. She wants to curl up in the field and not move for days.
There’s a whisper of grass behind her. Considering everything else that’s happened tonight, it should frighten her, but she’s too exhausted to even bother looking. Let them kill her. Let them try. Maybe she’ll rise from the ashes as someone different. Someone whole.
He kneels in front of her, dark brows furrowed over familiar blue-green eyes. Khiran’s hand slides along her jaw, tipping her chin up so his eyes can trace over the skin of her neck. “Let me see.”
There’s nothing to see, she knows there isn’t, but somehow he knows anyway. “I don’t bruise,” she murmurs. A truth he should already know.
His touch is gentle where not an hour earlier another pair of hands were not. “Not that they can see,” he says, voice soft with regret.
“And you can?”
“Yes, Anna.” His gaze lifts, eyes dark with shadows. “I can see where you hurt.”
She stares at him. Thinks of the anger that lit his eyes and the harsh words between them the last time they saw each other.
It’s only his tender touch and the softness in which he speaks that gives her hope that the tentative friendship between them is salvageable.
Still, in a world where he’s the only constant, she’s unwilling to leave it to chance.
“I’m sorry.”
He stills, brow furrowing. “Sorry?”
Pride sticks, thick in her throat, but she swallows it down. “You were right. There’s a lot I don’t know, and I was wrong to accuse you of cowardice. I—” Anna looks away, cringing. “I just really wanted to save her.”
She’s afraid to look up, to see the judgment on his face, but his voice carries a level of understanding—of empathy—that shakes her. “I understand,” he says, and in those two words Anna hears what’s left unsaid.
I did too.
Somehow, it only adds to the heartbreak of it all.
Anna tips her chin to the blaze across the valley. “They’re burning down the house I was staying in.”
He sits beside her, his forearms resting on his bent knees with a sigh. “I’m sorry I didn’t make it here sooner.”
She looks at him, traces his profile in the moonlight, and wonders how he knew to come at all. How he always seems to know where she is and when to come to her rescue. She could ask, but she’s too tired for riddles. “I threatened a man today.”
His gaze dips to the invisible bruises on her neck. “I suspect he probably deserved worse.”
“I showed him my skin, just to scare him,” she murmurs, looking away and gesturing to the pinprick of fiery light. “It worked.”
“How did it feel?”
Anna thinks of the fear in his face as the man looked up at her, of the feeling of control that helped her forget about the empty feeling in her heart. “Powerful,” she says, a whispered confession. “And painful.”
Khiran sighs, leaning back into the grass with his hands behind his head. She wonders what constellations he’s tracing, if any of them are his. “That sounds about right.” His eyes slide to hers. “Is that what’s bothering you? That you liked it?”
“Why do you think anything is bothering me?”
“There’s an ache in you,” he murmurs, turning back to the heavens. “There has been for years now.”
Anna scoffs, too tired to be angry. “How would you know?” The words, you haven’t been here sit, implied, between them.
“The same way I know someone put their hands around your throat. The same way I know you weren’t afraid when it happened.” His eyes are luminous and, sprawled out across against the grass with a grace she’s never learned, he looks every bit the god he is. “Why weren’t you afraid, Anna?”
She looks away, quickly, before he can catch her uncertainty. “He said he’d kill me. I knew he couldn’t.”
“That’s not what I’m asking. I think you know that,” he says softly, before repeating his question. “Why weren’t you afraid?”
How does she explain the constant ache, the emptiness, she carries? She doesn’t have the words for something she can’t even find a name for. Instead, she offers what little she can and prays it’s enough for him to understand how deeply it goes. “I’m tired.”
The answering silence is almost as painful as if he were to answer it.
She flushes, filling the silence before he can probe further.
“How do you do it?” she asks, the words are little more than a whisper.
“So many people are suffering, dying excruciating deaths. How do you live with all their ghosts?”
Khiran idly plays with a piece of grass, twisting and twirling it between his fingers.
“One ghost becomes two. Then a dozen. Then hundreds. Eventually the faces blur together and the details of multiple atrocities merge into one looping nightmare.” He looks up at the sky.
“And then I’ll discover places of beauty, enjoy food and art that fills me with a desire for more.
Nightmares aren’t without end. At some point, you wake up. ”
Anna bites her lip, chest heaving around a sob she refuses to release. “I’d like to wake up now.”
His stare is pitying. “I know.”
It’s too much. She is centuries of loss and heartache, of failed rescues and lost causes, rising up like a flood.
It’s tearing at her seams, filling her lungs, and ringing in her ears.
It’s not until she feels his arms around her, feels her tears wetting the silk of his shirt, that she realizes the keening sob is coming from her.
His breath is in her ear, his hand a gentle soothing pressure petting the back of her head.
“No one can hear you,” he promises, soft and brimming with an understanding that makes her chest ache with every gasping breath.
“No one can see.” His cheek presses against her temple, a could-be-kiss. “Let go.”
And she does.
She screams until her voice breaks, cries until his shirt is sticky with tears and snot, and his hold stays steady.
The only fragile tether she has to the earth.
When she’s reduced to whimpered hiccups and swollen eyes, when her breathing goes from sharp and violent to shaky and stuttering, he is a constant pressure keeping her from flying away in all directions.
Strange that the god that saved her from the fire would be the same one to keep her from drowning.