Chapter Twelve #2
“Why me?” The words are little more than a breath, soft despite how deeply they have haunted her.
Anna has replayed their meeting over so many times and with so few answers.
Sometimes she feels as if they’re more imaginings than memory—that they have evolved and changed along with the world around her.
Ask me again, on a day when the gift I’ve given you doesn’t weigh on you like a curse.
It has taken her more than a century to find it in herself to ask again. A century to look at the world with excitement instead of dread. She wants to know, wants to understand, just for the sake of it.
His gaze is steady but unreadable. She’s getting familiar with this mask of his—beginning to recognize it in every form he takes. It speaks of hidden truths. “Let’s go for a stroll.”
Anna frowns down at his offered arm, brows raising. “People will talk.” And her employer is sure to listen. Ms. Merril’s rules are rigid and her ears seem to pick up on each and every stray piece of gossip.
“Let them.”
She shakes her head. “It’s exhausting—starting a new life in a new place. I’m not ready to leave this one behind just yet.”
He regards her, huffing softly. “Fine. Then you have my word that no one will recognize you.”
It’s an impossible promise, but from him it’s believable.
She accepts his waiting arm and tries not to think of the warmth seeping through his sleeve.
He leads her into the courtyard and Anna discreetly watches for the people’s reactions, but Khiran’s promise holds true.
Their eyes slide right past them, as if … “They can’t see us.”
She remembers the night she screamed up into the stars, the warmth of his arms around her and the whisper of his breath against her ear.
No one can hear you. No one can see.
“In a way,” he says, leading her down the street. “Though to say we’re uninteresting would be more accurate. It’s a simple trick, but useful.”
Simple. As if the bit of magic that made them invisible to the world was as easy as snapping his fingers.
Not for the first time, she wonders how much easier it would be if she were granted a bit of power with immortality.
If she could flit from place to place with a thought, change her appearance with a blink.
She wonders if Khiran knows how lucky he is.
He leads her to the main square. People file around them—as if aware of their presence despite never glancing their way.
There’s a child at the fountain—dirty and clothed in scraps—with a coffer at his feet and a bundle of cloth in his arms. He looks nothing like Piers, and yet Anna feels her heart ache with the memories that it brings.
His hair is brown and matted, dirt and grime streaking his cheeks.
He looks every bit abandoned and desperate as Piers did, dropped off in an unfamiliar forest and told to wait.
She starts forward, but Khiran’s grip on her arm tightens.
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “Watch.”
The boy’s voice cracks, tears running down his cheeks. “Please, my sister needs medicine. Please.”
And Anna realizes with a start that the bundle in his arms isn’t cloth, but a newborn, and her heart breaks.
She doesn’t have the means to take in two children.
Even if she did, she isn’t sure she’s ready to take on the heartbreak again.
Still, she can at least help in some small way.
She has the knowledge to heal, knows enough people in the palace that surely she’d be able to find someone to take them in. “Let me—”
Khiran sighs, but his hold doesn’t loosen. “Not the children. The crowd.”
“But they aren’t doing anything,” she hisses.
She has watched at least a dozen people pass by without so much as glancing at the scene.
Worse, their eyes seem to purposefully point in the opposite direction.
She yanks her arm free from him, intent on making her way to the children with or without his blessing.
But when she turns, the space under the fountain is empty.
The young boy that reminded her so much of Piers, the cradled bundle in his arms, is gone. Swept away as if they never existed.
“Exactly. They did nothing.” He steps around her, their shoulders brushing, and ducks his head until he catches her gaze. “But you would have.”
Anna feels her breath come faster, fighting the dizziness that makes the cobblestones feel like water beneath her feet. “I don’t understand—they, the children. They weren’t real?”
His eyes soften, his hands rising to cup her shoulders. “No, Anna. They weren’t real. Just an illusion.”
Her eyes scan the crowd. People continue to move around them, unaffected. “But everyone else could see them, too?”
“Yes.” The word is short and curt, holding no room for misunderstandings, but he delivers it with so much compassion it files down the harsh edges.
He gives her shoulders a gentle squeeze.
“I carried that magic with me for centuries, Anna. But it wasn’t until you offered a stray woman a place at your table, that I saw someone deserving of its gifts. ”
The pain in her chest twists.
It should be a compliment, something that instills pride, but all she can feel is disappointment. “Centuries?” she echoes. The words taste impossible. “How could you have held it for centuries, and met no one else? I can’t be—I’m not—”
She’s not the only one with kindness in her heart. She can’t be.
Khiran sees the question in her eyes. “You aren’t,” he assures her. “There are many who know and deliver mercy, but … it is something that grows in them. It was nourished and fed by the kindness they received.”
Anna shakes her head, more questions on her lips, but he reaches for her—palms cupping her cheeks and forcing her still.
“The world was cruel to you, Anna. You were stolen from your homeland, blamed and exiled for the patterns on your skin. They gave you reason after reason to be hateful, to be selfish. Instead, you saw a stranger in the woods and you brought her back to your meager home, offered up the little food you had despite the hunger lining your eyes.” His thumb brushes over her cheek, his face so close she can feel his sigh on her lips.
“Do you not see how rare that is? Do you not see how wondrous you are?”
She stares at him, heart fluttering weakly in her chest. She hadn’t.
Never has she considered her circumstances and the pain she’s been subjected to as something she’s risen above …
it was simply something she survived. A flood of bad luck that nearly drowned her; had her struggling to keep her head above the water even as the temptation to stop fighting pulled at her limbs.
She thinks of Ophelia—of still pond waters and lilies tangled in her hair—and knows why she relates to her character the most.
Khiran’s eyes are deep and dark; ocean waters that have no end. Bottomless. They drown her, but this isn’t a flood she wants to escape. There is warmth there, tenderness. It envelops her, but instead of feeling trapped, she only feels safe.
No one, not even Piers, not even Eira, has managed to give her that feeling.
When everyone else leaves, when they never come back, Khiran does.
He flits in and out of her life like the seasons, but when he fades away from her life, it’s with the unwavering faith that she’ll see him again.
Next spring, next fall. He’ll find her when she is falling to pieces or when she’s whole.
There’s comfort in that. Comfort in knowing he’ll be there when no one else can be.
She takes his hand, presses it more fully against her cheek. “Thank you.” She speaks the words in a whisper, but she can feel the full force of her heart behind it. When his brow furrows, she licks her lips and tries again. “Thank you for the gift you’ve given me.”
It dawns on her that she doesn’t remember ever thanking him.
Maybe she did, when she believed his offering to be a fruit and nothing else.
Nothing more. She can’t be certain. Centuries have made some of her memories weak, and those first days after the fire were like walking through a dream that held no meaning.
His hand slips from her cheek, the friction from his palm slow and terrible in ways that make something spark inside her. Then he takes her hand, long fingers delicately curving around her own, and his smile is so sincere it makes her ache. “Thank you for accepting it.”