Chapter Fifteen #2
“You can’t possibly believe I’m here for any other reason than to check up on you.” He casts an overt glance over his shoulder, his brows raised. “I must admit, you lingered in Europe and the Americas for so long I was beginning to grow concerned that you’d never leave it.”
“Would that bother you?”
“It would be a gross waste of the gifts you’ve been given.” His eyes meet hers. Anna wonders how dark his eyes would be in the light of day. “It’s a big world. It would be a shame not to know it.”
“See it, you mean?”
He shrugs. “Give it a few more centuries and seeing won’t be enough.
There is so much that the eyes can’t see.
Textures to be felt, tastes to be experienced, cultures to be learned.
” His eyes slide to hers, so dark and still they reflect the moonlight better than the ocean below them. “If you don’t feel it now, you will.”
Anna doesn’t, but she believes him. It’s hard not to when he’s been right about so much else. “Is that what you do?”
“Something like that. How is your Cantonese coming along?”
“It’s so very different from what I know. It’s taking me longer.” She breathes a laugh, shaking her head. “Though I suppose I started learning centuries ago, in a way. It’s funny. After all these years, I still remember the name of the fruit you gave me. Still remember the taste of it.”
“Immortality leaves an impression, whether it’s bitter or sweet.”
Anna hums. “I was told a story the other day,” she says, mouth quirking. “About Sun Wukong. You wouldn’t have heard of him, would you?”
“Born from a rock and dismissed by the Jade Emperor for being a nuisance?” His grin is wicked. “I’m not sure I’m familiar. Was he devastatingly handsome?”
“I’m told he’s a naked monkey.”
His smile doesn’t slip. “Tell a story enough and the details are bound to change over time. Man has a habit of omitting and embellishing where they see fit. Time touches everything.”
“Not you,” Anna murmurs, humor faltering. “Not me.”
“Yes, me.” His eyes are dark, but for a sliver of a moment she thinks she catches a glimpse of pale green. “Especially you. Nothing is immune to change, Anna. Not the mountains or the oceans. There is nothing more inevitable; nothing else that unites us so indiscriminately.”
She looks down at her hands, picking at the calluses lining her palms. They were there in the beginning, too.
Somehow she knows that’s not what he means.
There are more scars on her heart now. More heartbreak and tragedies.
Time has hardened her; made her numb to all the death and suffering of the world.
And, in that moment, she realizes that she misses the woman she was.
“It’s a hard truth,” he soothes, “but there’s comfort in it, too. Don’t you think?”
Anna looks up at the stars and wonders how much they’ve changed without her noticing.
If something as vast and endless as the heavens can’t resist, she supposes it’s folly to believe that she can.
“Maybe,” she murmurs, brow creasing. She faces him, bolstering her courage because there is only one person she can trust to answer her with honesty. “Am I heartless?”
Surprise flits across his eyes, creasing his brow. “Heartless?” he echoes. “How—”
“It hurts less now,” she blurts, the words leaving her in a rush before he can finish his thought. “The death, the pain. It doesn’t hurt like it used to.”
Confusion softens into sad understanding. “No, Anna. Of all the people in this world, I think you’ve more heart than any of them.”
Anna shakes her head, arms wrapping around her waist. “I don’t feel like it,” she murmurs, looking across the water. “I’ve watched prisoners wither and starve and I felt nothing for their suffering.”
He raises a brow. “Nothing?”
“Not enough.”
His chuckle is too light for such a heavy topic, but it floats between them. “Only you would consider offering your meal to the same men who spat at your feet as not caring enough.”
“How did—”
“You’re on the ship of the most successful pirate on the seas. Did you not expect me to check on you?”
Anna frowns. “I didn’t see you.”
“Sometimes I don’t wish to be found.” Then, as if only to appease her, he confesses.
“I stayed only long enough to see that you weren’t in any danger.
” His eyes soften. “You’re no monster, Anna.
No matter how much guilt you bury yourself under.
Your heart is only harder because it has to be.
” He places a hand over her chest, high above her heart.
She can feel it racing beneath his palm. “It deserves to be protected, too.”
It takes a week to reach shore. A week where Anna enjoys the feeling of wind in her hair and salt on her lips, of sharing stories and culture over tea. A week where she thinks this life is one she could continue to live longer than the rest.
The thought is shattered faster than it could fully form.
There is a massacre on the beach, screams and blood spilling from the houses like ink over silk—a permanent stain spreading over Anna’s heart faster than she can blot it away.
She is too horrified to hide it.
Ching Shih catches her look. “You don’t approve?”
Time touches everything. Khiran said.
But Anna doesn’t want to lose herself to it.
Her heart is scarred, but seeing the violence on the shore has shaken her.
Tragedies no longer carry the same heartbreak they once did, but cruelty does.
She can’t look at people suffering at the hands of their brethren and not feel sick at the sight.
She can’t look at Shih’s pirates carrying braided heads over their shoulders like trophies, the blood smearing over their chests and staining their hands, and not see the horror in it.
This isn’t a battle. It’s a massacre. “They’re just people. They’re innocent.”
Shih scoffs; a soft sound for a sharp woman. “This is a village willing to sell its daughters to a brothel and its sons to a life of servitude.” Her gaze is edged with warnings. “Why do they deserve my mercy?”
Anna knows better than to believe she wants an answer, but there’s an urgency prodding at her heart that won’t allow her to drop it. “How do you know?”
“Because they are all cut from the same rotting silk. Why should I give them the mercy they denied me?” A scream rises over the rest, bleeding across the water before it’s swallowed up.
Shih catches Anna’s wince, and shakes her head.
“They will bend you till you break, Táohuā. If we are to rise in this world, we must bite at the hands that would hold us down.”
Anna goes quiet, heart in her throat. She would rather fall than to rise up using the bloodied bodies of innocents to climb, but she says nothing. That night, and many nights after, she dreams of echoed cries and bloody oceans, and wakes with tears and sweat stinging her eyes.
Anna knows she can no longer stay, but she isn’t sure how to leave.
Ching Shih is as merciful as she is cruel, and Anna isn’t confident that she can navigate those waters.
She spends weeks making plan after plan, from slipping quietly ashore the next time there’s a raid to simply asking the captain for permission to leave. In the end, the choice is made for her.
Rough hands push her against the wall, wood biting into her shoulders, snapping at her spine. They’re below deck—far from sight and sound of the other crew mates—and Anna knows even before the threat leaves Gang’s mouth what he wants.
His breath is in her ear, his body pinning her to the wall. “Scream and I’ll kill you. Tell anyone and I’ll kill you.”
Anna thinks of the long-deceased man who threatened her with death, whose hand pressed against her throat much like now. He had left afraid but unscathed, before burning down the life she built.
They will bend you till you break.
Anna won’t bend, won’t break, not with this.
She claws at his face, stomps at his feet and kicks at his calves.
“The captain will have your head,” she hisses, because Ching Shih is a study in opposites, shows mercy in the same breath as ruthlessness.
It will not be Anna’s blood that coats her blade.
Gang laughs, putrid and dark. “Who’s going to accuse me? You’ll be at the bottom of the ocean before she even realizes you’re gone.”
The tearing of cloth, the sudden hiss of air at her chest, and the painful pause before he scrambles away, shouting words that Anna doesn’t recognize.
She knows that even if the captain will surely have his head, that doesn’t mean her own is safe.
She’s not sure if there are any limits to her immortality, any weaknesses, but beheading seems like a foolish one to test. The sea laps at the ship walls, a painful reminder that being thrown into its depths is perhaps the worse fate of the two.
Her hands fumble with the torn cloth at her chest, gripping it closed as she hurries to the deck. Gang is already speaking to the crew, his words leaving him faster than Anna’s frazzled mind can translate. The wide berth they give, the looks, aren’t nearly as difficult to interpret.
Anna can feel herself shrinking, shoulders hunching, as she takes a step back. Centuries have passed, the land and sea beneath her feet has changed, but this has not. May never.
They will bend you till you break.
But Anna has nearly six hundred years they will never live, has seen renaissances and plagues, fields of lavender and famine filled streets. She has lived through the same histories they only hear about, has called the god they only know bits and pieces about, a friend.
They will bend you till you break, Shih warned her. But once, so long ago, a shapeshifting god held out his hand and assured her, Fear is for mortals.
Her spine straightens, her chin rising to meet their stares with a determination that seems to make some of them falter. She has laughed with many of these men, has told stories under the stars and shared the same meals. Let them look—let them be afraid—but let them see she is above all of it.
Ching Shih emerges from her quarters, drawn out by the noise. “What is going on here?”
Gang is the first to speak, the words leaving him with the same sharpness as the way he points in Anna’s direction. “Captain, she carries lesions! We must go to shore and bury her immediately before the evil in her spreads!”
She looks down at him, her eyes dark with suspicion. “And you know this, how?” He goes silent, but there’s an edge to her gaze that makes his answer meaningless. She turns to Anna. “Did he force himself on you?”
She pulls the collar of her shirt tighter, but holds Gang’s gaze and keeps her voice level. He deserves no mercy from her. “He tried.”
Shih tips her head, a silent order, and Gang is grabbed by two of his fellow crew mates. He is pale, trembling with fear, but he doesn’t fight their hold. Even if he did, he would have nowhere to run—there is nothing but open ocean surrounding them.
Glare sharp, Shih’s lips curl in disgust. “Take him below. Let him sit in the dark, knowing that death will come for him before the sun sleeps.” She turns to Anna, appraising. When Anna doesn’t flinch away, she gestures to her quarters. “Come, Táohuā. We have much to discuss.”
Anna follows, ignoring the sound of Gang’s shouted pleas behind her, and tries to calm the pacing of her heart. Surely, if she had planned to follow through with his suggestion of burying her, she wouldn’t have invited her into her cabin?
The moment the door closes, the captain gestures to Anna’s chest. “Let me see.” A demand, not a request. Anna knows better than to ignore the difference.
Taking a bracing breath, she lets the torn fabric fall to the side—her marked skin on full display. There is no fear in Shih’s expression, but Anna is quick to see that there is no sympathy either. She looks away, hands fisting at her sides, and waits for judgement.
After what feels like an eternity, Shih’s stare eases and she takes a seat in her favorite chair. Her elbows plant on the table, her fingers steepled. “Make the tea.”
Anna flushes, relieved and embarrassed, and ties the pieces of cloth at her neck to save most of her modesty before collecting the captain’s favorite tea blend and pot. They say nothing as the water heats. Nothing as the leaves steep. Anna pours the tea, only sitting after she’s invited to do so.
It is only after Shih takes her first sip, her silks whispering with every subtle movement, that she breaks the fragile silence. “How long have you carried those marks?”
A trick question. Anna gives her the most truthful answer she can. “Since my fifteenth summer.”
She nods, setting down her cup. “There was a girl I knew. She worked on the flower boats with me. She had a heart like yours.” Her eyes dip to Anna’s chest, as if seeing through the fabric.
“When she turned thirteen, she had marks like yours, too.” Her gaze lifts.
“I saw no evil in that girl, just as I see no evil in you.”
Anna releases a shaky breath, knuckles white as she clasps her hands in her lap. “It’s not leprosy. It doesn’t spread.”
“Leprosy,” Ching echoes, tasting the word. “We have another name for it.” Again, she glances at her covered chest. “But I believe you’re right. Still, you must know I can’t let you stay.”
“I know,” Anna murmurs, but she feels the disappointment, anyway.
Her gaze travels to the window, knowing the ocean lies beyond it even though all she can see from her seat is sky.
“I didn’t like the violence, I can’t—I’m not someone who can thrive in it—but the rest of it …
the sea and the freedom. I liked this life,” she breathes. “I’ll miss it.”
The truth of it tastes both bitter and sweet.