Free Lies in Blood by A. M. Hudson Page B

rising up over the Enchanted Forest like a castle. “It’s after midday, Ara.”
    “ Oh. Um. Really?” I rubbed my head.
    “ Yes.” He drew both hands from his jeans pockets and walked over to sit under the old oak’s leafy bows. “Are you okay, Ara?”
    “ Yeah,” I said wistfully, my toes parting the long grass with each step, the temperature of the soil beneath it cool and moist as if the morning were new. I tucked my dress under my bottom and sat down beside Jase. “I guess I’ve just got a lot going on.”
    He nodded casually, reaching between us to pluck a blade of grass from its roots. “Wanna talk about it?”
    “ Yes,” I said, but didn’t talk.
    “ You know—” He leaned forward, resting his arm over a bended knee, wrapping the grass around his fingertip like a green ring. “I was thinking about you before I ran into you.”
    “ You were?”
    “ Yeah.”
    “ All good thoughts, I hope.”
    He lay back, crossing his hands under his head, his feet flat on the ground just by my leg. “I was just thinking how amazing it is that we’re both still here, you and I—that we can be friends—sit side by side this way after everything you’ve been through.”
    “ You mean after everything evil you did to me,” I joked, gently slapping his bony knee.
    He lifted his head a bit and offered a sweet smile, that soft, Jason smile that radiated the kindness in his soul. “Yes, and that takes an unbelievable amount of strength, Ara, which is as scary as it is incredible.”
    “ Scary? How?”
    “ Because I can't even begin to imagine what it must have taken for you to survive what I did to you—both times. And yet you came out of that. Your scars healed, your heart healed and, somehow, you found the strength to not only move on, but forgive me,” his voice broke.
    “ Wow, you’re really cut up about all this,” I said, still making light of things.
    “ Do you know why?”
    “ Why?” I sat back against the barky trunk.
    “ It’s because you are capable of more than you possibly realise, Ara. Yet you don’t know that, and it breaks my heart.”
    “ Aw.” I tilted my head bashfully to one side.
    “ No, I mean it. You . . . you're like those fake columns in the Throne Room.”
    I pictured the stone pillars marking the aisles of the Throne Room, sitting proudly as beams of support, despite baring no actual weight at all. “How do you know they're fake?”
    “ I hear you think of them a lot.” He shrugged against the grass. “And I think that’s because you know you’re just the same.”
    “ How so?”
    “ You might not feel like the pillar of strength, Ara, but if that roof ever does cave in, you’ll be the one left standing, still holding everything together.”
    I scoffed, crossing my legs under me. “I doubt that.”
    “ I don’t. I mean, if you think about it, you always have been.”
    “ Me? No way. You’re thinking of David.”
    “ No. He’s the hammer that nails the coffin, so to speak. No one would ever mess with him. But you’re the one they look to for strength, Ara. Because you exude it in every breath you take, and everyone I speak to says the same thing: they have no idea how you’ve come to survive what you’ve suffered.”
    I lay down in the grass too, my toes against his shoes, bodies facing opposite directions. “Well, with you saying nice things like that to me, maybe I’ll start to believe it all one day.”
    He crawled over and landed on his side next to me, smiling at the corner of my mouth. “Sweet girl, you already do.”
    I smiled, too, reaching down to scratch the itchy rash on my hip. “Yeah. Okay. Maybe I believe that, but I don't think I’ve found any backbone yet to support my own opinions.”
    He knocked my hand gently away from my skin. “I don't know about that. I saw you make your own ruling in your very first session of Court.”
    “ Yeah.” I thought back to that day. “Guess I kinda did. But I got in trouble after.”
    “ So what?