Page 140 of A Winding Wave of Magic
“I’ma telepath like me mam,” pronounced Iona, puffing out her chest through her tatty yellow gingham shirt. She bared her teeth, revealing a gap where the front two would eventually grow in.
Despite my confusion, I couldn’t help but grin back.
“And I’m a bard.” Enda spoke up in a voice a few steps higher and infinitely more timid than her twin, though no less proud. “Right, Mam?”
“You can See the past?” I asked.
She nodded, giggling as she shrank against her mother’s knee. “Only a little. And I can’t say when things happened, but we know they’re true.”
“Only the one time!” Iona protested. Ignoring the mutinous expression on Enda’s face, she turned to me to explain: “She had a vision of a great battle that happened at the edge of the island. Mam was convinced she’d Seen the invasion of Cromwell or some rubbish like that—ow!” Enda’s elbowing interrupted the diatribe, but Iona wasn’t about to be deterred. “Two days later, Dad found a bunch of dead cats after a fight.”
“Enda’s Seen more than that,a stór,” Robbie put in gently, patting Enda’s hand as he chided her sister. “We never had to tellher about Granddad, did we? How would she have known about the buried silver otherwise?”
Iona grunted. Bronagh, from her seat next to Jonathan on the sofa, rolled her eyes at her sister and started to kick her heels absentmindedly against the bottom of the couch. The twins bickered in Irish for a moment before settling into a peaceful daze as we continued to talk.
“I can’t be an oracle, then, Caitlin,” I said. “I’m missing a requirement. Sybil’s the banshee, not me. I can’t See the future.”
“Yes, you can.” Jonathan had been quiet until now.
I turned in my chair. “What do you mean?”
He looked apologetic. “I might…have read your journal. A few times.”
My mouth dropped. “Youwhat?”
Caitlin shook her head and muttered something in Irish that didn’t have a direct translation, but I understood as something like “young idiot fool.”
“In your dream journal,” he continued, “if you look back, especially around the time Penny died, there are several entries with, ah, me in them. And my father.”
I blinked. “I—no—but?—”
But he was right. A shadowed man that took my memories. A pair of green eyes that saw into my soul. A cat in the night.
“Talk about an invasion of privacy!” I snapped, unable to think of anything else to say.
Jonathan had the grace to look sheepish. “I haven’t read anything since we met formally in Manzanita, but before that I had to know who you were. By any means possible.”
“Well, it’s not exactly a crystal ball.” I turned to Caitlin. “They’re dreams, for crying out loud. Nothing conscious.”
“You haven’t manifested fully yet, either,” she said as she looped a bit of yarn around her needle. “Normally, when a seer begins to show abilities toward her primary type, she’s taught afew basic lore. First by her family, to protect her, you see. Then, depending on her skills, she’s apprenticed to another, so that when she manifests, she’s ready for the extra power as it comes.”
I understood now why Gran wanted me back at the beach so badly. If I was supposed to manifest at thirty-three, my time to be apprenticed was growing short.
“But for an oracle, it’s different,” Caitlin continued. “You’re a vector for truth and a conductor of other power as it comes through you. To make you dependent on the first power you show as a child…that would be like putting a frame and glass on a half-finished picture and calling it done. You’d never learn to See things as they are, never learn the real gift you have on this earth, Cassandra—that of truth empathy.”
“But I’m not manifested now,” I pointed out. “Shouldn’t you have waited until I am to tell me all of this? Isn’t that what Gran was planning to do?”
Caitlin shrugged. “I expect she was, but then she learned of what was going to happen to her. Possibly from your mam.”
I stilled at the mention of Sybil. My horrible, unfeeling mother, jaded from a life of Seeing nothing but death. Jonathan’s gaze drilled into me, but I wouldn’t meet it. I didn’t know what that would do.
“Because of what’s asked of you at this point, and the fact that you’re older than, say, these two here, we must take a different track,” Caitlin went on. “You can’t afford to be ignorant, Cassandra. There’ll be too many people interested in finding you, and you must learn to protect yourself. No, I think we shall learn your strengths and weaknesses and see if we can’t help you discover the rest before you manifest. It’s only four years. And we’ve a good sense for what you can do already.”
I tried to remember what I had learned in a history of mythology class as an undergrad. Oracles were a major part of Greek literary history, though the concept existedpretty much worldwide. Pre-Athenian oracles were almost always connected in some way with Gaia, the earth goddess. Fortunetellers and prophets—mouthpieces for the gods. Pythia, Dodona, Trophonius, even my namesake: these were oracles. Toga-wrapped priestesses who crooned back and forth with the spirits. Not a poor almost-professor with a suitcase full of pilled sweaters.
“You’re thinking too much like a plain scholar, and not enough like a seer,” Caitlin told me. “In the old stories—the real ones, mind you, not the bleedin’ academic ones written in books—the oracles are always two things. One, they’re women, and often cast as hysterics and witches, every one. But think of the old tales. The oldest we know.”
“The ones who spoke with the gods?” I snorted. Not likely.
