Page 214 of A Winding Wave of Magic
Senni looked up. “Interesting.” He looked back at me. “Have you siren in your lineage, Ms. Whelan?”
I shook my head. “Not that I know of, no.”
He frowned again at the ceiling. “You may want to explore that. You took to Miriam’s mind as if it were yourown. Experienced all of her thoughts, motives, intentions, and emotions in the space of thirty seconds or so.”
“Is that…good?” I couldn’t help but wonder.
“Power is power,” said Chancellor Se. “We take what the universe gives us.” He looked at Senni. “Continue.”
Senni nodded, then walked across the room to retrieve a box that looked a lot like Gran’s. It was on a shelf containing several identically old, battered boxes. One space was empty.
My skin prickled. Did they know where one had gone?
Senni brought the box back to me and set it on the table in front of me. “Inside this box are significant artifacts rangingfrom last year to the dawn of human civilization. You will interact with them and See the histories attached to them.”
Cautiously, I touched the box, then breathed a sigh of relief when no darkness descended over me. I opened it and one by one, removed the things inside. This was, after all, one of the things I loved to do in another life.
The Burns Library, however, seemed very far away. My heart yearned for the simple days of reading Yeats’s notebooks.
I hovered a hand over what looked like the oldest object in the box—an ancient flute carved from bone and eaten away by the effects of time.
“I…wait a moment.” I tugged out the little vial of water given to me by Aoife.
Touching this flute was sure to invite chaos. But the point here was to show the Council what I could do, to demonstrate my power and my worth. I needed the oldest memories here. The ones that mattered.
I unscrewed the dropper from the vial and let a few drops pour into my palm.
It did the trick. Even the room seemed clearer as I picked up the flute and quietly asked it to show me its most important memory.
The vision was immediate.
A girl,short and dark-skinned with thick, locked hair that reached her shoulders, sat on a stone beside a creek, head bent as she scraped a hollow bone with a flint edge.
The boys in the village loved to blow through the hollow reeds they dried from a nearby creek. One of them had discovered that covering a hole in his reed produced a different sound—similar to the original, but higher. She had wondered what would happen if she made something like it with the tools her father had given her.
At last, the final hole cleared, and she blew the dust out with a deep breath. She took a moment to admire her creation. The boys had stolen her reed when they saw her using one and crushed it under their feet. But this bone, taken from an elk’s carcass, was sturdy and hollow. They could not crush it so easily.
She lifted the flute to her mouth and blew. The sound, pure and clear as a running brook, echoed around the meadow. She laughed, a high tinkling like a bell, and blew again. Her joy was as bright as sunshine as she pressed her fingers on the holes down the reed, experimenting with the new tones they made with her fingers on them and off.
And then she played a song. Short, sweet, but unbearably beautiful. The first song.
The vision disappearedas I set the flute back into the box, and I wiped a tear that had escaped. It was unusual I Saw such beauty,though it did happen from time to time. It was why I had gotten into archival research to begin with.
“Oh…my,” murmured Mage Mbotu, as she too wiped away a tear. “What a gift. Senni, don’t you agree? The memories of this flute have remained silent even to you.”
More than one mage at the table was battling their emotions alongside her.
“Think of what we can learn,” she said to the others. “The mysteries she can help us solve if she joins. It iscriticalwe protect these important gifts.”
The seer, however, did not seem particularly happy to have witnessed the scene. “Well. It would appear you have some significant talent as a bard, Ms. Whelan. But that doesn’t mean you’re truly an oracle.”
“Tashi, surely this is enough,” Mbotu turned to the chancellor. “She has already demonstrated two primary talents—that alone makes her special, even if she is untrained. No one has been able to recover history from so long for many generations. This knowledge is priceless, and what she may be able to do once manifested?—”
“The tests aren’t finished,” Senni interrupted. He turned to Chancellor Se. “Shall I?”
The chancellor seemed to ponder the options before him, tipping his head from side to side like a metronome. Then he nodded. “Continue. We must understand her abilities in full.”
Senni grinned. “My pleasure.”
