Page 141 of A Winding Wave of Magic
“It’s not so much that they talked to the gods.” Robbie stretched his long legs toward the fire. “We know who the ‘gods’ were, or once were—just other fae, like all of us here. But the stories of the oracles come from a time when magic wasn’t considered a farce the way it is now. So it’s more likely that they were celebrated simply for their abilities to See the truth in things, to mediate the world around them from one being to the next. The cults that rose up around some…” He shrugged. “I don’t suppose we can really blame them for the small minds of plain folk, can we?”
I rubbed a hand over the creases of my eyes. “I don’t understand. How is this any different from any other seer?”
“It’s special,” Caitlin said. “All the energy of the world is around you, and you’ve the ability to tap into it with a simple touch. She sky’s your limit with what you might See. To what you might do.”
“I can’t believe I didn’t See it before.”
Caitlin, Robbie, and I turned to Jonathan, whose eyes burned a multitude of glittering greens. I fought the urge to cower into my chair, to escape the scrutiny of his sorcerer’s gaze.
“See what?” I asked
Oracles were supposed to be noble and nearly omnipotent, if somewhat crazed in their dedication to the truth. But I felt small and ignorant. It was ironic that I was named after one of the craziest of them all—the prophetess whom no one believed
“The energy of the room. Of everyone here. All of it is drawn to you, Cass, as if it’s trying to find a way inside or through you.” Jonathan pitched forward in his seat excitedly, as if he was trying to hold on to his vision for as long as he could. “It’s amazing. Like you’re a conduit for it all, but it flows out of you, too. As if you take it all in just to share it with others.” His eyes faded back to their normal mild green, though wonder remained in his expression.
“So I’m a funnel. An empty vessel,” I said. “My existence just turned feminism back about a hundred years.”
“Wait here a moment.” Caitlin placed her teacup on the tray and rocked out of her seat.
Everyone watched her pad out of the room.
I turned back to the fire and rubbed my hands over my face. “Gods,” I mumbled through my fingers. “This doesn’t make sense.”
“What did you say?” Jonathan asked.
“I said, this doesn’t make anysense!” I snapped. “Traditionally, the ancient oracles were writings, texts to be read, not the priests themselves. The Sibylline oracles, for instance, are a collection of books. Utterances by prophets themselves—the Sibyls—but the women weren’t actually the oracles—the words were. I’m not a book, for Christ’s sake. Or a prophet.”
The information only seemed to excite Robbie and Jonathan more.
Robbie nodded, but not out of agreement. “Fitting, is it not?”
“That she’s a scholar of antiquity?” Jonathan looked at me knowingly. “It would seem that would make you even more qualified to see the truth of the texts in front of you, don’t you think, Cass?”
I groaned in frustration, suddenly envisioning myself at Delphi à la John Collier’s painting, swathed in a crimson toga while gesticulating amidst the great tombs. The whole thing was utterly absurd.
“You must let go of what you’ve learned at school, Cassandra.” Caitlin reentered the room carrying several large leather books with cracked bindings.
“Let go?” My voice jumped half an octave. “I’ve only poured my entire life into my work for more than a decade. And you want me to let itgo?”
She ignored me and resumed her seat. I took one of the books and viewed it with suspicion, only to find a familiar typograph looking back at me.
“Yeats?” I said, surprised to find a well-worn copy of theThe Celtic Twilightin my lap.
The title was a mainstay in Gran’s house, one we read from nearly every night when I first came to live with her. I’d also worked extensively with it for one chapter of my dissertation. From its frayed leather hide, this copy looked like it had survived more than one beating over the years, and I wasn’t surprised to discover it was a first edition.
“I would have thought you’d grab Aeschylus or Pausanias,” I said.
“Boorish plain men, the both of them,” Robbie volunteered. “Fae historians—bards—still give oral histories, mostly to protect us from plain folk. The ancient writers were all plain. Allthey saw of the seers were the bards and the prophetesses, most of them written to sound like they were crazy. Cassandra likely did more than just See the future, which was why she was such a threat to Apollo, no?”
I frowned. Cassandra was cursed because she refused to be Apollo’s consort, not because she was a threat. Growing up, I hated that my mother had named me after the laughing stock of the clairvoyant world—I never wanted to be a woman whose power was cut short by a man’s jealousy.
“But Yeats was fae,” I said. “And he wrote.”
Robbie shrugged. “The young are always stubborn. But at least he was Irish.”
“Page ninety-one,” Caitlin ordered.
I flipped to the page, and she had Enda recite the passage from “Regina, Regina Pigmeorum, Veni” as if she’d known it all her life.
