Page 59 of Nineteen Eighty

“No,” Colleen replied, with a thoughtful look at Ophelia’s portrait on the wall. “Not really, but the thing about Ophelia was, that wasn’t her way. You have to remember that she resurrected this tradition from France, and she built it from nothing but notes and memories of others. All by herself. And then when she started bringing in family to help, she was still running it. Still the only one who really believed in what we were. Even when I joined, our meetings were still mostly perfunctory. A sense of limbo, as if we were waiting… for something. The Curse, maybe, or something else, but she said to me before she died that she could only do so much to make the Council what it was, and that we, this generation, all of us, had to take it where it was meant to go.”

Their peers in the room each absorbed this in their own way, some nodding, others staring off into the distance.

“Would you like me to use my ability here?” Elizabeth pressed.

“I want to do what Ophelia set the foundation for us to do,” Colleen said. “I want to build our network of witches, and I want us to improve attendance at Collective meetings. I want us to truly lead in a way she knew she couldn’t do without the buy-in not only of her Council, but the broader family. We’ve existed on islands for too long. It’s time for us to come together.” Colleen nodded at the Council. “We’re starting down that path now, Elizabeth. Luther has our first gathering on the calendar for the new year, and we’re going to start putting more interesting topics on the agendas to elicit interest from the rest of the Deschanels, Fontenots, Guidrys, and so on. To answer your question… I want you to only ever use your power with those goals in mind. And only then, if you think it will help bring us closer together, and not further apart.”

When the others were gone, Elizabeth lingered. “What changed your mind?” she asked Colleen, as their sister closed the door. They’d said goodbye to Evangeline, who was flying back to Switzerland, and would be home again soon for Christmas.

“Oh, I don’t know…”

Elizabeth reached for her sister’s hands. “I want to know.”

“Tristan,” Colleen blurted, and when Elizabeth’s confusion stole over her face, she quickly corrected herself. “No, not him, specifically, but your encounter with him. It has to mean something.”

“I don’t think his name is really Tristan,” Elizabeth replied.

“You don’t believe him?”

“I believe him about the important things. But he even said as much, about his name, that he’d given it to me because I was meant to one day give it to my son. But I don’t think his real name, or who he was, was all that important to the events of that night, and why he was there. Whoever he is, he doesn’t need us to know anything else about him in order to protect us.”

“And you think that’s what he is to us. A protector.”

“Maybe? I don’t know. I saw him watching me in Paris, and I’d never seen him before that. And I’d remember, Colleen, because this guy…” Elizabeth laughed. “He’s beautiful. Gorgeous, with this oddly colored red and silver hair. But my God, this man doesn’t belong in this century, he belongs in a museum. The way he dresses, talks, acts. And he wears a sword that probably came from the goddamn Viking invasion of the British Isles.”

Colleen frowned. “That is odd. Ophelia never mentioned anything like that.”

“He doesn’t look any older than me, but I have a feeling he’s been looking after us a good long while.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, but not much about who we are ever has, has it? We’ve never asked ourselves why we’re this way. Where it comes from.”

“And you think this Tristan has something to do with that?”

“I don’t know anything at all, other than the man thought it was a priority to protect my future. Our future. He mentioned that, you know, what I’d told you. About Tristan, my Tristan that is, saving the family one day.”

“He did? He said that?”

“He reminded me what was at stake.”

“And where was this protector when Maddy died?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “I don’t think it works like that, Colleen. I think that it’s like… like questioning why God lets children die. We all have free will, and that’s part of us, but our path has already been set. Free will is a construct. Maybe this is a chicken and egg argument, but it’s hard to say whether our choices made by free will are what set us on this predetermined path, or whether this path backed us into those choices. I’m not good with philosophy. But I believe all the choices we make, we were destined to make. Free will be damned, the choices might be ours, but they were already written before we made them.”

“But why would he save Connor? By that logic, wasn’t Connor always meant to jump? And haven’t we always known that we can’t change the future?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “Because Connor wasn’t supposed to die that night. His decision to do that was affected by my attempt to alter the timeline. Me threatening to change the future went against the natural order of things, something only a seer, oddly, would be capable of doing. Tristan created a paradox of sorts, in correcting us back to the course that was meant for us, which, in its own way, also changed the future. Because in doing so, he’s changed me, and now I’m on the path that led me to you.”

“That’s very confusing,” Colleen said, but her expression was interested. She wanted to know more. She wanted to understand. “Do you think all seers have a Tristan? What would stop them from throwing the future off course without one?”

Elizabeth shrugged. “Maybe they do. Maybe Ophelia knew him, by another name and another set of circumstances. Or someone like him. When she let me go on that fool’s errand to try and stop the ship from wrecking, it was obvious then she knew I wouldn’t, couldn’t change it, but there was also an odd glint in her eye. I didn’t understand it then. Maybe I do now. Our only real power as a seer is the one we have over life and death with ourselves.”

“Don’t you wish you could ask him?”

“Oh, aye,” Elizabeth said, using Tristan’s word, and his strange way of talking. “But the one thing I do know about the man is we’ll never meet again, not in this life. He told me so, and I have no reason not to believe him.”

Charles gave up the glass an hour ago, now taking swigs directly from the bottle of Hennessey on his desk. His smoldering cigarette prepared for death in his ashtray, but he still had more, another pack, and he’d smoke them all because there was no one who cared enough to stop him from that, or the heavy drinking. When he’d kicked the cocaine, he’d done it all by himself. And wasn’t that the real Deschanel curse? The curse of the heir? How lonely it was at the top, when you had to make all the decisions, do all the protecting so others could live in peace?

---