A Winding Wave of Magic

41. The Oracle’s Lesson

41

THE ORACLE’S LESSON

What horror will invade the mind,

When the strict Judge, who would be kind,

Shall have few venial faults to find!

— THE EARL OF ROSCOMMON, “ON THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT”

T he house exploded. Robbie and Jonathan both started shouting questions, and the three girls shot down from the upstairs, from where they had apparently been listening through the iron vents. Caitlin continued to knit as if nothing were happening while I sat numbly in my chair, waiting for the commotion to die down and for Caitlin to explain just what the hell an oracle was.

“Now then,” Caitlin said, once the men had quieted and her daughters had settled at her feet. “Iona and Enda have just finished learning about all the types of fae in the world, so perhaps they might help us explain. Girls, what are the four kinds of seers? In English, please, for Cassandra.”

Iona looked pointedly at me down a short, stubby nose and recited obediently: “There are four types of seers that every fae should know. Telepaths, who know what a body thinks in the present—they’re the most common ones. Fílid —I mean, bards—can see the past and so sing us songs about it. Prophets can see the future, like banshees who see death. And oracles, who can do all three plus they channel other fae powers. They’re very rare.”

“One for each generation!” piped Enda, her round face shining with excitement. She clearly let Iona do most of the talking, but wasn’t about to be left out of the lesson completely.

“And which are you, lovies?” Caitlin asked with a gleam of motherly pride.

“ I’m a 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 tell her 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. “You what ?”

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 a few 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 existed pretty 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.

“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 any sense !” 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 it go ?”

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 the The Celtic Twilight in 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. All they 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.

We were, however, quite alone. The spirits of the place had begun to cast their influence over him also. In a moment he was corroborated by the girl, who said that bursts of laughter had begun to mingle with the music, the confused talking, and the noise of feet. She next saw a bright light streaming out of the cave, which seemed to have grown much deeper, and a quantity of little people, in various coloured dresses, red predominating, dancing to a tune which she did not recognize.

It was from a well-known story about Queen Medb, but it was the seeress that Caitlin was most concerned about, the part of the tale where Yeats is standing in the field with an older man and a young seeress as they called upon the spirits of a fairy mound.

I turned to Caitlin, who seemed to be caught in her own strange trance. “This doesn’t prove anything. Yeats was just a typical bard, if that’s what you’d call it. Like Enda here. And apparently, this seeress he was watching was the same.”

Enda grinned, pleased to be recognized.

But Caitlin shook her head. “Just listen.” She nodded at her daughter.

Enda continued, and the narrator did indeed begin to see Medb emerge from the dancing folk and approach the trio. The narrator had all sorts of questions for the queen, but was forced to ask them through his guide, the seeress.

“‘I bade the seeress lay her hand upon the breast of the queen,’” Caitlin spoke with Enda, “‘and after that she heard every word quite distinctly.’” She stopped there and blinked her eyes open, staring at me meaningfully.

I blinked back. “What, the touch? The girl didn’t need it to communicate her visions to Yeats or the old man. What did it matter if she touched the queen?”

“The girl was just an ordinary bard, Cassandra, as was William Butler Yeats. But it was Medb who needed to be touched, mm?”

“She wasn’t a seer, Caitlin,” I protested. “She was just a queen. And one who was supposedly married a half a dozen times, I might add.”

“You of all people should know that you’ve got to read between the lines. It was the blasted monks, not the poets, who likely focused more on her marital activities than the fact that she was the goddess of sovereignty. In the old tales, she appears as an apparition, speaking to animals as familiars, guiding the warriors through battle, and attracting men of all types with her beauty, yes.”

Caitlin leaned in close to me, her gray eyes gleaming. The girls leaned closer. So did everyone else.

“She could do everything with a simple touch of the hand. She was one of the greatest women in Irish history. And she was the oracle of her generation, a channel for power and truth. Just like you.”

Satisfied with her dramatic conclusion, Caitlin cooked the pollock on the ancient wood-burning stove in the kitchen while her daughters peppered me with questions. What did it feel like to be an oracle? Could I show them how to do it? Did I really not know what I was?

Eventually, their questions bled into the memories released from my chair, and all of them seemed to grow louder as the embers in the fire turned to ash. The sea begged me to visit, and I escaped outside on the pretense of a walk.

A path cut into the limestone cliff zigzagged down to the shore below the house, where the Atlantic Ocean beat the limestone to pebbles. The sun was just starting to set when I found a large, flat rock above a low tide, turning the previously silver waves golden as the rays met the water.

Tucked into my favorite of Gran’s old sweaters—identical to the one Caitlin had been knitting inside—I focused on breathing the salt-sprayed air as I dipped my fingers into the tide pools on either side of the rock.

Feel the earth. Touch the water .

Less than a mile down the shore was a break where, according to Jock, surfers came from all over the island to try their luck. It was a solid left, and under a relatively calm breeze, the waves broke in even green barrels patched with kelp. Occasionally, a seal popped up from the crest, playing in the rise and fall as it caught its evening meal. One turned to me and barked. I wanted nothing more than to pull on my wet suit and escape into the cool oblivion.

“Are you all right?”

Jonathan’s voice was low enough to blend with the dull roar of the surf, but I heard him anyway. I folded my arms over my knees and buried my face in my hands while my hair tumbled about my arms and shoulders, enshrouding me further. I knew he could watch every emotion running through my body if he wanted to, but somehow I felt more hidden this way.

It was a blessing to have found the Connollys—a kind, pragmatic family like I’d wished for my entire life. Who had welcomed me into their home in the space of a few hours without blinking an eye. But I had never felt so naked, so invaded in my life.

And it had only been maybe an hour.

“That bad, is it?”

“Mmph,” I mumbled into the wool.

I lifted my head and stretched my legs on the rock, digging the heels of my boots into the rock. Jonathan sat beside me and opened his palm on his thigh. An invitation without being presumptive. One that said, I’m here. If you need ..

“Not just now,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I need some privacy.”

“Do you want me to leave you alone?”

“You can stay. Just don’t touch me.”

We allowed the ocean’s meditative laps and the gulls’ songs to slip pleasantly in between us. Behind us, the Connolly girls picked greens in the garden for dinner, and Robbie had gone to the next lot over to feed their family’s livestock. A hint of grilled fish floated pleasantly from the house.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” I said finally, turning my gaze back to the water as the sun began to turn amber as it dropped to the horizon. “I don’t know…I think…I’m just not…I’m not a savior.”

“Savior?” Jonathan’s snort was loud and immediate. “No, I don’t think so either. You’re no Messiah, Cass.”

I chuckled with him. “Just the ‘Oracle of a Generation,’ then.”

“She does have a knack for drama.”

I heaved a sigh. There were so few oracles, Caitlin said, which meant we were either revered or reviled. Sometimes both, of which Medb and my namesake were examples. Oracles served as guides for the people, but not everyone wanted to hear the things they had to share.

There hadn’t been one in Ireland for several hundred years. The last known oracle in Europe had died in a concentration camp during World War II. Whether there were others out there or not, it was safe to assume there weren’t many of us.

She said I was a marvel, but I felt like a fraud.

“How can I do this if I’m not sure what I’m even supposed to See?” I demanded. “I’m so ordinary, it’s absurd. Other than some discomfort when I bump into people and occasional moments of insanity, I’m practically plain.”

“That’s not true and you know it.” Jonathan pried a shell from the edge of the rock and held it up, revealing a tiny snail inside. “In a few weeks, this one will grow too large for his shell and crawl out to find a new one. Chances are, he’ll be washed out by the tide, to a new part of the island or another that’s farther from his home and stranger than any place he’s ever been. He’ll see new things and be confused. But eventually he’ll find a new home, crawl in, and grow even more.”

He set the snail back into a small pool of water gathered on the rock, where several others were firmly attached to the algae-covered surface.

“As metaphors go, that’s fairly heavy-handed,” I said, but my tone didn’t match my words. “I liked A Home for Hermit Crab too when I was little.”

Although there was a reason for that, I had to admit.

“Most of us would probably give up, Cass. In his place or in yours. Most people simply can’t weather the changes of the world. But you’ve been born with the gifts to do just that and help others too. Unlike most seers, you’ve already traveled across the world rather than staying in the same place, even with the challenges of your gifts. You’ve chosen to live in cities for your love of knowledge, rather than cower in some remote location like this or Manzanita. Haven’t you ever wondered why?”

“This place is gorgeous,” I countered. “Anyone would be lucky to live here.”

“It’s beautiful, but it’s the middle of bloody nowhere.” Jonathan grabbed a few loose pebbles and began skipping them off the whitewash. “It’s for people who don’t like people, who can’t deal with change. I love the Connollys, and you’ll learn a lot from them. But they’re chasing a past, the way they live, one that’s dying. You want to know history, but you want to know the rest of the world too. It’s your curiosity that makes you special, oracle or not.” He took a breath and tossed a few more rocks. These didn’t skip, just made a splash on the shallow waves before sinking below the frothy surface. “I don’t think Penny gave you that box just to guard it.”

A gust of wind tossed my hair across my eyes, and I pushed it away to look at him. “What do you mean?”

“You’re not a telepathic shield like she was. You’re the opposite, in fact. You’re a vector for truth—you keep nothing to yourself. I’d wager she thought of that when she willed you that box and her position. Maybe it’s time for the Secret, whatever it is, to be shared. Maybe it’s time for the lost mage of Inis Oírr to be found.”

My breath seemed to escape me. “That’s a lot to say with maybe.”

Jonathan’s full lips press into a tight line. “It’s a lot no matter what.”

I stared back out at the waves, fighting the urge to run into them and forget all of this nonsense. If I was an oracle, like Caitlin said, perhaps I could find a merrow out there who would help me turn into a seal, too. I could sink that nasty box to the bottom of the ocean and swim away, and no one would ever know where I’d gone. Gran’s Secret would stay hidden, and I’d never see it again.

But you’d never see him again either, said a small voice somewhere in the back of my mind.

“Cass.”

I turned. “What?”

Jonathan’s eyes gleamed before he stared back at his hands, almost like he couldn’t bear to look at me. “I’m leaving in the morning. First flight out.”

My heart felt like it had been smacked by a hammer. “What? Why? We just got here.”

Jonathan took my hand and tugged me closer. Remorse shivered through his touch, along the fact that he didn’t want to leave. Not any of us. Not me.

My body relaxed. Until I Saw what he planned to say next.

I flung his hand away, but he said it anyway. “I can’t stay here. I agreed to escort you to this house, and I did that.”

“You’re lying,” I bit out.

“I’m not.”

I reared. “You are. I Saw it. You can hide things from others, but you can’t from me. Not completely. You want to stay here. You want to be together just as badly as I do, but for some reason you won’t . Why?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Jonathan exploded. “Do you think I’ve nothing better to do than to babysit an errant seeress on a deserted island? I have papers to write, research to conduct, business of my own to attend. And let’s not forget you have a mother I promised to look after and a madman to track down.”

Every assertion was a punch to the gut. And each one a lie, in his heart if not his mind.

“I don’t know the Connollys,” I insisted. “I’ve only met them today. I know you, though, and I know in my heart we are not supposed to be apart! This connection is too valuable—you say there is something special about me, but there is something special about us, Jonathan! I don’t care if you don’t want to be lovers—truly I don’t. But I—you’re…” My voice choked. “You’re the only person left I can trust.”

“Cass.” His voice was hushed. “Stop.”

“But—”

“It’s what Penny wanted.”

“Penny’s dead.” The words were bitter on my tongue. “What she wants doesn’t matter anymore.”

Jonathan was quiet for a long time as he looked at me. I just stared out at the surf, wishing to all the gods that I could throw myself into it and never come back.

“You don’t mean that. You loved your grandmother more than anyone in the world.”

I hugged my sweater around my shoulders, feeling the haze of my Gran’s love in the yarn. A tear slipped down my cheek.

But when I didn’t say anything, Jonathan ran a hand through his hair. “One day, you’ll see this was the right thing to do. You’ll learn what you have to learn here. You will get justice for Penny. And then you will live your life on your own terms.”

I swallowed. Whatever that meant.

Jonathan sighed, then, as if he couldn’t bear not to, slipped an arm around my shoulder to pull me close.

“I’m your friend, Cass,” he murmured along with the same feeling gliding through his touch, though it still betrayed a desire for something more. He didn’t care, though, wanting more for me to know the truth of his words. Of his feelings. “I’ll come back. I promise.”

Still I couldn’t speak, vibrating as I was with anger. Pain. Sadness.

“Please go,” I managed through gritted teeth, fighting with everything I had against the other tears. “I’ll come in for dinner. But right now I just want to be by myself.”

Jonathan waited a few more minutes, but eventually stood up and left. His footsteps were quickly drowned out by the wind and water.

This was the part, I realized, that Caitlin hadn’t mentioned in my first lesson. Being an oracle meant something else I had never minded before, but was starting to hate for the first time in my life.

Being completely and totally alone.