15. Tabitha
Tabitha
Finding the Oracle when you want her turns out to be harder than tripping over her when you don’t, which tracks, because nothing in this dimension has ever once been convenient.
It takes us the better part of a day and a lot of Azaan muttering at the wind before we find the still black pond tucked between two fangs of rock, exactly where it shouldn’t be, because it moves, obviously it moves. The surface doesn’t ripple. It just watches.
“I hate this pond,” I inform it.
“The pond doesn’t care,” Valerian says.
“The pond can hear me, Valerian, look at it, it’s being smug.”
And then she’s there, the way she’s always there, no arrival, just suddenly present at the water’s edge, tall and pale, white-blonde hair drifting like she’s underwater even though she isn’t.
The Oracle. Last time the men treated her like a scam.
This time they hang back and let me walk up, and that alone tells me how rattled they are.
“You came looking,” she says. Her voice does that thing where it’s coming from the water and the air and the inside of my own skull all at once. “You’ve never done that before.”
“Yeah, well. I’m told I’ve been rude to you, and it turns out you’ve been right about everything, which is deeply annoying.
” I fold my arms, then remember I’m not meant to, and unfold them, because even my body language is on the naughty list these days.
“So. Tell me straight. No riddles. What’s the darkness you keep banging on about? The thing after Mordecai.”
For a moment she just regards me with those pale, endless eyes.
“When you opened the book,” she says, “you did not simply free a realm. You rang a bell. And it was heard on the other side of the veil, in the place that shut you away.” The water darkens behind her, images moving in it, towers I don’t recognise, robed figures, a cold white light nothing like Sanguisca’s red.
“The Sorcerers sealed this realm because they feared its Queen. Now the Queen has returned, and the seal is broken, and the book that held you is loose in the world. They will not allow it a second time. They are coming to finish what they began. To unmake the realm. To end its Queen, permanently, so no bloodline can ever wake it again.”
The bottom drops out of my stomach. “That’s the darkness. Not a monster. A whole other world coming to switch us off.”
“That is the darkness.”
“And Mordecai?”
Her mouth curves, not quite a smile. “Mordecai is a splinter. A grief with teeth. He is dangerous to you, but he is small, in the scheme of what comes. He wants one dead woman back. The Sorcerers want every living thing here erased.” She tilts her head.
“You have been fighting the splinter and calling it the war. The war has not arrived yet.”
Behind me I hear Valerian let out a slow breath, and Azaan mutter something that might be an apology to a pond.
“Right.” I make myself keep breathing. Two fronts. My ex on one side, an army of realm-killing sorcerers on the other, and me in the middle with a dead Queen squatting in my soul and seven lives on the clock. “And I don’t suppose you’ve got any actual helpful advice, or is it just doom today?”
“I have the only advice I have ever given you.” She drifts closer, and the men tense, and I hold up a hand to still them.
“You keep reaching for the throne like a woman borrowing a coat she means to give back. You think the power is hers. Tabeitha’s.
You think you are the vessel and she is the wine.
” Her eyes hold mine, and there’s something almost kind in them, which is worse than cruel.
“Go deeper, little Queen. The power was never borrowed. Stop asking the ghost for permission to be what you already are. That is the only thing that saves you. From her. From him. From what comes.”
“That’s not advice, that’s a fortune cookie.”
“It is the truth. You are simply not ready to hear it yet.” She’s already fading, the pond reclaiming her. “You will be. I hope it is not too late when you are.”
And she’s gone, and the pond is just a pond. I’m standing at the edge of it with four demons and a to-do list that just got a great deal worse.
“Well,” Azaan says brightly. “She seems nice.”
I don’t laugh. But it’s a near thing, and near enough counts.