Chapter 22 Mad Ramblings
MAD RAMBLINGS
Baird shrugged into his heavy coat and whistled for Bunny before heading out the cottage door.
As he passed Mira's studio, he leaned over the half-door to call out that they were off to check the herd—but stopped short.
Mira stood beside her bench, palm upturned, a steady flame blooming from the center of her hand—as natural now as breath.
With calm precision, she brought the torch toward it, the hiss of the gas signaling it was ready to catch, and then the flare of the dragon before she adjusted the balance of oxygen and acetylene, the striker that always sat at the ready on her bench now obsolete.
He stayed silent, watching her the way he often did—entranced, half-afraid to break whatever spell she'd woven around herself.
Her focus was complete, her face illuminated by the small miracle she'd just performed.
He wanted to share her wonder, to let it fill him with the same awe it once had.
But lately, something darker had begun to stir beneath that admiration—a whisper of unease he couldn't quite name.
When she finally turned and saw him—lit torch in one hand, eyes bright with triumph—color rose to her cheeks.
She blushed, realizing he'd witnessed her summon the flame from within her own palm.
Her smile was harnessed sunlight—brilliant, effortless—and the sight of it cracked something tender and painful inside him, because it looked so certain.
He only lifted a hand in farewell, a simple gesture to say they were off to the hills.
Mira blew him a kiss, her expression bright, before turning back to her bench and to her work.
When Mira had woken from the dream two nights ago—not frightened, not shattered from nightmare—but restless all the same, he had known it instantly.
There had been a current in her, a bright, humming energy that did not belong to fear.
Excitement, perhaps. He had felt her pulse racing beneath his palm, the swift percussion of adrenaline alive in her veins.
It had startled him at first—the intensity of it—but when he searched her face, there had been no terror there.
No lingering shadow in her eyes. And for that alone, he had breathed a quiet prayer of thanks into the dark.
She'd mumbled words in a voice that didn't sound exactly like her, too high and too low, the wrong cadence, yet dynamic and omnipotent just the same.
But as soon as she was fully awake, relaying what she'd seen, Baird began to feel uneasy.
“I was chosen,” she'd whispered. “Many were not enough, but I am.
It's Brigid, the goddess—she's chosen me—but for what I'm not sure.” She was confused by the dream, looking for the message that was lingering just past the point of comprehension, and grasping for it all the same.
It struck him then—how her tone mirrored Agnes's fevered prophecies, a photograph negative made flesh.
Every trembling, fearful utterance Agnes had once spoken now echoed back through Mira's calm conviction, eerily similar in language, stripped only of the terror and paranoia.
Most of what Agnes had said in the height of her episodes sounded wild, unhinged—ramblings that rarely made sense.
And now, those words were playing over and over again in his head.
“She's coming for me because I'm not the one. I’m not enough—I'll never be enough. One of us must die each generation for our sins, until the chosen appears—and the ones we love will not be safe.”
Those things that hadn't made sense—the tangled mutterings, the half-phrased warnings—had always seemed to circle back to Bastien.
At the time, Baird had dismissed the shifting he and she in her ramblings as confusion, the fraying of her mind.
But now, he wasn't so sure. It struck him, with the weight of inevitability, that Agnes had known exactly who she spoke of—and what she meant.
The guilt he'd thought long buried rose again, pressing in until it was hard to breathe.
“And one day, after I am gone, she'll come for the one chosen and take her from ye as well. Remember this, Baird. Remember.”
She'd repeated it like a warning carved into stone, meant to outlast her.
Over and over, urging him not to forget.
The meaning had always eluded him. He'd never known whether the loss she spoke of would be a child, or a woman he had yet to meet—but the certainty in her voice had left no doubt that she believed the loss would be real.
When Sorcha first claimed she could see the magic in Mira, Baird had felt a quiet pride. He'd seen it too, simmering just beneath her skin, aching to be known. Mira couldn't see it herself then. Maybe it was that uneasy feeling of being different, strange, that made her deny what she was.
Then Granny Margaret gave her the family grimoire, and everything shifted.
Curiosity came first, then confidence, until she began to glow with it—her skill sharpening, expanding, beyond anything he'd expected.
Every spare moment found her bent over its pages, chasing meaning, pulled deeper and deeper as the book seemed to unlock something within her, a hidden current of energy that pulsed brighter with each passing day.
Everyone could see it now, even Mira. But the dreams, the conviction that someone was testing her, that she was being drawn toward something inevitable…
those echoes were beginning to sound hauntingly like Agnes's prophecies.
Only this time, Mira was chosen. But chosen for what—and by whom?
Baird suspected Granny Margaret knew more than she let on, and perhaps Sorcha did too.
The thought unsettled him, a cold weight pressing into his gut.
With each new power Mira unlocked, each page of the Mother's Book she turned, the more certain he became: whatever force had chosen her was also taking her farther away from him—into something he couldn't yet see.
The entire walk into the high valley, he'd asked himself a dozen times—more, maybe—how he could learn the truth before it was too late. Granny Margaret, he knew, would speak in riddles if she spoke at all; truth with her always came tangled in threads of misdirection.
But Sorcha—perhaps Sorcha would tell him.
The truth about the book. About Mira's awakening powers.
About what it meant to be chosen. Robbie always said Sorcha had ways of knowing things, that her reach brushed against the gods themselves.
She'd become a guide to Mira, helping her draw out the power she'd once denied.
And yet, more and more, Baird couldn't shake the feeling that Sorcha wasn't just mentoring Mira—she was watching Mira herself, waiting for more pieces of a puzzle to fall into place.