Then I almost cry out as the Eye begins to pulsate in my palm, as though I were clutching a beating heart. The darkness behind my eyelids becomes light, refracting over and over until, quite suddenly, I’m looking out across a vast expanse of ocean.
A winged shadow glides over the water, and a creature lands smoothly on the beach beside me. My mouth tips open – I am staring into the bulbous eyes of a giant dragonfly. It’s roughly the size of a small horse, deep blue and breathtaking.
They say the Rain Singers used to fly upon dragonfly-back, and that they were sometimes spotted swooping through the clouds above Brava.
Sure enough, a boy with pale-white hair slides gracefully from the saddle and begins to make his way up the beach towards the forest.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spot a girl hiding in the treeline. She’s beautiful, with eyes the colour of twilit sea. Only when the boy glances in her direction, she disappears. I wonder briefly whether she’s Ventalla, and using her gifts to flit. But no, I can still hear her footsteps, twigs snapping as she keeps pace behind him, vanishing and reappearing everyfew yards. It’s as if she’s still there, but I can’t see her – as if she’sinvisible.
All of a sudden the boy whirls round, snatching at thin air. The girl lets out a squeak and materializes with his hands clamped on her shoulders.
‘Hello, Mage,’ he says, grinning.
‘Hello, Singer,’ she responds, rising up on her tiptoes to kiss him.
I stare at them. How can this be? And what has any of it got to do withme?
The visions come thick and fast, and I watch as a story unfolds. A love story. Years pass, and two become three when a child is born – a little boy who inherits his father’s hair and his mother’s eyes as well as both their gifts:Demari.
The scene shifts and the happiness fades. The boy, now around nine or ten, sobs over his parents’ pox-ridden bodies. He sits by their bedside night and day, yet they never wake up. Tears drip from his face, forming a small pool on the floorboards. I gasp as the pool transforms into a shimmering portal, and the boy falls through it with a scream.
He emerges on the outskirts of a large province. The day is blisteringly hot, the sun beating down mercilessly upon the barren stone plains stretching out for miles before us. We’re no longer in the Otherlands – we’re in Ostacre. Specifically, the Firelands.
A few yards away, a girl is perched on the edge of a steaming hot spring, moodily tossing stones into the water. She looks about the same age as the boy, herthick hair unbound, dark eyes narrowed with irritation. She doesn’t notice him standing there, tear-stained and bedraggled, until his foot makes a scuffing noise on the rocky ground.
She whips round, flames igniting in her palm as she demands, ‘What do you want?’
The boy shrinks back, raising his arms in surrender. ‘N-nothing.’
The girl angles her head as she considers him. Then she extinguishes the flames and folds her arms crossly. ‘You shouldn’t go sneaking up on people. It’s bad manners.’
His lower lip trembles.
Her gaze softens along with her voice. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘My … my parents are dead,’ he whispers. ‘And I … I don’t know where I am.’
Rain begins to fall above their heads – fat droplets sizzling on hot stone.
The girl stares, wide-eyed. ‘Rain Singer,’ she breathes.
The boy looks frightened. He stumbles backwards, as though about to run away.
‘No, wait! Don’t go. I’ve never met a Singer before.’
He hesitates. I can’t be sure whether it’s rain or tears streaming down his cheeks.
‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ the girl adds gently.
The boy wipes his eyes, then sits down next to her.
‘I thought all the Rain Singers lived in Brava,’ she says. ‘What’re you doing here?’
‘Where is here?’
‘Valburn, of course.The flaming heart of the Firelands, as my father calls it.’
Valburn? Of all the provinces in Ostacre, why is this particular vision taking place in the one I grew up in? Who are these children?
