This time, my chuckle was humorless. “Perhaps.”
“Let’s hope that’s the reason.”
I raised a brow.
Her laugh was equally dark. “No other justification would satisfy you,” she said.
“It doesn’t need to be satisfactory if it’s true. Do you have a prophecy for me, Brigid?”
She cast her eyes to the water, but it wasn’t in avoidance. I watched her contemplation as the threads of fate wove behind her eyes.
“She’s been born female in each life, has she not?”
I balked at the question. I hadn’t even considered it. “Yes, I suppose she has. Is that…unusual? I haven’t spent enough time with mortals to be familiar with their soul cycles.”
Brigid’s eyes unfocused. “Her ability to bear children may be a sign of things to come.”
I moved closer, if only by a fraction. “Tell me what you see when you peer into our future.”
“The thread is on the loom. It may be nothing. Your fates are undecided.”
I’d broken so many rules already, what was one more? I pushed my luck.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
The hardness in her gaze returned. She had finished playing along. “Find your human. Learn what it is to be human. Pray that is the fate between the two of you. For any other path would mean something grand, something powerful, something bigger than you or me or your mortal. But one doesn’t see the story until it’s written.”
My lips parted, head shaking in my silent question.
“You may remain on my land, as I hope this human is merely a tool for education…” Her eyes returned to the water. The last part was more to herself than to me as she said, “What a tragedy it would be if the two of you were crafted to create history.”
She’d already begun to wobble as her form stepped from the mortal soil to her own pantheon. I caught her just before she disappeared. “Will my presence be challenged in your kingdom while she lives?”
“Do what you must,” she said. “And for all of our sakes, I hope this lesson is your last.”
When she left, so did the light.
The mist resumed, abandoning me to the gray silence of damp moss and chill.
I lingered on the riverbank and stared at the trout swimming upstream, wondering as to how they kept their fervor even though it meant battling the current, struggling day in and day out to fight against the very environment for which they were made. Were the trout born to learn a lesson? After which theymight relax, they might find a pond, they might rest and join the idle slumber of freshwater fish?
Their answer echoed my own.
One could refuse to learn a lesson, but they could not deny purpose. Trout were the way they were because they had no other choice.
I was a phantom, unseen on the fourth day as I walked into her village. I planned to find her, but didn’t have to search far. There she was, a wooden pail on her hip as musical Gaelic rolled off her tongue, chatting with someone near a well.
My human had been more or less solitary in the lives I’d been her guardian, and I wondered as to the friendships I’d kept her from, the human experiences I’d limited by being in her life. The question burrowed into me as her face lit.
For a second, I thought she’d seen me.
She looked right through me, the sun shining from her on the overcast day as if it belonged in her chest. Caoimhe set the pail atop the well’s stony ledge and opened her arms wide when something scurried into the space that existed between my world and theirs, directly through my legs as it ran to her.
Not it. He.
Thiswas genuinely surprising.
A boy no older than four, with hair the color of strained peaches. His fat cheeks glowed with his mother’s light, with health, with joy.
