Field and flower.
Time circles. Repeats. Ready to tell the story again. And again.
The drum beat louder. The days were slipping by, and the Komizar was getting closer. Keep going, I told myself. Keep walking.
The scent of the crushed grass beneath my boots wafted up to meet me. I thought of Dihara and another meadow. It was a lifetime ago, but I saw her again. She spun at her wheel. Her head angled to the side.
So you think you have the gift.
Who told you that?
The stories … they travel.
Her wheel turned, whirred. The valley waited, watched, its heartbeat a murmur on the breeze.
The truth was here. Somewhere. I walked on.
The pluck of a string.
And another.
Music. I spun, looking back from where I had come. The valley was empty, but I heard the mournful strum of the zitaraes, my mother’s song floating, and then when I looked back to where I’d been heading, I saw something else.
All ways belong to the world. What is magic but what we don’t yet understand?
A girl knelt on the rim of a wide bluff above me.
There.
The word fluttered in my belly, familiar. A word that had pushed and prodded me toward the maps, and then this valley.
Her eyes met mine.
“It was you,” I whispered.
She nodded but said nothing.
She kissed her fingers, and I heard the Holy Text braiding with the air.
And Morrighan raised her voice,
To the heavens,
Kissing two fingers,
One for the lost,
And one for those yet to come,
For the winnowing was not over.
The song that had filled the valley only seconds ago, was now hers, winding, lengthening, beckoning. I stumbled up the steep trail to the bluff, but by the time I got to where she had knelt, she was gone. The bluff jutted out, and the long valley was in my view in both directions, as still and silent as ever—except for her voice. I dropped to the ground, kneeling, feeling the warmth of where she had been, feeling her desperation from centuries ago. Feeling it now. The winnowing was not over.
Time circles. Repeats.
And the desperate prayers she had lifted to the gods so long ago became my own.
* * *