"Then I had another dream. I stood near the edge of a clearing, under the trees." She stopped and stared off into the distance, as if she saw it afresh. She stared so long and so quietly that Miach finally took his life in his hands and covered one of her hands with his.
"And?"
She looked at him and there was a look in her eye he'd never seen before.
It was fear.
"There was evil there," she whispered. "A well of it."
"In the clearing?"
"In the clearing, aye," she said. "A man stood there. Tall. Dressed in black." She took a deep breath. "There was a woman as well. Children, too, I think. I'm not clear on how many, though I think they were all lads."
He waited for quite a while as she shook. He squeezed her hand. "Did you recognize any of them, Morgan?"
She shook her head. "I didn't", she said finally. "But I did recognize some of the things the mother said, or at least I think so. For all I know, it was just the words you were saying when you healed my leg."
Miach blinked. "What?"
"I wasn't awake, not fully, but I heard the words you used for the spell. Soon I dreamed and those words were in the dream. The mother of the girl used words like those." She looked at him, obviously distraught. "The mother was there with the little girl, but she left her at the edge of the woods. Next to me."
"Did she," Miach said, frowning. "What happened then?"
She swallowed convulsively. "The man said words. He uncapped the well. Evil erupted from it. It fountained up, then came down and washed over the people like a black wave." She paused. "It killed them all."
Miach closed his eyes briefly. "Even the little girl?"
"Nay, not the little girl."
"Why not?"
Morgan took a deep breath. She had to take several. She was clutching his hand so tightly, it was starting to become a little painful. But he didn't move.
Morgan looked at the brush. "The little girl said those words, the ones I used on that brush." She looked at him. "The evil swept by her without seeing her."
Miach looked into her eyes as time slowed to a halt. A thousand questions clamored for answers, but they were naught but noise that distracted him from what he truly needed to know.
How had a shieldmaiden from a backward island famous for bickering peasants and too many sheep dreamed a spell that she managed to weave without possessing any magic at all?
Unless she had magic.
Unless she dreamed memories.
He looked away first, released her hand, and rubbed his hands over his face. Then he turned back and smiled at her. "We'll find answers."
"Are there answers?"
"There are always answers. The difficulty lies in knowing where to look." He nodded toward the brush. "Can you undo that?"
She shuddered. "I haven't the faintest idea how."
He waited. He could have unwoven the spell, of course, but he wasn't going to do it without her permission. He wasn't even sure he wanted her to know that he could. Her distaste for mages was clear.
Heaven help him if she ever found out who he was.
She frowned thoughtfully. "You wouldn't know how, would you? I mean," she said quickly, "being a farmer and all."
It was what he had told her, of course. And he was a farmer?of sorts. He grew all kinds of things in his garden, things that made his brothers uneasy and terrified the servants. And those were just the flowers. Aye, he farmed. He planted spells all over the kingdom and watched them grow and flower into enchantments of beauty and ward and defense.
