“The fate I saw for you,” Niamh said, “brings you to Coill Darragh.”
Briar froze.
He waited for her to laugh. Tell him it was a joke. She didn’t. Instead, she brought the pint to her lips, giving Briar an inelegant view of her nostrils. When she set the pint down again, it sank in. She’d meant what she’d said.
“Where?”
“Coill Darragh.”
“Where’s that?”
“Island, up north and west across the channel, like.”
“You’re joking. I’ve never heard of it.”
“Lovely place,” she said with a sly look that made Briar suspicious. “Full of history.”
He tapped frantically at his phone to pull up a search on the name. He misspelled it, getting the “did you mean Coill Darragh?” option. “You’re sending me to a tiny town of a few hundred people in the middle of the ocean five hundred miles away from here?”
“Yes.”
“In the middle of nowhere, with no one?”
“There’ll be another witch. There are two every year.”
“Niamh. You’re ruining my life.”
“You’ll be grand.”
“There must be some mistake.”
“No mistake.” She nodded sagely. “I’ve seen your destiny in Coill Darragh.”
“Tell me what you saw, then,” he said. “Am I rich? Do men and women fawn over me in the streets? Do I eventually go to Pentawynn, where I meet Linden, and we fall madly in love and become the two most popular people on the planet?” Though he’d adopted a sarcastic tone, he hoped even a portion of that was true.
Seer Niamh rubbed her temples. “Do you know the price of a prophecy?”
A chill ran down the length of Briar’s spine.
In his eagerness to hear the details of his fate, he’d forgotten the price, though he knew it well. He’d had one prophetic reading before, at a traveling fairground in the tent of a young seer. Only a teenager, barely older than Briar at fourteen. With a belly full of soft-serve ice cream, he’d gone in hoping to hear about his high school crush. Instead, she’d flipped over the Tower from her tarot and foretold the slow, agonizing death of his mother.
He’d never told his mum why the news of her curse hadn’t surprised him.
A tithe old as time: you could learn your future, but you could never speak of it.
“The price is my silence,” he said.
“You do know, then.”
“I want to hear it.”
“You understand the price? You’re sure?”
A pang of grief reverberated through him. Vatii would know because she was a part of him. He wouldn’t be able to tell anyone else. But apart from her, who else could he tell?
“Yes.”
Niamh stood and took her pint somewhere private. The noises of the pub fell away. As she folded her bony hands, knobbed like tree branches, under her chin, Briar felt magic creep like ivy up his throat, binding his tongue so he couldn’t repeat what he was about to hear.
