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“It’s okay, Mòr. It’ll be over soon,” Kenna murmured.
A fine sweat broke out over the oracle’s forehead.
“Will she be okay?” Lila asked.
“Yes. It’s going to be a bad one, though.”
Lila startled as her own name passed the oracle’s lips.
Chapter 10
Lila and Dixon lingered awkwardly in the oracle’s parlor, both pacing atop a thick blue rug, both cutting glances at one another whenever they came to the frayed ends. They’d followed Kenna and Connell into the oracle’s house and stopped in the parlor, not wanting to intrude, but no one had emerged from the bowels of the house to fetch them.
Perhaps they’d been forgotten.
Perhaps they should wait outside.
Both turned their gazes away and started pacing anew.
Back in the admin building, Mòr had thrashed and murmured for what felt like hours. But Dr. McCrae, the compound’s daytime physician, had arrived as the seizures ended—not that she could have done a thing to stop them. Connell had burst through the door immediately after, lingering in the background while the doctor completed her examination, her thin purple scrubs flitting over the oracle, the fabric baggy over her small form. Mòr made Dr. McCrae’s work all the more difficult by shoving away anyone who hovered near her.
“She’s not herself right now,” her sister had explained before being pushed off balance for the third time.
It took Mòr another five minutes to become aware of the world once more. She finally moaned in her own voice and peered around the room, trying to sit up.
“Oh no, you don’t.” Connell had nearly knocked Kenna over again in his haste to nudge Mòr back down to the floor. “We’ve talked about this. Lie down. You promised.”
Dr. McCrae cleared her throat. “She needs to—”
“She can hear you,” Mòr reminded them. “She’s right here.”
“We might talk to her if she ever listened,” Connell said.
The doctor sat back on
her heels. “You need to rest, Mòr. I’ll swing by your cabin in a few hours to check up on you. Call me—”
“If anything changes. We know.” Connell had scooped up the oracle in one motion, as though lifting a child made of glass and china, and navigated her carefully into the hall. Reactions from onlookers in the admin building ran from concerned to curious, but no one approached. In fact, they seemed very keen on their paperwork, their phone calls, the rugs at their feet, or even the outsiders.
Connell carried Mòr to the nearest cabin, surrounded with an abundance of violet pansies. Kenna followed along, worried hands waving as though she’d catch her sister if Connell’s grip slipped.
Lila doubted that would ever happen. Perhaps he lifted weights for precisely this reason, so he could fulfill his duty as chief and carry home the oracle whenever she grew ill.
Lila came to the end of the rug, but kept walking this time, her curiosity finally outweighing her worry. Mòr had arranged a collection of family pictures on a set of shelves, interspersed with hundreds of travel books. Each cover promised glossy pictures of places Lila had never seen. The oracle had a book for every country, even Germany and Italy.
Lila’s eyes cut away to the rest of the room. A dark brown couch and a few sofa chairs had been positioned near a roaring stone fireplace. The leather’s hue matched the colors in the rock, and contrasted prettily with the deep blue rug they’d been marching back and forth across.
Little else had been put into the parlor except for two display cases. One contained family heirlooms spanning the millennia, the shelves filled to bursting. Brass placards gave a date and a description for each object: a chipped china plate, a silver hand mirror, a frayed and folded quilt, several illuminated manuscripts with ornate calligraphy, sketchbooks, rings, pendants, and watches. A worn obsidian slab sat in the middle, as thick as two knuckles. It ran the length of Lila’s arm and the width of her chest, and had been carved with letters she’d never seen before.
No placard explained its existence, but Lila knew exactly what it would say.
Oracle Stone. Carved twelve to sixteen hundred years ago.
Once upon a time, every oracle on the islands of Britannia and Hibernia owned an oracle stone. Now they were spread all over the commonwealth, just like the stones later crafted in France and Spain and Portugal. Many had been lost, stolen as spoils of war, burgled by private collectors, or broken into pieces and destroyed. Only a few hundred still survived.
Superstition always followed the stones. Before modern medicine “discovered” oracle’s disease and catalogued its symptoms, people believed that the stones afflicted a chosen girl in their village with the seizures, granting her the sight, giving her the ability to share the thoughts of the gods as she thrashed upon the ground. Now people knew better, recognizing that the women merely possessed a faulty gene. Most believed their visions to be false, and the stories of their deeds had been eschewed as nothing more than perversions of history or myths, similar to the gods themselves.
The second display case held more gruesome artifacts from the old country and the new. Polished swords, maces, bows and arrows, an entire row of guns and rifles. A worn saddle settled in the middle, a deep red stain covering half the leather.
