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“Will she be okay alone?” Lila asked.
“Connell is with her. He takes good care of her, and he’s the only one she listens to, the besotted little fool.”
Lila’s mouth hung open.
“Yes, the oracle has a lover.” Kenna rolled her eyes as she tugged on her fur-lined boots. “She’s a person, Lila. Don’t start thinking of her as something instead someone. Things like that get on her nerves, and she likes you. It’ll hurt her feelings.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You should. My sister likes it when people don’t treat her like an oracle. You treated her like a con-woman when you first met her. That doesn’t happen often.” Kenna studied Lila from her head to her boots. “She might like you as a person, but you terrify her, you know. If half of what she’s seen comes to pass, you’d terrify me too.”
“What does that even mean? What has she seen?”
“Blood. Lots of it. Some caused by you, much of it stopped by you. Mòr’s not lying when she says that you are important to the oracles. You’ve already stopped things.”
“The kidnappings?”
“She said you were deadly that afternoon, that you had the blessing of Frigg upon you, that you’ve had it since you were an infant.”
“No, I had a gun,” Lila grumbled. “Why won’t she tell me what she sees before it comes to pass?”
“Tradition. Rules.”
“Mòr breaks the rules all the time.”
“Yes, she breaks silly rules for very good reasons, just as you do. You might dig into a government database if it helps you catch a criminal, but you’d never torture someone, would you?”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“You have no idea what is the same thing and what is not. Know the limitations of your own experience, and listen when you should not talk.”
Lila buttoned up her coat. “Fine. This is me shutting up.”
“She said.”
Lila stuck out her tongue.
Kenna snickered and escorted them from the cabin. Dixon trundled along behind, his eyes absorbing every color he saw. They detoured through a large garden behind the administration building, leafless, thigh-high hedges grown into a labyrinth. Marble statues stood at the center, carved on short pedestals. Bouquets of purple pansies lay at their feet. The six frozen women danced in a ring around a seventh, Sileas, the Blind Oracle, the first of her kind.
She hadn’t been born blind, though. The teenaged Sileas had been the first to spot ships off the shore near her family’s village. Raiders had landed, camping and entrenching themselves, their weapons of war not far from the beach. They’d come to take the
farms and the land, ready for a long and bloody siege.
Even Sileas knew that her people could not handle it. Her people had only lived in the area for a generation, and it had been a particularly brutal winter. Food stores had already dwindled, and they wouldn’t survive if the enemy soldiers ruined the fields. After she told the elder men what she had found, the tribal leaders told her to get into the village hall with the rest of the women and children, for none of them were fit to hold a bow or wield a mace. She, just like her mothers and grandmothers, were too weak, good for nothing but one last defense for the children, good for nothing more than desperate pleas against rape.
Sileas disobeyed the tribal leaders. She ran to the temple instead and asked the gods how she might save her people.
Frigg answered her call. She’d grown frustrated over the centuries, frustrated that the people had nearly forgotten her and her sisters in favor of her brother-gods, frustrated the people had demoted her from a goddess of war and sex to a scavenger of battlefields, who only pointed to those who had earned an honored place in the halls. She appeared before Sileas in animal skins, her bow slung against her back, asking the teen to make a sacrifice.
Sileas did as the goddess bid.
She cut out her own eyes with a stolen dagger.
Frigg fashioned a necklace from the girl’s eyes, wearing them like pearls on a cord around her neck. In return, she healed the teen’s wounds, filling the holes with orbs of white. Then she handed Sileas a bow and led her to the beach, whispering where the girl should aim.
The raiders saw the bloody teen on the shore of hill, shooting arrows straight into the hearts of her enemies, a blue light glowing at her side. Sileas pulled her bow without rest, and none of the men could hit her. Their arrows fell at her feet as though they’d struck an invisible barrier.
Frigg had shot down their arrowheads before they reached their mark.
