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I held no animosity towards the older woman, but I was wary of her. I didn’t particularly like the rite she had invited me to take, and I still had no idea what it was supposed to have accomplished, if anything. And what with Lucius, the wedding, and the Longest Night taking all my focus, I hadn’t a chance to ask.
“What can I do for you, grandmother?” I squeezed her hand before relinquishing it.
“I want you to change your mind about going to Odessia.”
Startled at the unexpected question, I shook my head and frowned. “What? Why would I?”
Her bright blue eyes bored into mine. “Because I’ve come to warn you.”
Chapter Seven
Sierra
“Warn me?” I asked. “About what?” Surely the old woman was a little “touched by the Mother,” as they said in Providence. I didn’t know for sure if she identified as a seer or was just a spiritual leader for the Ongahri here, but whatever she was, she took it too seriously.
“How much do you remember about what you saw in the In-Between?” she asked, ignoring my question.
All I wanted was to sip my tea and go back upstairs to sleep next to Lucius. The nightmare had unsettled me, and now her strange, cryptic antics were ending the job.
“The In-Between?”
“During your rite. It’s where you went. In between your physical form and your soul one. What did you see?”
Shaking my head, I answered truthfully. “Hardly anything. Images. My mother, my watcher.” The words had me missing both with a vengeance. It was the night for it, after all.
One good thing about traveling to Ghypsom City was that I could finally get a letter to my parents. Surely the post was functioning in the mid-land. I could now, in good conscience, tell my parents I was a married woman. Just married to someone else.
Lost in my jumbled thoughts, I’d missed what the Sapera had just said and asked her to repeat it.
“I asked if you remember a snowy forest, a woman crying.” Her intense look had me staring right back at her.
I was about to shake my head, but then I remembered the song sung around the cerei on the Longest Night, the image of a woman crying, her tears freezing mid-drop.
“Yes,” I breathed.
“Thank the Mother,” the Ongahri elder said under her breath, her thin lips barely parting.
“What does it mean? Who is this woman?”
She tsked and waved a hand. “When you get to Ghypsom City, a woman will approach you. You’ll know her by her headdress. Give her this.” She pulled out a tiny sachet of purple satin tied with a red ribbon.
“The woman I saw?”
“Of course not, child. We should be so lucky.” She laughed but it was rueful. “Here, take it.”
“What is it?” I took it from her aged hand and felt its weight.
“Never you mind what it is, just make sure she gets it. She will have something for you. You must see that she gets that. There’s not a lot of time. If you were to stay with us, we’d be able to keep you safe, and what you’ll be required to do you can do here. With us. Your Sisters.”
I looked around for Farah, thinking maybe she could mediate between this strange woman and myself, but I realized she had disappeared. We were alone.
Setting down the sachet, I met the woman’s eyes. “Look, I don’t know what that rite meant, nor what it is you want from me, if anything,” I said with as much politeness as I could. “But you’re going to have to be more upfront with me. I may look young, but that doesn’t mean my head is in the clouds. So please, give me the respect I’m giving you and tell me what all this is about.”
She seemed to contemplate this.
With a nod, she folded her hands on the table. “Many centuries ago, a Sapera of the Trajan tribe had a series of visions. These visions haunted the woman day and night for years, until finally, she succumbed to them, dying at the age of sixty years. This was the time way before Houses and courts, our kings and queens. Back when the Old Ways was the only way. At first, she kept the visions to herself, then eventually shared them with her sisters in the delphia, the sacred keepers of the Ongahri’s Word. The women you met before your rite began are the Sisters of Delphi.”
She was throwing too much information at me, so I just nodded. I could process it later. “Go on.”
