The Haven

Chapter 15

The ceramic bowl laughed at her.

Elsa could almost hear it.

The sun glittered on the bowl's surface like teeth, and the breeze made the water inside shiver like quivering lips. It was amused, laughing and laughing and laughing at her stupid attempts to read it. She tried to see past the mocking surface into the black depths where the secrets lay – or so her shiny new divination book promised. Scrying, the book said, is a fickle sport. Hiding, coy and unwilling, the secrets in the water are a hard thing to find, often simply invisible to the eye.Fire, apparently, was better. So were tea leaves and wax drippings and divining sticks and anything else with shapes in it. Fire was the best, though, because it's shapes were constantly morphing and adapting – just like the future. But Elsa was sitting on the lawn outside Nikolai's house and it was a dry spring so far.She didn't think the parched twigs and delicate greenery would thank her for lighting a fire under them.

So she stared into the water.

What...

Elsa sat up. Something moved in the midnight base of the over-large teacup, a shadow, a ripple of someth–

Oh.

Branches and leaves waved overhead in the tall sycamore under which she was sitting. Its shady reflections danced in the water of the cup. But beneath the reflections, there was nothing. For another frustrating moment she stared into the cup, then she shook her head and looked around.

So that's the future, then. Nothing.

She took a breath and smiled up into the sunny sky between sycamore leaves. It was another day with that too-bright-to-be-angry weather, and the back lawn of Nikolai's house was brimming with fresh greenery, and the wild treeline of Nathaniel Park was just behind the yard, throwing half of it into deep shade while the happy sun shined overhead, andnear the front of the yard, beside the house a brightly-painted hippy van sat in the driveway...

It was another day where frustration didn't stand a chance of taking hold.

Oh well. Elsa put the cup down into a crook of the sycamore's roots. She streatched her arms up high and yawned.Staring at water feels stupid anyway.

"Magnification or light-gathering capacity – which is more important in a telescope?"

Erasmus's voice, no longer dripping with sarcasm, came from a few feet away where he sat against another sycamore. A notebook lay open in his lap.

"Hmmf?" Nikolai mumbled back.

Nikolai stood close by in the middle of a patch of raspberry bushes. He was alternately picking out the ripe berries by the handful, stuffing them in his mouth, and untangling the thorny bushes from his sleeves. On the fingers of one hand, the red-purple berry stains reached to his star-ring. The ring rattled when he shook his arm free of the thorny stalks. Elsa wondered whether it still held the bead of hematite she'd identified for him in the library.