Daughter of the Sword

8 || The Seer

THE CARRIAGE CRESTS THE hill and jostles to a stop outside the stone archway that has haunted my dreams for months. As I step through it, dressed in the same gown, the same heels sinking into the dirt, hugging my arms to my chest, I can't help the pang in my chest at how different my life would be if I had never come here in the first place. Would I have been exposed just the same?

This time, the escort of armed guards are not here to protect me, but to protect others from me.

I swallow my shame and follow Beckett down the corridors, towards the steps that feel all too familiar. I get the same feeling, like every twist around the spiral staircase winds me back through time, down and down into an abyss far older than Lyria, dating back to the original inhabitants. I reach out, trailing my fingertips on the rough hewn brick, unpolished but smoothed from centuries of hands doing the same exact thing, until the guard behind me shoves me forward and I stumble onto the next step, flinging out my arms to keep from falling.

"Faster," he grunts.

When I reach the bottom, my magic seems to purr. I feel the stones vibrate in response, and warmth spreads through my veins, a conversation cloaked in a thousand years' worth of legends and spells and secrets. A whisper pricks my ears, and I angle my head, trying to listen, to pick apart the words, but their language is old, guttural, crackling like fire. When I turn back, Beckett is watching me.

I have barely stepped foot into the room of the seer when she says, back turned, hunched over something I cannot see, "Leave us."

My eyes widen.

The guards balk. "We have explicit orders from General Calloway not to let her out of our sight."

"Leave us," she says again.

The guard who shoved me huffs. "How dare you command us, woman—"

Their torches flicker and gutter out, then light again. "I will not ask again."

Beckett puts a hand on the guard's arm. "General Alderon put me in charge of the girl's oversight. I order us out." He glances back at me, then sweeps the others from the room.

When I turn back to the seer, still facing away and draped in a long, billowing robe, my heart begins to pound. The room stretches wider, the emptiness yawning around me, and the shadows seem to pull at me, alive. I focus my eyes on the deep ruby of her gown. A woman, ordering not just any men, but an escort from the king—

"I am not a woman," the seer says. "Not in your sense of the word."

"Pardon?"

"I present like one, and am addressed like one. But I am much more than man or woman, closer to both, and neither. I am not limited to the labels of this empire, or of this realm."

I open my mouth, then close it. "B-because of your gifts?"

"Because I choose not to be."

I blink. Who can choose such things?

She turns around, and I step back, the click of my feet too harsh amidst her silent movements, her soft voice. Her face remains veiled in shadow.

"You do not need to fear me, Mera."

I swallow hard. "You did this to me." The accusation slices out of my mouth, a rudeness not to be bestowed upon anyone, lest of all a person of such stature.

"I did nothing but reveal what was already there. All truths emerge in the end."

"They have imprisoned me—"

"Such is their weakness; not yours."

I furrow my brow.

"You believe you have reason not to trust me, for having exposed you. But when your father came to me, I gave him the truth. With you before me now, I offer again nothing but the truth. Lies and deceit hold little interest to me; such short-lived things, they would do me little good here."