“And you had the power then?” Ryan asked.
“No. There were odd times that I had a sort of. a sort of ‘feeling’ about things. I could help finding a lost cow or a mislaid ring. Knowing when there might be a storm on the way. Most if it I kept to myself. There were a couple of times I saw that someone taken sick would die and not get well, I was rarely wrong. But nothing compared to now.”
“Don’t have to tell this if not want,” Jak muttered, looking ill at ease with the interrogation.
“No,” she replied, favoring the albino teenager with a brief wintry smile. “I don’t mind, Jak. In a way it’s a relief to be able to talk to someone about it. Someone you know you can trust.” The gold eyes looked around the room. “One of the few good things about my cursed gift is that I can tell when someone can be trusted. I paid a price for learning that.” She shook her head. “But I run before my horse to market.”
“Did any of your family have the gift?” Krysty asked. “Because ‘seeing’ ran in my family, at my mother’s generation. Always through the women.”
“No, Krysty. Your mother must’ve been a most remarkable woman.”
“She was. Gaia, but she was!”
Emma carried on with her story. “We often went fishing in a small boat, off the shore. Winters were cruel and iron-hard. The sea turned gray and froze, so thick you could drive a wag over it or roast an oxen on it. It was a winter past that it happened. A bitter day with a wind that would cut you to the bone. The white bears had been seen within a stone’s throw of the ville.”
“Polar bears?” Doc asked.
“Seen in old predark books that they called them that, Doc,” J.B. said.
“We had a number of fishing holes cut, and it was the job of the younger women to keep them open, day and night. I was out on the sea, a hundred yards from shore, when I saw a white bear approaching me from the north. It had already come close enough to cut me off from the ville, so there was nothing to do but stand and fight. I screamed. ‘Course I screamed. But I knew it wouldn’t chill me. Knew it inside. But I was still terrified. Had a spear with me. But I tried to dodge it, hopping around the fishing holes in the ice, with the leaden water surging and slurping beneath. You know it turns thick, like gruel, in bitter cold.”
She paused as they all heard booted feet walking slowly along the passage outside the room. The footsteps stopped for a moment and then carried on, the sound fading into stillness.
“Yeah?” Ryan prompted. “What happened? You fell in one of the holes?”
She nodded. “You certain sure you don’t have the gift, as well, Ryan?”
“Good guesser is all,” Krysty said.
“I slipped and my feet went from me. Next I knew I was deep under the ice.” Emma’s voice became dreamy as if she were reliving the experience. “I can see the light. Dappled like the sun through a forest. The cold took my breath. I swam toward the light, but the undertow had pulled me sideways and I had lost all sense of my bearings. When I came up toward the surface, I bumped my head on ice.”
“That’s triple scaring!” Dean exclaimed. “Reckon I’d have just shit myself.”
“Perhaps I did, Dean. I don’t remember that. I know I wasn’t frightened by then.”
“What about the bear?”
“I never knew, Dean. It must’ve been nearly as surprised as I was when its prey disappeared.”
“Don’t keep interrupting, son,” Ryan said.
Emma gestured to a water pitcher and glasses by the side of the bed, and Jak quickly poured some out for her, holding it as she sipped.
“Thanks. Not much more to tell. I tried to breathe in the narrow gap of air between the sea and the bottom of the thick ice. But the movement of the water made it impossible.”
Doc cleared his throat. “It was said that Harry Houdini, the famous escapologist, did that once when a trick went wrong. But my belief is that it was simply a clever piece of self-publicity on his part.”