“Why did you say you’d been waiting for me?” They were in the front room of Ysanne’s cottage, in chairs beside the fireplace. Late afternoon. Through the window Kim could see the figure of the servant, Tyrth, mending the fence in back of the cottage. A few chickens scrabbled and pecked in the yard, and there was a goat tied to a post in a corner. Around the walls of the room were shelves upon which, in labelled jars, stood plants and herbs of astonishing variety, many with names Kim could not recognize. There was little furniture: the two chairs, a large table, a small, neat bed in an alcove off the back of the room.
Ysanne sipped at her drink before replying. They were drinking something that tasted like camomile.
“I dreamt you,” the Seer said. “Many times. That is how I see such.things as I do see. Which have grown fewer and more clouded of late. You were clear, though, hair and eyes. I saw your face.”
“Why, though? What am I, that you should dream of me?”
“You already know the answer to that. From the crossing. From the land’s pain, which is yours, child. You are a Seer as I am, and more, I think, than I have ever been.” Cold suddenly in the hot, dry summer, Kim turned her head away.
“But,” she said in a small voice, “I don’t know anything.”
“Which is why I am to teach you what I know. That is why you are here.”
There was a complex silence in the room. The two women, one old, the other younger than her years, looked at each other through identical grey eyes under white hair and brown, and a breeze like a finger blew in upon them from the lake.
“My lady.”
The voice abraded the stillness. Kim turned to see Tyrth in the window. Thick black hair and a full beard framed eyes so dark they were almost black. He was not a big man, but his arms on the window sill were corded with muscle and tanned a deep brown by labor in the sun.
Ysanne, unstartled, turned to him. “Tyrth, yes, I meant to call you. Can you make up another bed for me? We have a guest tonight. This is Kimberly, who crossed with Loren two nights past.”
Tyrth met her eyes for an instant only, then an awkward hand brushed at the thick hair tumbling over his forehead. “I’ll do a proper bed then. But in the meanwhile, I’ve seen something you should know of. . . .”
“The wolves?” Ysanne asked tranquilly. Tyrth, after a bemused moment, nodded. “I saw them the other night,” the Seer went on. “While I slept. There isn’t much we can do. I left word in the palace with Loren yesterday.”
“I don’t like it,” Tyrth muttered. “There haven’t been wolves this far south in my lifetime. Big ones, too. They shouldn’t be so big.” And turning his head, he spat in the dust of the yard before touching his forehead again and walking from the window. As he moved away Kim saw that he limped, favoring his left foot.
Ysanne followed her glance. “A broken bone,” she said, “badly set years ago. He’ll walk like that all his life. I’m lucky to have him, though—no one else would serve a witch.” She smiled. “Your lessons begin tonight, I think.”
“How?”
Ysanne nodded towards the bannion resting on the table top. “It begins with the flower,” she said. “It did for me, a long time ago.”
The waning moon rose late, and it was full dark when the two women made their way beneath it to stand by the edge of the lake. The breeze was delicate and cool, and the water lapped the shore gently, like a lover. Over their heads the summer stars were strung like filigree.
Ysanne’s face had gone austere and remote. Looking at her, Kim felt a premonitory tension. The axis of her life was swinging and she knew not how or where, only that somehow, she had lived in order to come to this shore.
Ysanne drew her small figure erect and stepped onto a flat surface of rock jutting out over the lake. With a motion almost abrupt, she gestured for Kim to sit beside her on the stone. The only sounds were the stir of the wind in the trees behind them, and the quiet slap of water against the rocks. Then Ysanne raised both arms in a gesture of power and invocation and spoke in a voice that rang over the night lake like a bell.