But now I could feel the High Priestess standing like a flame before me. “Eilan daughter of Rian, are you willing to seek visions?” the voice came out of the darkness.
I murmured agreement, and was assisted to the chair. Awareness shifted once more and I opened my eyes. Suona poured more water into the bowl and set it before me.
“Lean forwards and look within,” said the quiet voice beside me. “Breathe in… and out… wait for the waters to still. Let your vision sink beneath the surface, and say what you see.”
Suona had put more herbs on the coals. As I breathed in the heavy sweet smoke my head swam and I blinked, trying to focus on the bowl. Now I could see it—a silver rim surrounding a shifting darkness shot with gleaming flickers of torchlight.
“If you see nothing it is no matter,” the priestess continued. “Be at ease—”
It does matter, I thought with a twitch of annoyance. Does she want me to fail?
Perhaps it would be easier without the distraction of external vision. I did not quite dare to close my eyes again, but I let them unfocus, so that I saw only a dim blur surrounded by a circle of light. Look for the marshes, I told myself; what had Aelia been trying to see?
And at the thought, the vision began to emerge before me, first in scattered flickers, and then complete and whole. Dusk was fading into evening. The Lake gleamed faintly in the last of the light. But the mixture of marsh and islet that stretched around to the south and east were all in shadow. Torches moved along the higher ground, but my vision was drawn to a dark pool in the shadow of a twisted willow tree.
Something moved there. With a gasp, I recognized Dierna’s bright head. With one arm she clutched a fallen log. The other reached down as if she were holding onto something beneath the surface. I strove to see more clearly, and the scene shifted.
The searchers had found her. In the torchlight I could see Dierna sobbing, though I heard no sound. Two of the Druids were in the water beside her. One lifted her into Cigfolla’s waiting arms. The other was fixing a rope around something beneath the water. The men pulled, a pale shape surged upwards—
“Becca! Drowned!” The words tore from my throat. “Please, don’t let me see it—don’t let it be true!” I convulsed away from the table, and bowl and pitcher went flying. I fell to the ground, curled in anguish, grinding my palms against my eyes as if to erase what I had seen.
In another moment Suona had my wrists and was holding me close, her voice a soothing murmur beneath my sobs.
“Of course she will be all right,” Ganeda’s voice came from behind me. “These hysterics are only to gain attention.”
I jerked upright, though the movement made my head spin. “But I saw it! I saw it! You must guard Becca or she will drown!”
“You would like that, wouldn’t you?” snarled Ganeda. “One less of my blood to compete with for my place when I am gone!”
The manifest unfairness of this deprived me of speech, but I could feel Suona stiffen with shock at her words.
To move into the trance state had been easy. Recovering, especially when I had been so suddenly recalled from it, was harder. For several weeks thereafter I was disoriented and subject to fits of weeping. In the days immediately after the scrying session even my sense of balance was upset so that I could hardly walk, and at every step a headache stabbed my skull. When it became clear that a single night’s sleep would not restore me I was sent to the House of Healing. The reason given was that the other maidens would tire me, but I think now that it was really because Ganeda did not wish me to speak to the others, and especially to Dierna, about what I had seen.
And so it was that I was still there, being cosseted by Cigfolla whenever I emerged from my uneasy dreams, when I heard shouting from outside the house, and sitting up, saw the flicker of torches in the darkness through the open door.