“What is it?” I cried. “What is going on?” But a familiar fear had begun to uncoil in my belly. I tried to get out of bed, but the pain in my head struck me back down, moaning.
I was still sitting there, trying to control the agony by careful breathing, when the door flew open and Heron darted in.
“Eilan—we cannot find Dierna or Becca!” she whispered, looking over her shoulder to make sure she had not been seen, and from that I knew that no one had come to see me because Ganeda had forbidden them to come. “In your vision, where did you see her? Tell me quickly!”
I clutched at her arm, describing as well as I could where the willow pool that I had seen lay in relation to the path. Then she was gone and I lay back, tears leaking from my closed eyes.
An eternity of misery later I heard the searchers returning, voices deadened by sorrow or hoarse with weeping. I turned my face to the wall. It did not help that without my vision Dierna might have died with her sister. I had wanted so desperately to prove to Ganeda that my Seeing was true, but now I would have given anything to have her accusations proven right, and little Becca safely home again.
Gradually my own health improved and I was allowed to return to the House of Maidens. Heron told me that Dierna had gone hunting herbs in the marshes, leaving her sister behind. But Becca, who since their mother’s death had been her sister’s shadow, had followed, and fallen in, and by the time Dierna reached her, had already been sucked under by the bog. Even if no one else blamed her, Dierna must be tormenting herself with guilt by now.
I was not surprised to hear that the chill she had taken from the water had turned to lung fever. Now it was her turn to be nursed in the House of Healing. I asked to visit her, but Ganeda forbade it. I remembered a story that my tutor Corinthius had once told me about an oriental king who responded to bad news by executing the messenger. It made no sense for her to blame me for what had happened, particularly since she had not believed me, but I had learned long since that where I was concerned the actions of the High Priestess rarely made sense at all.
Our training went on, but we were given no more lessons in scrying, and I for one was content to have it so. I had learned the first paradox of prophecy, which is that glimpsing the future does not necessarily mean one can understand it, much less alter what one sees.
In time, Dierna also recovered, to creep about with eyes like holes in a blanket and a face pale as whey against the fire of her hair, as if she had died with Becca, and it was only her ghost who remained with us on Avalon.
And so that dreadful summer drew to a close at last. The cat-tails in the marshes grew full and brown, nodding in the wind that fluttered the turning willow leaves, and the mists that surrounded Avalon seemed suffused with gold. One evening as the new moon was rising I was returning from the privies when I glimpsed a pale shape moving down the path towards the Lake and recognized Dierna. My pulse leaped in instant alarm, but I stifled the cry that rose in my throat and whistled instead to Eldri to go after her.
When I caught up with them, Dierna was sitting beneath an elder bush with her arms around Eldri, weeping into the little dog’s silky fur. At the sound of my footstep she looked up, frowning.
“I was all right. You didn’t need to send Eldri after me!” she said sullenly, but I noticed that she did not let the dog go. “But maybe you think I ought to walk into the Lake and just keep going, in punishment for letting my sister drown!”
I swallowed. This was worse than I had thought. I sat down, knowing better than to try to touch the girl now.