He looked at me, a watery smile stretching over his face. “He’s beautiful.”
Tears of joy streamed down my cheeks.
Tauren smiled proudly and held the babe so I could see our son. When I reached out to hold him, he placed the infant in my arms. He was so light, fitting perfectly within the crook of my arm. I cooed at him, smiling and crying all at once.
My heart nearly burst.
Our son was flawless. He had his father’s golden eyes, while the fuzz of hair on his head was the same dark shade as mine. The baby’s hands balled into tiny fists as he began to cry. I cried with him, holding him close to my chest and stroking his velvety cheeks. “He is as handsome as his father,” I told Tauren.
The lights flickered then went out, and the temperature in the room dropped suddenly. I shivered, holding our son tight so he didn’t get too cold. A shadow slid over the far wall. “Tauren,” I said, sitting up straighter.
“The storm knocked the power out,” my hand-fasted explained.
I wasn’t sure it had. Something felt strange, like the dead had drawn near. I held my son tight to my chest. Fate, do not let them take my son. Do not take me from him, either.
Though it was dark, I watched his tiny chest rise and fall. His eyes blinked open and closed again, as if he wasn’t sure he could lift the lids. As if they were too heavy to keep open for long. He wasn’t having difficulty breathing. He seemed perfect, yet still. His tiny finger gripped mine tightly. Whether it was a reflex or he sensed my distress, I wasn’t sure, but the babe chose that moment to let out a single cry.
In a blink, the lights flickered back on and warmth slowly seeped back into the room.
Tauren did not know what had happened. He didn’t see the shadow or feel the spirits of the dead. He hadn’t seen his son make it all right with the sound of his small voice.
But I did.
The physician gave us a moment to take in our son and then asked Tauren to clip the umbilical cord tethering him to me. With a quick snip, a nurse took the infant to further clean him so the physician could look him over once he finished attending me.
Tauren held my hand as the physician monitored me, making sure I suffered no complications.
It took no time for me to heal because of the magic shared by those waiting outside my door. My friends were in the hallway. My best friends. Their restorative magic slithered into the room and wrapped around me. Per their whispered instructions, my body slowly became whole again.
Bones eased back into place. The bleeding slowed and then stopped, and every ligament and inch of stretched skin tightened. Within minutes, I looked exactly as I had before learning the boy child lay inside my womb.
The physician was speechless, not that he should have been. He’d witnessed magic and knew what it was capable of.
Fate had blessed his daughter once again – this time with a son. I silently thanked him, knowing deep down that he could hear me; that though he no longer dwelt within me, he was listening.
“What will you name the Prince, Queen Sable?” the nurse asked as I stood from the bed and slipped behind a changing curtain. I would bathe, but first wanted to change and hold my son.
When I emerged wearing a simple dark robe and gown, she gently brushed a wet cloth over the baby’s silky hair. When he was clean, she handed him to his father.
Tauren walked to me, an overwhelmed, awestruck look on his face. “I want you to introduce him,” he said.
The infant blinked tiredly as I gently brushed my fingers over his downy hair. He pursed his tiny lips and gripped the finger I offered him again. I smiled at my husband and proudly announced the name we had chosen for him.
“His name is River. River Lucius Nautilus.”
2
Lindey
I eased onto a nearby boulder and watched over Omen as she played at the river’s edge. Today was her fifth birthday. She’d refused a nap and had sobbed the word ‘river’ for hours as I did my chores. I finally gave in and led her out of the garden, down the paths, and to the river. The water soothed her instantly. Though, soothe might have been too weak a word. The flow entranced the girl.
She crouched down, holding the same position for nearly an hour, studying the way the water trickled over the rocky bed beneath its surface. At home, she’d been in a terrible mood. But here, she was perfectly quiet. Perfectly still. I was about to speak when finally, Omen moved. She reached into the water and pulled out a stone.
“What do you have there, dear?” I asked. Omen turned to me, proudly holding the rock up so I could see. The rock was the color of pale sand, with hints of blue-gray in its nooks and crannies. Omen brought it closer and put the stone in my outstretched hand. “It’s lovely, Omen.”
Omen’s brows were furrowed. She looked up, her gray eyes blinking innocently. “It has missing pieces. Like me.”
I looked more closely at the stone. It wasn’t chipped but worn smooth by the water over time, except for three small holes that had formed in the rock. The holes must have confused Omen.
“These are just hag stones, dear. The water makes the holes. They’re nothing special,” I told Omen, and went to throw the rock away.
“No!” Omen shrieked. She held her hands up to block me from throwing it, and after I stopped and handed it back to her, she began to cry. She sniffled and hiccupped, and then made me promise never to throw away any of her precious rocks again.
Still upset, Omen stuffed the hag stone into the pocket of her dress and went back to the water. She quietly watched it flow for hours until I told her it was time to go home. Of course, I had to wait as Omen gathered a few more rocks before leaving. They were the only things Omen would play with, after all.
Nothing entertained her as they did. She made shapes out of them. Triangles, circles, squares, rectangles, lines…but Omen’s favorite design to fashion was a spiral.
The home of the Fate-Kissed girl was littered with them. The Founder had the small home built for Omen, but it was my home now, too. The Founder had asked me to watch over Omen, but it didn’t take long for me to love the girl. And now, Omen was mine. Not by blood, but by choice. I loved her with all my heart, and it was my privilege to raise her. It was also my responsibility to ensure she didn’t misuse magic the way the Founder feared she one day might.
We walked home with her new bounty, and as soon as we arrived, she set to work, adding her new additions to the rest of her rocky treasures.
A myriad of stones hung from cords and twine from the ceiling. On our windowsills, what wasn’t piled was stacked intricately, each stone perfectly balanced on the one beneath it. If Omen built them, they never fell.
Omen had paved a wide path to the front porch with river rock, and walkways meandered throughout the garden they tended in the back yard. The paths flowed like streams through the lush grass and somehow no weeds or tufts ever grew in the spaces between where her stones lay, swirling patterns whooshing over the earth like a river of stone. The colors and shapes were whimsical and beautiful, and Omen never tired of making more of them.
Nautilus’s Twelfth Sector had once been my home. Before he chose me to watch over her, the Founder asked if I knew anything about the creatures in Thirteen. Of course, I lied and said I didn’t know much and let him explain things I should watch for, warning signs that pointed to dark magic and a dangerous witch.
The way he referred to them as creatures made my hair stand on end.
Omen wasn’t a creature.
She wasn’t dangerous or malevolent.
She was a witchling, but more than that, she was an innocent child.
In truth, I knew a lot about witches. More than most, I’d wager. And far more than Founder Smith.
Most grew into their magic. Most could control earth, air, fire, or water.
Omen was a type of earth witch, I supposed, but there was much more
to her than that. She couldn’t do anything with soil itself, like a typical Earth witch could. Her power came from stone. And at the age of five, she was already more powerful than any other witch I’d known.
With the stones, Omen told futures. Stones, especially those in the river, spoke to her. I wasn’t sure how her magic worked, but it wasn’t altogether frightening.
Omen was a sweet girl. A sweet, sometimes sad girl.
I took her to town to see other children, but she would gravitate back to me, or to any stone she could lay her tiny fingers on. I taught her from slate boards and memory, and she took to every lesson. She excelled in arithmetic, spelling, and vocabulary, but inevitably her attention slipped back to the stones that hung or were piled around the room.
The only place she was calm was when she sat at the river’s edge, or when she gathered wildflowers on the way to or from it. Ever since she could form words and sentences, she’d always said something was missing, just as she’d inferred today with the holey hag stone. She just couldn’t tell me what.
The feeling that Omen was right nagged at me, but there was nothing I could do about it.
Omen’s witch mother abandoned her along the riverbank. The Founder’s wife, while out for an evening walk, heard her cries and brought her back to the village. She’d kept Omen and raised her with her son. They were close in age, and she could nurse both children. But when Omen weaned herself, the strain of having two children the same age began to wear on Mrs. Smith and the Founder asked me to take over and become Omen’s guardian.
I had no children of my own and had always wanted a child. My late husband had wanted them too, but it was not to be.
I pushed the painful ache of his death from my mind and tucked it someplace safe, returning my thoughts to Omen.
Omen, who was alive and depended on me. Not for the first time, I wondered Who could be so heartless as to abandon their child in the middle of nowhere?
Omen quietly concentrated as she tried to jab a thin leather strand through the largest of the three holes in the stone she’d collected today. She wanted to make a necklace.
I walked across the room and gently offered to help Omen thread the stone. She waited patiently until I was finished, and then asked me to tie it around her neck.
I left Omen to arrange her rocks and went out back to feed the hens in the yard, scattering corn kernels over the ground for them. They came for the feed, clucking happily and pecking at the ground. From inside, Omen called out, “A storm is coming. I can hear them.”
Hear them? What does she mean? Raindrops? “You can hear the storm?” I guessed.
“Not the storm. I hear the river stones.”
Queen Sable
I sat in a sumptuous chair in the corner of River’s room, watching him closely. I knew what it felt like for Fate to whisper in your mind, and I was almost certain he had already begun whispering to our son. Sometimes, River would go still and look like he was someplace far away. It was those times that a ball of nervousness built and tumbled in my stomach.
River sat still, looking up from where he sat cross-legged on the plush rug beside his bed. He had been playing with a wooden horse Tauren carved for him, working the wood until it was smooth and soft. River had since played with it so much that it was stained with dark mud and nicked in places, almost as if the horse bore scars.
Right now, the horse hung limply in his hand while River sat perfectly still, staring into the air as if someone stood in front of him. Then he began to speak, quietly at first.
I leaned forward to hear him.
His back was to me, but the daylight illuminated his soft features. Hair as dark as the water when fall leaves fell in, staining it a brackish hue, softly curled at his neck and around his ears.
He turned to me with a smile that nearly melted my heart. “I want to see Grandfather’s grave.”
I hadn’t expected him to ask for that…“What?”
“Grandfather Lucius,” he said innocently. Even though River had just turned five, he spoke as plainly as any adult. “I want to visit his grave. He has a gift for me.”
King Lucius, Tauren’s father, was buried in the royal cemetery on the northern slope of the palace grounds.
“Can we go now?” River asked, standing up and walking to me, his golden eyes shining in the sunlight that spilled into the room from the windows on either side of him.
“Why the rush?” I asked. My abdomen clenched as I vainly hoped it wasn’t Fate who prodded River toward such a goal. I had no trouble taking the boy to his grandfather’s grave. I’d taken him there before. But I rued the day Fate began giving him small tasks and rewarding him for his obedience, because it meant that more difficult tasks lay ahead, and he was grooming River to shoulder the responsibilities that came with harboring Fate within.
“He says there is a golden flower growing on it. He wants me to have it,” River replied with a dismissive shrug.
“Who said this, River?” I asked, expecting him to answer that the voice in his head told him so. Expecting Fate to have offered the gift to my son.
“Grandfather Lucius,” he answered guilelessly.
My heart skipped a beat, followed by the drop of my stomach. Lucius died before Tauren and I were hand-fasted the first time. “Are you sure it’s not Fate’s voice you’re hearing?”
“I’m sure. I know what Grandfather looks like from the pictures in the hall.”
My heart thundered. Could River see spirits? “You see and speak to him, River?”
River smiled sweetly and grabbed hold of my hand, his wooden horse gripped firmly in the other. “M-hmm. Can we go now?”
I took River to his grandfather’s grave, where he found a small, golden-petalled flower growing out of the soil directly over Lucius’s heart. I had watched them lower the King’s casket into the ground and remembered the heartbreaking occasion in great detail.
River flopped onto the grass, looking over his left shoulder and giggling. “Thank you, Grandfather,” he said gleefully, twirling the tiny flower in his hand.
As I watched River, a bone-chilling feeling slithered over me.
Could he be a spirit tongue?
Plenty of witches could summon the dead for a quick question, but I’d never seen anyone who could converse with them for so long. It was as if Lucius was lying right beside my boy. I could almost see him lying on his back with his legs crossed, his hands folded behind his head for a pillow. River mimicked the pose.
River let out a sigh. “I know. You have to go,” he said disappointedly to what I assumed was Lucius’s spirit. “He’s gone.” River sat up and frowned. “We can go back now if you want.”
I did want that, then I wanted to talk to Mira and Brecan to see if they knew something I didn’t. Mira was Priestess of the House of Water, and Brecan was Priest of the House of Air. Someone in the kingdom’s Thirteenth sector – where the bulk of the kingdom’s witches resided and where I grew up – would know more about this.
They had to.
River held my hand as we walked back home toward the palace. We took the path that led toward the lake to extend our time outside, at the boy’s request. He skipped small rocks across the lake’s surface – or tried to. Tauren had been teaching him how. River plucked what, at first, I assumed was another rock from the ground, but when I approached, he stood frozen and stared vacantly into his hand.
“What do you have there?” I asked, smiling and crouching down to look.
His fist closed around a small bone most likely from a rabbit or some other small game. River’s chest began to heave. His breathing became frantic and he gasped for breath. Fat tears sprang into his eyes and slid down his cheeks.
“River?” I said loudly, holding him. “What’s the matter? Talk to me.”
For long moments he did not talk, then he began to hyperventilate until the fit releas
ed him and he collapsed into my arms, sobbing and desperately sucking in air. Speechless, I held him tight, stroking his hair and telling him it would all be okay. I pried the bone from his fist, reading his residue. He was frightened, not of the bone, but of the death of the animal to which it had once belonged.
I held him tight until he calmed down.
“River…Did you see the bunny’s death?”
He nodded against me. “I felt it, too. It was so scary. A fox killed it. Here.” He pointed to his neck.
There were no marks on his neck. No blood or wound was visible, but that didn’t mean the vision hadn’t hurt my son.
I knew what it meant to read bones. That was my affinity, to divine fates and fortunes through the reading of wishbones once broken. I could divine through a few lesser means, but bones were the most potent and accurate.
That meant River had absorbed at least some of my magic into him, but the way it manifested itself terrified me. I needed to speak to my friends in Thirteen right away. And until we learned more about River’s power, I would do everything in my control to keep any and all bones away from him.
3
River
Preparations were underway for my birthday. Tomorrow, I would turn seventeen and come fully into my power. My mother said she didn’t feel a huge shift when she turned seventeen, but admitted her grandmother had feared her coming of age. I was afraid to celebrate, because I wasn’t like Mom and wasn’t sure what the day would bring.
Like my mother before me, I was a unique Fate witch. And as prince, I would one day rule the Kingdom, as my father does today. I’d be lying if I said the burdens of both expectations didn’t weigh heavily on me.
Leaving my room, I crept through the palace avoiding Mom, because she felt the need to constantly reassure me that all was well. Sometimes I hated that she could read me so well. Not that she couldn’t read anyone she wanted. Fate may have left her body, but he had blessed her with a gift and didn’t take it away in penance for choosing a different life than he had offered.
The Omen of Stones Page 2
