by May Peterson
This vibration was the first form prescience took in me, in my infant self, and it still sits at the core, sounding out the beats of everything to come. The story is that I was aglow with the holy crown even on the day of my birth. Mother lifted me into her arms, and already my fuzzy curls were bright with prophetic power. She and I curled together like omens brought to life, a rogue queen and her witch spawn, wreathed in the light of the fates.
I remember some of this. As young as two, I would cry as if frightened or hurt, with no apparent sign as to why, only for a loud noise or a sting from a bee to befall me hours later. The future was felt to me—like a wind, like a throb of blood, like a tone through glass—long before I could ever picture it, name it, condense it into neat prophecies for others to learn from. It was simply another sense, making up the experience of my body.
I must have learned to speak rather slowly, perhaps because other peoples’ words were not the only language I was listening to. This part I don’t remember clearly, but the story has been told to me many times—after I learned to walk, Father took me with him to council sessions, to meetings, to outings. He would hold me on his lap, me cooing senselessly and chewing on my hair. If I cried or started to become afraid, he knew something was wrong. If I remained calm or slept throughout the meeting, this was a sign that fate had not spat on his fortunes.
I was a tiny wiggling ball of portends, infant cries and fits and pleasures, all signs to be read like leaves in a cup. Vague sensations run through me of Father’s arms around me, tight, clenched. Like someone guarding a fragile object he had fought long to obtain.
Was that how other children were held by their fathers, if they had them?
Mother was so different. With her, the future was a game. Mother made everything a game, because she was good at them. We played in the garden, or in the trees behind the house, and she never scolded me for getting wet or for coming back inside with dirt on my trousers. Indeed, it would have been rather hypocritical—she often looked herself like a gardener who’d taken to wrestling with the plants instead of watering them.
In the sun-dappled garden, we’d compare the stones or flowers we found, and make guesses about what caterpillars would turn into. It was perhaps the game I remembered the most clearly with her. When one of us happened upon a caterpillar, Mother would take it upon her finger and bring it to eye level so we could examine it. I felt like a tiny scientist, wholly invested in the wonder of our discoveries.
“Hm. Now that is a find.” Mother poked this caterpillar, let it wiggle amusingly on her finger. She looked younger, strong and spry, in her worn working clothes and with her hair up. Dirt smudged her cheeks; we matched faintly, like older and younger reflections of each other, with our freckles and curly hair. “The one the other day was fluffy like a lamb. This one is bright green. Emerald green, maybe.”
I clapped my hands. “It looks like a flower stem!”
Mother’s smile was wry. “And its wings will be like its petals. Right. What color do you say for this one? I think bright blue. Sky blue. With yellow flecks. It will look like sunlight reflecting off water.”
She always closed her eyes briefly when making her prediction. It didn’t seem to have any purpose, but an inkling told me she’d seen me close my eyes when I concentrated on the future, and was only doing the same. It made me feel all right.
My stomach twitched. It wasn’t quite nausea, not as unpleasant, but had the same force and wordless urgency. As if the future was sitting in my guts, adjusting position to get comfortable. I hummed to myself when Mother opened her eyes. “I say the correct guess gets the other’s dessert for a week.”
My eyes widened. “I don’t want to lose dessert for a week!”
She bopped my nose with a fingertip. “A night, then.”
All right. I could take that bet. I let the rumble inside me bubble up into a thought, the first idea that entered my mouth. “Dark red, like velvet, but purple streaks around the edge.”
“It’s a wager.” She set the caterpillar down on a blade of grass. “I’ll get a box to keep it in so we can have a watch.”
Countless things could kill a caterpillar. Even at that age, I could understand this. I didn’t yet understand why, when a stick fell across our box or the clatter of a bird rose from the garden where we kept the box, I’d check on the caterpillar to find a sheen of violet light licking its tiny form like a harmless flame. When the glow passed, the creature was fine. But that churning in my gut became stronger, a pounding in my chest, as if the caterpillar and I were sharing a body. A link between its feelings and mine, so that danger sounded an alarm inside me. The flicker of pink light soothed me, somehow assured me the caterpillar would survive to become a butterfly.
It felt suddenly, consumingly important that this little creature have the chance to be a butterfly.
The next cluster of days crawled by. But eventually, I went to our little box and found that the chrysalis the caterpillar had turned into was torn open. Nothing was inside it. My squishy, nauseous sense of danger was not hitting me. When Mother came with me to investigate, we found it in the garden: a vibrant, garnet-red butterfly with bright purple swirls around the edges of its wings.
Mother’s grin was like the moon. “Sure you don’t want to make it a week, my dear?”
It was with Mother that I truly learned to feel what the current of the future meant. Where inside me it felt like red wings rather than blue, and how to see it in my mind, hear in my thoughts. She showed me the path into the lucid dream of prophecy more than Father ever had. I felt Mother coming, like the breath of a night breeze promising gentle rain. She carried with her companionship, fun, relief. The sensation of her kindness flowed and bubbled inside me, inchoate and shapeless, until I became able to time exactly what each pulse of meaning told me. And if I let the current touch my head, it would turn into a vision. A sound, a face. Mother was returning home at exactly one hour before the sun went down, or in ten minutes, or not until tomorrow because she and Father had had another fight. Those nights were the worst. She had often brought me with her when visiting her friend, but Father didn’t always allow it. So I would lie awake and feel where she was, where she would be, and let the ripening weight of the future unfold into color and warmth and dream within me.
Mother also had a little secret—a friend who gave her magical advice. It was to this friend she escaped when she couldn’t be around Father anymore. The friend was the first witch I had ever known. Serafina. Tibario’s mother.
She and my mother were curiously different. Mother was athletic, unruly, fun loving. She stood tall and willowy and had long, muscular limbs; she wore trousers and a sword at her waist at formal events. She put red and gold flowers in her bodice, and told jokes with the staff that went over my head. She could have been a big teenager, full of wry humor.
Serafina looked more like a sprite, dainty and elegant. She had hair like wheat, pulled straight as a curtain and ornamented not with flowers but with jewels. She was a petite woman with delicate features. But no garden sprite had her audacity and edge. It could have been the most natural thing in the world for Serafina to breathe fire, her words leaving a tang of woodsmoke and gunpowder on the air. Her smile dazzled sharply, like it could cut. Her eyes didn’t match, the one on the left red as a ruby, and it radiated a quiet light when she thought or got excited as if her mind exuded magical phosphor.
At times I’d be playing on the floor, or reading a book, and would overhear Mother and Serafina talking in the other room. They probably expected I couldn’t hear them.
“What is the true chance that he could become a dragon? Does anyone actually know?”
I paused, listened in stillness. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard talk of a dragon. I didn’t quite understand it, but a combination of vague memory and intuition said that they weren’t talking about mythical serpents that lived in oceans or breathed fire. They w
ere talking about something magical.
Serafina didn’t hesitate. “No. There haven’t been enough dragons to calculate, unless you count folklore, and I don’t. Claiming the once high queen of Portia was a dragon for years before finally burning up is one thing. It’s bizarre enough to entertain actually happening. But stories that dragons once filled witch countries like flowers blooming on hillsides? I can’t imagine how we’d have so much as a planet left to live on, let alone why it doesn’t happen anymore. You’ll get a different answer from anyone but me, though. Some lands have public life entirely built around keeping mages from becoming dragons. Greater chance of being struck by lightning twice, if you ask me.”
Mother’s voice was tense, almost anxious. “Casilio doesn’t think so. He wants every measure in place. I’ve told him most of these techniques are inhumane, torture. I’m not keeping my child sedated so he doesn’t have too many visions. I’m not covering him up with some heavy goldwork apparatus that will give him lifelong pain. But I’ve managed to make him agree that if you have a good solution, we’ll follow your advice.”
I wrapped arms around my belly, a squirm of significance and fear running up my spine. I hated this—was I simply afraid, or was I feeling what was to come? I often didn’t dare let it rise into my head to look at it directly. The prophecies were intense, frightening, and once seen, I had no idea if it was possible to avoid them.
When Serafina spoke again, she sounded hard. Clenched. “Then I will have a good solution. I suspect the real fear is not the likelihood of Mercurio developing a dragon, but what it would mean for a mage who knows the future. He will most likely grow into a witch with profound gifts. But if Casilio wants him under control, of course he dislikes the idea of a being more powerful than himself.”
I held my breath, abruptly certain they might know I was listening if I moved. This was an old tension between Mother and her friend. Serafina didn’t seem to like Father very much. A tight, sickened place inside me had a complex reaction to that, but I never knew what to think.
Overwhelmed with nausea, I slow-stepped away, unwilling to hear more.
As I got older, the waves of the future washing over me became...heavier. Like a cat tongue licking me instead of wind or water. I would wake from black, empty dreams and be so full of a sense of sorrow and uncertainty I’d almost tip over. Some moments, merely looking at Mother, or Father, or our sunny garden with its red and blue butterflies, would drown me in such an ocean of regret, pain, excitement, immensity, that I’d be unable to speak. The moon would drip like honey down from its place in the sky, I’d grope through the witching-hour dark for meaning, and the future simply rolled out with endless possibility and power.
Maybe dragons were something like the future. Huge and gorgeous and terrible.
Have you ever seen someone standing under a chandelier, or some other object that could in theory fall, and been struck with the odd sensation that even with no sign of the thing falling, this person was in danger simply by standing where they did?
I began to have this sinking, ambiguous worry at random about Mother. She’d be pencil-drawing with me, or quizzing me on my letters, and would look up with a bright smile on her face—and a streak of lucid vision would show me beads of blood running down her cheek, or I’d hear the clatter of thousands of knives as if the sky would start raining steel.
What a cruel thought it had been, that the tiny caterpillar might die before becoming a butterfly. But everything and everyone around me was like that caterpillar, afloat on the surface of a future that was vastly bigger than any of them could ever understand. Any one of us could be crushed, broken in half, by the sheer weight of all that time. And a person, or a city, or a family, were much harder to protect than a caterpillar.
These misgivings were wound through with memories about Mother and Serafina’s conversation about dragons. A human being could become something much bigger than a butterfly. But like a butterfly, I could predict what that form would look like. If the person who’d become it could last long enough against time.
* * *
The answer did appear. A way to turn the danger back.
The calyx charm. It was better than a shield, because it did not have to be strong. Metal could be battered down, pierced, melted, frozen, cracked, worn by time. A very strong person would someday get old. Mother herself would one day be old. No shield could last forever, could bear the full onslaught of dangers that pulsed down the rivers of time.
The calyx charm was different. It rose fresh and fragrant each time, and could not wear away. It was soft, like a scent, like air, and it surrounded everything it touched with a blanket of effortless safety. It was starlight and the perfume of violets, and lit up the strands of my hair like phosphorescence. Mother had seen it from the moment I was born. In some sleeping plane of my heart, where the future and my body met, the calyx charm had always been germinating within me. When it finally began to bloom, everything changed.
That glimmer that shielded the caterpillar was the first time I was aware of the charm. It was like an extension of my body. Like swallowing, or breathing, or shifting in my sleep, I wasn’t always aware I was doing it. A tug of alarm would move through me, bringing my awareness toward something, like the danger to that caterpillar. My awareness would surround something, a person or thing that was going to fall under harm. And a fuchsia glow would pulse forth, like the hand of my imagination closing protectively around it, this shield beyond any shield that no harm could ever pierce.
The first time I had faced a Colombo had been terrifying. Children were not normally allowed in the presence of the dire moon-souls, silver-bright birds with ages in their eyes. I knew they existed; they made tremors in my belly, like the rest of the world. If I let the feeling run to my head, I could picture them, hear and smell them, and spy on their motions through the night. I had so little context for who they were, because as far as my child mind knew, they may as well be living myths. Like dragons, except more real, physical rather than theoretical. At times I lucid dreamed prophetically of human-sized birds with gray feathers and talons like swords, cutting streaks through the sky,
Father had angered one of the dove-souls, appointed in his sacred room in our house. He burst through the door of the meeting chamber, into the anteroom where Mother and I waited to hear word of what the Colombo would pronounce to Father. I was old enough now to understand what this was beginning to mean: the recipe for a war, cooking into its most refined flavors. And a feathered beast that stank of immortality slammed his talons on the floor, human arms bulging and bird wings wide with terror. He shrieked like a battle cry, and the servants and councilors in the anteroom all scrambled with fear.
Only Mother stood. This was among my clearest memories of her. Rising in fury, stout as an oak, defying the immortal lord in his wrathful glory. But even a strong oak would be pulled under by a tidal wave, and at this moment, the bird-soul was doing a staggering impression of a tidal wave.
Maybe Mother would have been struck down, slain in her nobility in courage, but knowing at least she had done everything to defend her child. Maybe countless other threads of future could have unspooled like this, resounding in the drumbeat of my prescience, the moments decided by the slash of talons and a woman’s choice.
But there was a shield. The alarm pulsed through me, danger a physical substance, an essence that I could infuse my senses into. The fist of my imagination closed.
The Colombo’s talon, mighty enough to crack the floor, fell upon Mother. She raised an arm in defense, crying out.
A violet glow sprang across her body, limning her in flower-light. It produced no sound, only graced the air with the breath of violets. The thrumming place in me went still. The talon struck, and it was as if it had met invisible steel. He struck again, and again, and Mother stood firm with awe on her face.
She was proof against him. The calyx charm beat its silent drumbea
t, and danger could not touch her through it.
This had been the first volley in a war the Colombi were destined to lose. Because I had destined them to. I had raised the calyx charm, the invincible magic, the shield against fate, and even their might had failed.
Afterward, Mother had held me close, crying as I cried, her tears joyous and mine afraid. “I did tell you,” she said, voice thick and creaky with emotion. “I will be the shield. I am strong enough to fight anything.”
She would be. This, too, I destined, in my way. When war truly blossomed in Portia, I closed my fist around Mother. The calyx charm became her armor, a barrier as fine as gauze between her and the infinite deaths the Colombi had in store for us. I held that place of calm around her and did not let go. So she became a heroine of the revolution, Princess of Vermagna, who strode into battle with naught but her coat and twin swords, kissed with the gossamer blessing of the calyx charm that made her invincible.
But in this way, the calyx charm was like a shield—it had to be raised. I couldn’t simply wish a person well and they would be invulnerable forever. It could only be as broad as my attention, as the space within that joined with the unraveling of time, and I could no more cover everything in safety than I could count every ant under the horizon.
This, too, had a finesse to it, one I could learn. Prescience and the calyx charm ran together; with technique, with conviction, I had it in me to sus out the nuances of the future, dream increasingly precise dreams. It was like learning to imagine at the points of needles. Likewise did care and practice show me finer ways to use the calyx charm.
