by Ana Mardoll
Even if the prophecy had been official propaganda, it hadn't helped the king. Men still tried to harm him, though none succeeded, while others in the kingdom sought more creative ways to enact harm while satisfying the constraints of the prophecy. An underground industry sprang up almost overnight, determined to unseat the overlord whose reign brought misery to so many.
Schools were founded to teach women to fight, many headed by women as a precaution to ensure that any harm meted out by a student could not be indirectly attributed to a man. Other schools enrolled children in their ranks, arguing that 'man' was something attained through age and maturity and not applicable at birth. Some aspiring heroes even went so far as to train animals, raising whole menageries of killer bears, dogs, and wild cats with the intention of mauling evil King Fearghas should the opportunity ever occur.
Innes was not a woman, a child, or a wild animal, but he scraped together all the money he could in order to attend a school run by a woman named Màiri. She was a glorious giant of a woman, taller than most of the men in town, and her scalp was shaved once a month to clear away the dark mossy stubble of her hair which never gave up growing. Màiri had lost her right leg in one of the border wars—Innes wasn't sure which one—and she walked with a cane and a wooden leg, a beautiful piece of carved hickory and metal, attached to her knee with leather straps.
Màiri's leg was the only reason she was willing to enroll Innes. Just past puberty, it seemed unlikely that he would not be a man soon, and Màiri didn't have time to waste on students unable to circumvent the prophecy. However, Innes' father, Eoghan, had lost his left arm in a bandit raid when he was just a boy and had been apprenticed to a blacksmith who had fitted him with a series of prosthetic arms as he grew. Now Eoghan made his own arms and was the best blacksmith for twenty leagues in any direction. He had made Màiri's leg, and Ainsley, Innes' mother, had tailored the straps which held the leg in place. Ainsley was as good a tailor as her husband was a blacksmith, and they both served the town residents well.
Innes' savings from making deliveries paid for his lessons, but it was his parents' reputations which got him through the door to Màiri's cellar and her secretive underground fighting classes. All the other students were viable candidates for subverting the prophecy: girls, women of all ages, a handful of very young boys, and two students around Innes' age who had explained to the class that they were neither girls nor boys. When he'd first signed up, Innes hadn't realized it was possible to be a gender other than the one you'd been assigned at birth, but the students seemed very certain and he accepted that they were in the best position to know. They certainly knew more about their own experiences than Innes did.
He couldn't say why it was so important to him that he train. Innes knew he was no grand 'chosen one', special from birth. His hatred of cruel King Fearghas was no deeper than anyone else's, and Innes had experienced less harm than most from the oppressive regime; no one in his immediate family had been taken away by the royal guard, just one cousin and a few childhood friends. His passion for justice was real, but he couldn't point at a defining moment which had solidified those feelings.
There was no doubt in his mind what his role would be in the coming revolution. If and when it came, his skills would be there to support the leaders. He wouldn't be at the front leading the charge, but he would be there all the same. If Innes couldn't harm King Fearghas, he could still take down any royal guards standing between the evil king and the chosen one. Until that day, Innes would train under Màiri's tutelage and learn everything she could teach him. He wouldn't fail her or the cause she worked for.
"Have you heard the latest prophecy?"
Sìne sat beside him on the low stone wall which kept Farmer Gillespie's sheep from losing themselves in the forest on the outskirts of town. Innes was panting heavily after their practice session, but Sìne seemed as cool as a spring breeze. She always did, really; she mastered every move Màiri taught them in half the time Innes took. He took another gulp from the jug he'd brought with him. "No; what was it about?"
She laughed, a sharp mirthless bark. "What are any of them about these days? King Fearghas, of course; how to kill him off once and for all. Hand that over, will you?"
Innes perked up as he handed her the jug. In a world of potential prophecy candidates, all of them 'no man of woman born', how to kill Fearghas had become the sticking point. If gossip from the capital could be believed, the last attempt on the overlord's life had involved an exotic undetectable poison, a goat, and a young culinary genius. The plot had failed to the detriment of everyone involved and the overlord still lived, though it was said he no longer enjoyed soft cheese.
"Does it give any clues as to how to do the deed?"
Sìne tilted back her head, hefting the jug high to coax out the last drop. "I wish! No, this one is more qualifications for would-be heroes. They're putting together a list of signs so they'll recognize the right one."
"More signs? Cutting out half the population in a single swoop wasn't enough?" Innes shook his head in exasperation at the unfathomable motivations of mages and took the empty jug back from her.
She laughed as she pulled her leg up on the wall for a post-practice stretch, leaning over to grab at her toes to keep her muscles loosened. "Well, there's the remainder to winnow down," she pointed out. "There are actually quite a few of us who aren't men born of women, Innes! It would be nice to know which of us is fated to kill Fearghas, so we can stop wasting time and effort on those who aren't."
His lips twisted into an annoyed pucker, but he couldn't argue with her logic. "Okay, what are the new qualifications? No woman born of man? Then we'd really be in a pickle."
Sìne snorted and gave him a playful shove on the shoulder. "Excuse me, but you're forgetting the neithers. Watch it or I'll tell Niven and Graeme; they can remind you of their existence on the training mats." She chuckled and began stretching her other leg. "No, the latest item on the checklist is two living parents."
Innes was surprised to feel his heart leap in his chest. He was already disqualified or soon would be; he couldn't dodge becoming a man forever. But here was a portion of the prophecy he could satisfy, even if he didn't meet the rest of the qualifications. He felt a strange sense of validation, even knowing this was foolish. The point of a prophetic checklist was to whittle away all those who didn't fit, in order to find the one solitary person who did. His partial compliance wasn't special; given a list long enough, the whole world would fit one piece or another. So why did his blood thrill with the knowledge that he met at least one small standard for heroism?
He tried to hide his elation, retreating to the safer territory of scholarly speculation. "I suppose that settles the question of whether battlefield-born infants are 'of woman born'?" Babies cut from their dying mother's wombs were the stuff of bards' tales in country inns, but Innes had never heard of any such thing actually happening. Still, storytellers loved the idea and worked it into their epic songs when given any excuse to do so.
Sìne shrugged and bent at the waist, gripping her toes with the tips of her fingers. "I suppose so, but it does disqualify a whole lot of the rest of us in the process."
The disappointment audible in her words shook Innes out of his own feelings and he winced. "Sìne, I'm so sorry! I hadn't thought about how that would affect you." Sìne's father had died in an attack on the town by the royal guard when she was only five years old; after that, her mother had raised her alone.
"Yeah, well." She shrugged, looking out over the sheep field with grim determination. "What can I do?"
The words weren't intended as a question but he echoed them back at her, watching her face intently. "What are you going to do? Drop out of Màiri's school?" Innes couldn't imagine class without Sìne; she was one of the best and most dedicated students, mastering each lesson with ease only to turn around and help the others.
Sìne took a deep breath and shook her head. "No. I'll stay on."
"But—"
She raised a hand to interrupt him. "Look, either I'm the hero or I'm not. If I am, this prophecy is wrong or there's something about myself I don't know. Maybe I have another father out there; perhaps my mother was sleeping with more than one man nine months before I was born and the one we thought of as my father wasn't really. Heck, I was conceived during a town occupation; my father could be a soldier for all I know."
Innes turned this over in his mind, his eyes wide. "Are you going to ask her?"
Sìne thinned her lips. "Would you ask your mother if she'd been raped and hadn't mentioned it to you?"
He blanched and looked away. "I guess not. But don't you care about the prophecy?"
"Of course I care." She hopped down from the wall and stretched one more time, looking off in the direction of the town. "I'm choosing to believe I have the capacity to become the hero until proven otherwise. C'mon, the sun's going down and I don't want to step in a dung heap in the dark."
"Do you think the prophecies are prescriptive or descriptive?"
Innes' question was punctuated by a thud as his arrow hit the target. Granted, not where he wanted on the target—the shaft was embedded a full handspan from the painted mark in the center of the target—but the arrow had hit the target and stayed there. He was improving.
"What do you mean?" Graeme stepped up to the line and took aim. Innes watched them draw their string back to the very tip of their nose and studied their positioning rather than the target Innes knew they would hit. Graeme was a natural with a bow and Innes was desperate to learn their secrets.
He waited until their arrow struck true, not quite at the center of the target but barely a hair's breadth away. "Well, when the mages say no man of woman born will kill Fearghas, and that the hero will have two living parents, and tomorrow they might say the hero will have a birthmark in the shape of a dagger, do you think those are qualifications the hero has to actually have? Or do you think the mages look into the future to see who does the deed and they're just providing us with a description of that person?"
"Innes, do you have a birthmark in the shape of a dagger?" Niven was up next, kir lips twisted in a wry smirk as kie readied an arrow.
"A rabbit, actually," he was forced to admit. "At least, that's what my mother tells me; I can't see it myself without a mirror and serious neck strain. That's not the point, Niven."
"Is there a difference?" They both looked up at Graeme, who made a face at their matching expressions. "Not between a dagger and a rabbit, you big babies. Is there a difference between a predictive prophecy and a descriptive one? It's all the same to us at this point, isn't it? The hero must meet the prophesied qualifications because the hero will meet the qualifications."
Innes frowned as he worked through this line of reasoning. He liked Graeme; they hadn't been close enough in age to be playmates as children but growing up he'd thought of them as something like a cousin or distant big brother. Two years ago, Graeme had asked the town to use 'them' instead of 'him' for themself. Innes hardly ever messed up now, the new pronouns coming easily with practice. He didn't understand why Graeme wasn't a boy, but he recognized that he didn't need to understand a thing for it to be true.
"If the prophecies are providing details of a specific person, the way you'd describe someone you met in a village inn, then they could be changed." Innes found his hand moving in useless circles as he spoke; he grasped his bow with both hands to stop himself. "Fearghas could hunt down the hero and murder their parents, for example, now that he knows living parents are a prophetic marker. If he killed all the parents in the kingdom, would the prophecy become wrong? Would it be changed by events, the future altered by our response to it?"
Graeme gave him a look that was three parts exasperation and one part gentleness, the latter a recent addition in an attempt to improve their 'people skills'. "Innes, you can't change the future. Whatever they prophesy about the hero is true because it will be true. Fearghas could try to murder every parent in the land, but he would fail to kill the hero's parents; they'd be spirited away or hidden or otherwise saved. How can there be a difference between a description of what will come and a prescription of what must come?"
Innes felt there was a flaw in this somewhere, but Niven opened kir mouth before he could argue. "Here's what I want to know: does the hero actually need those bits and pieces in order to succeed? If the hero has to produce two living parents, do they help to kill Fearghas somehow? If the hero isn't a man, is that relevant in some way? We keep trying to work out how to do the job, but maybe the clues are in who can do it."
"Unless the prophecy is just a description!" Innes pounced on kir words. "That's exactly what I mean. Can anyone kill him and we're only hearing about the person who gets there first, or are the prophecy markers genuinely necessary qualities the hero needs in order to be the hero?"
"Yes," Graeme said, their voice firm and certain. "The prophecy descriptions must be met by the hero because they will be met by the hero."
"None of which answers my question," grumbled Niven, drawing kir bow and releasing a shaft straight into the tree trunk above the wooden target. Kie crowed with delight as kir arrow vibrated to a halt in the thick trunk. "Bullseye!"
Innes frowned at kir. "What are you talking about? You missed."
"Not at all; I hit the man's head, not his chest. Can we get Màiri to set the target higher, do you think?"
"Why are you so hung up on the prophecies?" Niven had stayed behind after practice to help Innes clean up. The king couldn't outlaw archery when so many people depended on the meat brought in by hunters, but it was wise not to draw attention to their training. The target was buried between practices, quietly covered over with earth and leaves, and the arrows plucked from the trees to be repurposed or disposed of.
Innes looked up from where he was trying and failing to wrest an arrow stuck fast in a nearby tree. "What? I'm not!" He narrowed his eyes at kir. "Anyway, you're as interested in them as I am."
"Because I think there could be clues in them," kie answered cheerfully, scooping up loose earth to scatter over the target. "If we piece together the puzzle, we'd know how to kill him. Apart from that, I don't care in the slightest what a bunch of mages say. I'm going to work out how to kill Fearghas and do it, and the rest of you can figure out how to apply the prophecies to me afterwards." Kie peered up at him. "But you've always got your ear to the ground for rumors of more predictions. Some days it's all you ever talk about. Why is that?"
The question made him pause. "Because I care! Finding the hero is very important, you know. I want to help them when they're found, so it's important to be well-versed on what qualifications we ought to be looking for. Educating myself is important if I want to be an ally to the hero."
"Uh-huh." Kie mounded the loose dirt to one side so kie could wedge the painted board in place. "Sounds to me more like you want to be the hero and you're looking for confirmation from someone else. Are you hoping for a prophecy that'll predict the hero will have a rabbit birthmark, eyes the color of acorns, and frizzy hair that goes wild when it rains?" Niven flashed him a warm smile. "Or that his name starts with 'I'?"
"No!" Innes shook his head but kie stared him down with dancing eyes; after a moment, Innes looked away. Niven hadn't known him from childhood the way Graeme had, being a more recent resident of the town, but kie had a way of reading his thoughts from his face. He wondered if kie saw the lie there and knew how gratified Innes would be if they came out with precisely those prophecies. Kir question echoed in his head: Why?
"It's not that I want to be the center of attention," he tried to explain, not meeting kir eyes. This was not a deliberate lie, but he struggled with whether or not it was strictly true. He hoped it was true, at least. "I don't need to be the hero. Someone else can be the hero, honestly! I just really want to help, and I feel a... a connection with the hero. I'd like to have similar attributes, even if I can't actually be the chosen one myself."
"Right." Niven stood, brushing kir hand
s on kir tunic to clear away the lingering soil. Kie gave him a sharp look. "Innes, maybe it's not my place to ask, but I'm going to anyway: are you a man?"
He'd heard the question before, of course; he was enrolled in Màiri's class and presented as masculine. Graeme was asked equally often, their reaction varying depending on the speaker, their tone, and how many times in a day they'd already had to answer the same question. Innes was never offended, but neither did he know how to respond. He stared at Niven and found himself shrugging his shoulders. "I suppose so?"
"Not a resounding 'yes', huh?" Kie leaned against a tree and peered at him with a skeptical gaze, soft at the edges. "I ask because, well, maybe you don't want the prophecies to fit you so much as you want yourself to fit the prophecies." Kie arched a thin eyebrow at him. "Innes, you do know you don't have to be a man, don't you? I mean, you've met Graeme."
"Well, of course I have." Innes felt defensive; he'd known Graeme longer than Niven had, after all.
Niven ignored the annoyance in his voice. "Have you ever thought you might be like them?"
Innes shrugged again. A part of him felt trapped by these questions, squirming and unable to flee; but a piece of his soul sang at being allowed to talk about it, at having a friend who looked at him and saw the indecision there. Someone who didn't judge him for not knowing. "I've thought about it. I... I believe Graeme when they say they're not a man? But I don't really understand why they aren't or how they can know. I mean." Innes laughed and tried to ignore the ragged edge to the sound. "Does anyone ever feel like a man?"
Kir eyebrow arched higher. "I suspect some men do, yeah."