Prophecy

by Sharon Green

  “I—think I’d better start from the very beginning,” Naran answered obliquely as she watched her fingers twist about each other. She looked at none of us, not even Rion—or possibly I should say especially not at Rion. He sat very still and straight, his expression touched with a shadow of terror, obviously afraid of what he was about to hear. Naran made no effort to offer her hand to him or ask for his, and that must have been what frightened him so badly. They always held hands, especially when Naran was upset, and Rion must have been convinced it was about to be over between them…

  “I—didn’t have the sort of childhood that other people do,” Naran said, and now her words were reluctant. “My mother loved me very much, and for that reason she and I kept moving around until I was eleven or twelve, when she died. After that I was alone, but by then I was able to look after myself—because of the reason we had to move around so much. You see … when I was five, I was classified as a null.”

  A heavy chill touched me at that, the sort I always felt when I heard the term “null.” That’s what they’d said of one of our neighbor children when I was small, a pleasant, round-faced little boy I occasionally played with when my parents weren’t watching. He’d been very sweet and never rough when we played our pointless child-games, but after they said he was a null he disappeared and I never saw him again. His parents had seemed more embarrassed than upset that he was gone, but then they had been friends of my own parents…

  “So that’s why you never commented about the strength of any of our group,” Rion said softly to her, his expression filled with pain. “I thought you were simply being circumspect… My poor love, carrying around the burden of that for all these years. Please—will you give me your hand so that I might know you’restill beside me? It almost feels as though you’ve left…”

  It wasn’t possible to miss how horrible an idea Rion thought that was, that Naran had left and was no longer beside him. She looked up with the most pitiful relief I’ve ever seen, and then she quickly gave him her hand. He took it and folded it in both of his, and Jovvi chuckled.

  “I told you that Rion would never react the way you were afraid he would,” Jovvi said to a glowingly radiant Naran. “As a matter of fact, no one here is reacting that way. Everyone is shocked and horrified, but only at what you must have been put through—and are still going through. Would you like to continue now, and explain that that first assessment of you was wrong?”

  “My mother and I didn’t realize that for quite some time,” Naran went on, now holding tightly to Rion’s hand. “All she knew was that she wasn’t about to let a bunch of strangers take me away from her, so we left our house in the middle of the night, and didn’t stop running until we were quite a long way away from our town. My father was dead and so were my grandparents, and so my mother had nothing to keep her there. We eventually reached Gan Garee, where it was easier to hide among the crowds of people. I later found out that my mother had stolen a blank certification form before we ran away, and then she forged our Guild woman’s signature classifying me as a very weak Air magic user. Her own aspect was Air magic, and more than once she covered for my complete lack of talent in Air magic.”

  “But Jovvi said they were mistaken,” Lorand put in with a frown, asking the question I was just about to. “What did your aspect actually turn out to be?”

  “It’s … not what you’reexpecting,” Naran replied, once again looking uncomfortable. “I don’t have any of the usual five talents, but I do have something… For instance, I didn’t find out where Tamrissa was by having someone tell me. I … knew where she was, without any doubt, and also approximately when she would leave that house. And it isn’t the first—or last—thing I knew.”

  “What do you mean, you knew it, love?” Rion asked, apparently as confused as I felt but in no way reluctant to continue touching Naran. “Or am I the only one who doesn’t understand?”

  “No, Rion, you aren’t alone in not understanding,” Jovvi assured him, then she looked at Naran again. “You’ll have to explain it to them, my dear. Just say it straight out and then it will be behind you.”

  “Yes, you’reright, of course,” Naran said with the most … reluctant agreement I’d ever seen. “I do have to say it aloud, don’t I…? Rion, my love, what I meant was … I knew it because I can often … see the future.”

  And with that revelation, all my own problems somehow … faded into the background.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The room all around them was as silent as death, but Jovvi flinched at the uproar coming from everyone’s mind. Shock clanged and emotions echoed, and all of them seemed to want to speak without knowing what to say. The reactions were expected ones, and so was the comment Vallant was finally able to make.

  “Surely you’rejokin’ with us, Naran,” he said, letting his expression fall into one of tentative amusement. “No one knows what the future holds, and if they did they would be owned by the nobility. You’reprobably just good at seein’ the most likely possibilities…”

  “Sometimes I wish that’s all it was,” Naran replied, her expression—and thoughts—finally determined to have the entire truth come out. “But at other times I’m very glad I have this particular talent, because it helped my mother and me to survive, and then helped me alone when she was gone. When I was young I had to see a place before I knew whether it was safe or dangerous for us to stay there, but once I got older I … knew in advance that the place would be there. I also used the talent to find places to work, without wasting time going where I would be refused.”

  Naran hesitated then, but the subject was purely personal. That was proven when she turned the hesitation toward Rion.

  “My talent told me I would meet the man I would love forever if I went to a certain place,” she said, speaking as though the two of them were alone. “It turned out that the tavern was short one girl for their upstairs rooms, something I also knew would turn out to be. I was there deliberately to meet you, my love, and I left shortly after we parted. I also found you that second time on purpose, only pretending that our meeting was an accident. Can you ever forgive me for … lying, yes it was lying, but I’d do it again if I had to. Are you badly bothered by that?”

  “Am I bothered by the fact that the one woman I’ll always love with every fiber of my being came to search me out?” Rion responded with a grin as he leaned closer to her. “Oh, yes, my love, I’m terribly wounded, but not mortally. I think I’ll get over it.”

  Naran’s relief was clear to everyone as she laughed and did her part in leaning closer to Rion, so Lorand was the one who asked the question that Jovvi had been thinking about herself.

  “Naran, if you know all these things, why have you been so uncertain about telling us about them, and most especially about how Rion would react? If you know things, you should know about these things as well.”

  “The best I can tell, my own emotions get in the way at times,” Naran responded, looking away from Rion with a sigh. “When I’m afraid of what an answer will be to something, I seem to … block out that answer. And there’s also the fact that I don’t see everything. Every once in a while something will happen that I haven’t had the least idea about, and it will come as a complete surprise. Why that happens I don’t know, and I’ll probably never find out.”

  “But all the rest of the time your talent is working to our benefit,” Tamma said, the words thoughtful. “You’ve already been absolutely invaluable, and I’m sure you will be again. It’s just too bad that you can’t Blend with us. It would make us—”

  Tamma stopped speaking abruptly as she realized what she’d just said, but Jovvi—and the others—were already ahead of her. They exchanged startled glances with their brows raised, so Jovvi put the question in all their minds.

  “Why can’t Naran Blend with us?” Jovvi demanded, looking around almost belligerently. “If she has a talent, and she most certainly does, it should be able to Blend with ours.”

  “But t
hat would make our number six rather than five,” Vallant protested, sounding more unsure and confused than disagreeing. “Isn’t that goin’ against what everyone knows the prime number to be?”

  “As little as everyone ‘knows’ about Blending and the talents, how can we be sure?” Jovvi countered, feeling more strongly about the matter by the minute. “At one time people thought that the prime number was four, and then the first fivefold Blending came into being. If Naran’s talent is something new, and that seems likely since no one apparently knows about it, how can anyone consider a sixfold Blending? Anyone but us, that is.”

  “The only drawback I can see is that Naran won’t have link groups to back her up,” Lorand said with a nod of agreement. “But we really should try to see if Blending with her will work.”

  Jovvi could tell easily that everyone was in agreement on that point, everyone but Naran. The poor girl was somewhat in shock over the idea of joining them completely, and her lack of self assurance was horribly clear. Her mind thrashed around trying to find the proper words of protest, but not because of reluctance. Jovvi knew exactly what the problem was, so she leaned forward a bit.

  “Naran, my dear, you can’t think that way,” she said gently with the warmest smile she was able to produce. “I know you’ve felt the outsider for all of your life, but you can’t let that interfere with what we want to try. If it works then things will be much more interesting, and if it doesn’t then things will remain just the way they’ve been. You can’t possibly lose any standing with us, so why not relax and have some fun?”

  Naran’s expression and thoughts lightened with that, and once she looked around to see that all the others agreed with what Jovvi had said, her smile was more than just tentative.

  “Relax and have some fun,” she repeated, her smile widening. “You’reabsolutely right, Jovvi, it could be fun. All right, let’s try it.”

  “Now, let’s not count too heavily on its working,” Jovvi warned the eagerness she could feel in everyone. “It may not decide to work until our second or third try, the way it sometimes goes with ordinary Blendings. This will be our least significant effort, so I want everyone to relax. Are you ready?”

  The others all smiled and nodded, but no one actually relaxed. They pretended to for Naran’s sake, but Rion, especially, yearned for success in the experiment. It would make his beloved really and truly one of them, rather than just a member of their group because of him. Jovvi knew that as well as he did, which meant delaying the effort would simply cause more discomfort.

  So Jovvi reached out to the others as she usually did, but this time she reached toward Naran as well. There was an odd … emptiness that wasn’t really an emptiness there, but it still remained one she couldn’t penetrate. Full Blending was being held off as the others reached toward Naran as well, all of them experiencing the same trouble. They were being stopped dead in their tracks—until Jovvi got a sudden idea.

  Rather than trying to reach Naran directly, Jovvi … slid through Rion’s awareness of Naran and approached her at the same time and in the same way that he did. It was a mini-Blending of sorts, and at first it didn’t seem to make a difference. Then, slowly, the emptiness became filled with something, a something that was being held back by automatic fear. Jovvi reached out and touched the fear, soothing it away to a large extent, and then—

  And then the entity had again come into being, an entity that sighed with the sensation of being complete. It wasn’t quite up to its full strength as yet, but that would come as its flesh forms matured and flowered to the point where they were supposed to be. And all of the bonds weren’t as close as they should be, but that, too, could be easily seen to. What mattered more at the moment was the Sight the entity had gained. Or regained, as it had been at one time in the distant past.

  A clearer awareness of the future now lay before it, a future it already knew would be fraught with danger. Perhaps a better description would be to say that the picture was blurry with multiple possibilities, but the awareness of those possibilities was a good deal more clear. It was faintly possible that they would reach and enter Gan Garee without difficulty, just as it was faintly possible that they would not reach the city at all. The stronger possibilities were that they would get there with more or less fighting, and the same for entering the city. Beyond that was the near certainty that they—or some of them—would face the usurping Five, but the results of that confrontation simply weren’t visible. For some reason there were more possibilities of various outcomes involved there than in what went before, and making sense of them just wasn’t … possible.

  The entity chuckled to itself, not in the least disturbed by the lack of clarity around the confrontation. Considering the number of variables which surrounded even the smallest happening, it wasn’t unexpected that the confrontation would be rife with this-or-that possibilities. The closer they came to the actual event, the clearer the picture would become. And there were other things to concern them before they reached the time of that event.

  For instance, the rest of their flesh forms would arrive the next day, most likely shortly before noon. It suddenly became obvious that a group of guardsmen would attempt to ambush them as they rode into Colling Green, a group much like the one which had earlier attempted to take its own flesh forms unawares. That group was not yet in position for the ambush, nor would it be until shortly before the column was due. And it would be larger than the one attacking earlier, significantly larger.

  The entity, no longer amused, paused to consider the matter. There had been difficulty before the previous attackers had been vanquished, and there had been danger to its flesh forms. It had managed to recall the manner of countering the enemy’s more complex kind of linking only just in time, but now that was clearly insufficient. Something more intensely efficient would be needed for tomorrow, as well as for those battles they would certainly have to face before finding it possible to enter Gan Garee. There was something which would serve, but at the moment the memory of the something escaped it. Perhaps, when it next came into being, it would find it possible to recall the method…

  At that point Jovvi returned to herself, having dissolved the Blending as the entity seemed to want her to do. She put a hand to her head, the least bit shaken, and not simply from having seen a picture of the future. The entity had never acted that way before, and Jovvi couldn’t help finding it somewhat disturbing.

  “Well, now we know it works,” Tamma said, also looking a bit on the shaky side. “Is that what you see all the time, Naran? How do you stand it?”

  “It’s … never been quite like that before,” Naran replied, clearly breathless from the experience she had just gone through. “But now I understand why the five of you are so close. It isn’t possible to put that … blending and meshing into words for an outsider to follow. But I’m not an outsider any longer, am I?”

  “No, you certainly are not,” Rion agreed with a laugh for her sudden, blooming delight. “You’recompletely one of us, and more, the entity told us that it knew about your talent. It thought about the way things used to be, which apparently indicates that its memories stretch all the way back almost to prehistory. No wonder it was having trouble remembering the best way to face tomorrow’s attack.”

  “I hope it remembers by tomorrow,” Lorand said, sounding as worried as Vallant looked and was. “That was a really large force it … saw, and it will do our people a lot of damage if they’recaught unawares. If it comes down to it, we’ll have to send someone to warn them.”

  “That probably won’t work,” Vallant said with a shake of his head. “They know enough about where we are to send a group to attack, so they’ve got to be watchin’ us. If they see any of our people headin’ out in the direction the rest will come from, they’ll know immediately what’s goin’ on and will stop him. We’ll have to think of somethin’ else.”

  “We’ll Blend again early tomorrow morning,” Jovvi said, the decision easily made. “If the entity has
n’t remembered what it needs to, we’ll have to use it to sneak someone out past whatever sentries they have set up. In the meanwhile, is there anything else?”

  “Of course there is,” Rion replied, his arm proudly about Naran’s shoulders. “I’m sure all of you recall the entity’s thoughts about the bonds to Naran not being as close as they should be, so that needs to be taken care of. Naran, love, you do recall what I told you about that, do you not?”

  “Yes, certainly, love,” Naran answered with her usual sweet smile, the thrill of having Blended still strong in her mind. “The rest of you have already done it and it’s necessary, so I’m fully prepared to do the same. After all, Lorand and Vallant are part of you.”

  “They certainly are,” Rion agreed with a happy smile, giving her a brief kiss before looking toward the other two men again. “So which of you is to be first to lie with her?”

  Jovvi felt the mild shock and odd discomfort in both Lorand and Vallant, and felt amused herself by it. As well as they knew Rion, they still didn’t completely understand that his main thought patterns and habits had been developed among all of them. He loved Naran so much that he wanted to share her with his brothers, the brothers he loved almost as much. He would certainly kill any other man who might ever attempt the woman of his heart, but his brothers were another matter entirely.

  “I’ll be first,” Lorand said after he’d exchanged glances with both Jovvi and Vallant. “And I’ll also be honored. Naran, are you certain you understand completely and don’t mind?”

  “Of course I understand,” she replied, her mind finally serene. “And how can I mind when I now know you as well as Rion does? This is a family I want to be a part of, even more now than before we Blended. There can’t possibly be five finer people in the entire world.”