“Okay,” Max said, pacing across our room two days later. “Do we know if this full moon was the correct full moon? Is there any way to tell when the timeline for the prophecy has passed?”
Kylie shook her head. “Not that I’m aware of. It’s never been a problem before; normally, the Eye – the Destiny – only predicts a short time ahead. But I don’t know what to do with these prophecies made in highly magical environments. Making the prophecy more powerful has just made it harder to use.”
“On the other hand,” Max said, “making it more powerful allowed you to prophesy this at all. You’re not particularly close to Saina, correct?”
“I barely knew who she was before she offered me Duniyasar.”
“So that doesn’t fit your normal pattern. Normally, you can only prophesy about people you deeply care about. Without Duniyasar, not only would this one have come too late to do anything with, you probably wouldn’t have gotten it at all.”
“Hang on,” I said, “that’s… a good point. You’re not close to Saina.”
“She was extremely generous, what with loaning me a legendary Point of Power,” Kylie pointed out.
“Yeah, and if your spell worked like Max’s, based on debts or justice or whatever, that would be an incredibly strong link. But it doesn’t. Whether or not you feel indebted to her doesn’t make you close friends. You’ve only ever prophesied about people you care about, and before that, Fionnrath’s Destiny only prophesied about Fionnrath, which their prophet is conditioned from birth to care about. I’m sure you can do those little readings you did at Duniyasar for just about anyone, but the real prophecies, they’re emotionally connected, right? That’s how the Destiny knows what to look for and what to communicate, right?”
“That is our current, strongly supported, hypothesis,” Max said.
“Right, so why this? We are certain that Saina’s the target, right? You’re not close to anyone else in the line of succession?”
“I don’t make a habit of hanging out with fancy rich kids from important families,” Kylie said. “Unless you’re suggesting that Max or Magista or someone like that is also a major politician’s relative who’s just slumming it, no.”
“Unless the Destiny is using some obscure symbolic system of inheritance in its prophecy, we’re sure,” Max said. “The way ‘heiress’ is legally and culturally defined is fairly specific, under both the old systems used by Duniyasar, and the way it would be used in Fionnrath. There’s only one heiress, who is currently Saina.”
“Who Kylie isn’t close to,” I said, “meaning that the way her spell is working has changed. More limitations falling away, which, fine, but this is something it couldn’t do in Fionnrath, and that doesn’t make any sense.”
“There’s only one heiress,” Kylie repeated Max quietly, “who is currently Saina.”
We looked at her, confused.
“My spell has never been very good at understanding time. When it could only predict short-term, that didn’t matter, but… you can tell from the way it speaks, it doesn’t really ‘get’ the idea. It can tell us that something is happening now, or that something will happen at the same time as something else, or that some thing will happen in the future. I think that’s about as detailed as its understanding of time gets.”
“So…?” I prompted.
“So, what if this heiress is someone who isn’t the heiress now, but will be in the future? Any woman in the line of succession, or even someone who might be given Duniyasar like I was, could be the heiress.”
I put my head in my hands. “That’s theoretically every woman in mage society. I mean, probably just every woman in the line of succession, but still.”
Max hummed thoughtfully and rubbed his goatee. “Possibly,” he said hesitantly, “but I don’t think that’s likely, or useful in any practical sense. The prophecy is about the heiress being killed, so it has to be talking about someone who’s the heiress at the time of the attack. You can’t become the heiress for anything after you’re dead. Meaning the only person in danger at any given time is the current heiress, so we only need to focus on Saina until she… unless she…” he cleared his throat. “Loses that position. And Kylie, you already said you’re not close to anyone else likely to be in the line of succession, unless they’re also in hiding. So it’s moot, and doesn’t affect the question here – about why you’d prophesy about Saina.”
“I don’t know why I’d prophesy about her. Unless being close to someone really was just a power limitation, like the time limit, and we’re somehow misunderstanding how the spell usually works…”
Max cleared his throat again. “Actually,” he said, “I believe that there’s a much simpler explanation. Kayden, how close are you and Saina?”
All three of us glanced at the familiarity mark on my arm.
“Does… does that matter?” I asked. “That shouldn’t matter, right?”
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“I wouldn’t have thought so,” Max shrugged, “since you can’t actually cast the spell. But it does put the prophecies in your mind, so there’s some kind of mental connection there. There’s a chance that it might be two-way. And human bonding has a strong physiological component, and a little part of the spell is in your body… we’re working with too many unknowns to theorise very confidently here. But it’s what makes the most sense. The variety of spells is so frustrating in situations like this; if we had five or six versions of this prophecy that behaved in the same way, we could run tests. I can’t do anything with a sample size of one.”
“How would you even test anything like this?” Kylie asked. “You’d have to figure out how to do the human familiar thing again without killing all of your subjects first.”
“Oh, no; I’d just use animals. I want to investigate if the link itself has any effect first, without any messy complications that might be in human links, and then fan out. So I’d have all the test subjects make familiars out of the beloved pets of other people. People that the test subjects don’t know.” He grinned to let us know he was joking. “Then, I’d secretly put all the animals’ owners in fatal danger…”
Was Kylie’s spell able to prophesy for Saina because she was my friend? Maybe. I didn’t think we were close enough for that – Kylie said it prophesied for people whom she considered family, so if Max was right then it should prophesy for Chelsea and Melissa, perhaps, but my relationship with Saina was more like my relationship with the Magistae. I didn’t think it would be close enough. But then… it had prophesied for me, the first day Kylie and I had met. Kylie hadn’t really known me or liked me when it warned her that I was going to drown in that lake of empowered water. We’d become friends, after that, and Kylie had said that Fionnrath’s Destiny seemed to have difficulty with the concept of time, so maybe it had seen that? And prophesied for me early? Did that mean that Max might be right, and Saina and I were going to become really close?
Maybe. But by that logic, I was, as Max would put it, a superfluous element. If future relationships counted, then we could just as easily say that Kylie and Saina were going to become close in the future. There was no reason to hypothesise that my relationships were relevant to the spell at all.
Anyway, the idea that future relationships counted didn’t really hold up, either. Given how often Kylie prophesied things, she would have noticed. She had a good handle on the spell’s limitations, at least when she was prophesying outside of somewhere like Duniyasar, and among those limitations was the ‘close relationships only’ thing. If future relationships counted, it would have happened before, and she’d know.
Unless that was a new thing, for prophesying in high magic areas. The spell could ‘see’ a lot further in time in places like Duniyasar; the previous time limits for the prophecies didn’t count there, so maybe that meant it couldn’t ‘see’ far enough ahead to detect future relationships before, but when at somewhere like Duniyasar… no. That didn’t hold up; Kylie had been at school when she’d prophesied my drowning. I, and Saina, were just… anomalies, I supposed. Exceptions.
I really, really wanted there to be exceptions. For Kylie’s spell to sometimes be able to predict about random people, just because. I really wanted that to be true.
If that were true, it greatly expanded the number of people that the Hero and Child prophesy could be about. It made it less likely that it was about me.
Kylie was already sure it wasn’t about me, but I couldn’t fully trust her reasoning. There just… weren’t very many other people it could be about, given her spell’s limitations. Anyway, even a remote possibility that you’re prophesied to be carrying the magical equivalent of a nuclear weapon in your body and the only way to save everyone is to be ritually sacrificed in some obscure binding ritual is something that tends to stick in your mind. That probably wasn’t the case, but I wanted the ‘probably’ in that sentence to be as big as possible.
I forced myself to tune back in to the conversation. “Okay,” Kylie was saying, “I still think you’d need to restrict your familiars for the experiment exclusively to dogs. What matters is that the pet loves their owner deeply, and dogs are honest about their emotions. Whereas cats – ”
“Kylie, if you are about to speak against the good nature of the wonder, loving, affectionate animal that is feline domesticus,” Max cut in with mock severity, “then I must terminate our friendship. I cannot, in good conscience, hang out with such a callous fool.”
“Kayden, back me up. Cats or dogs.”
“Birds,” I said. “Definitely birds.”
“My cousin has a budgerigar that tries to eat my ear every time it sees me,” Max said. “Clearly, birds are incapable of love.”
“Or your cousin’s bird happens to be a sociopath.”
“Max,” Kylie said suddenly, “what’s that thing poking our of your pocket?”
“What?” He checked, and blushed. “Oh. It’s, um. Alania helped me make it a few days ago.” He withdrew the object and showed us.
It was a silver compass. Not the magnetic needle kind; the ones for distance and arc plotting on maps, with two arms tipped with needles. There were runes etched in the bright metal arms; I leaned close to read them.
“A new fetish? It looks pretty cool.”
“Thanks. It was about time I made something to help me manage the power, and I didn’t want another pen, after… well. It seemed appropriate.” He put it away.
“Pretty cool,” I repeated. “Not as cool as Kylie’s familiar, of course. But few things are as amazing as me.”
“Yes, I suppose I’ll just have to content myself with this little fetish and getting all the credit for Kylie’s familiar,” he said with a small smile.
“What would happen if Kayden had a familiar or a fetish?” Kylie asked.
We already knew the answer to that. “Nothing,” I reminded her. “I can’t channel my spell. I can bleed it for ichor, but it’s inert.”
“Exactly. But there is magic in you. Mine. Would you be able to use one to bleed off some of that? Create a sort of chain?”
I opened my mouth to answer. Closed it again. We both looked at Max.
He shook his head. “People have tried to chain familiars before. But the familiars don’t channel the… hmm. But Kayden is human, and spells react with humans differently, which is why it’s so dangerous in the first place. And if it’s using his mind, and might be using his relationships as prophecy criteria… huh. I have absolutely no idea.” He looked at me, hunger for knowledge in his eyes… and a question. Apparently he was still hesitant enough to need explicit permission. I nodded.
“Of course,” Max added with a slight smile, “the thing about familiars is that a strong personal bond makes a strong connection. A mage should feel genuine affection and connection with their familiar if they want a strong, stable bond.”
“So…?”
The smile widened into a mischievous grin. “So it just became scientifically important for you to accurately and sincerely answer Kylie’s question. Cats or dogs?”