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escritoireazulAt first, Lucinda can see nothing. She touches the tips of her fingers against her cheeks and her gloves are cool. It was not cold along the path of thorns, nor warm, and it is neither in this place beyond the door as well, but she thinks she should be cold, should tremble and burrow into her shawl.
Then that voice.
“Brass for the sun, so distant and so warm.”
Above her, pinpricks of light spring to life. She looks up and then cannot look away. She has heard tell, in those most secret of conversations no one is to overhear but she has always had a knack for such acts, that on the surface, there are names for the stars and stories to be found in the constellations.
If there are such stories in the lights of the Neath, it does not want to be told.
“I have no brass,” Lucinda says, and it is not a lie.
A laugh like broken stone, and then, “Pearls for the moon, so terrible and cold.”
“I have no pearls,” Lucinda says, and it is a lie.
“Is your future worth so little?” Silence, and then, “Did you learn nothing in those memories of distant shores?”
The lights above twist and turn. She blinks, but they are as they were. When she blinks again, they do not seem to have moved, but are somehow – there is something different to them. She tries to stop it, but the delicate shiver curls along her spine.
She slips three pearls into her palm and holds them out into the darkness. She is pleased that her arm is steady and does not shake.
They are gone from her hand in a moment, but with her eyes on the lights above her, she does not see what takes them. Even now, knowing someone – something -- is there with her, it is difficult to drag her gaze away, and once she does, her eyes burn.
There are lights moving toward her. She squeezes her eyes shut and then quickly opens them again. Not lights, then, but spangles on a shirt. A woman, dark hair long and straight, swirling around her as she steps closer.
Moon pearls encircle her throat, and once again, Lucinda has difficulty looking away.
“Listen,” she says, and it is not the same voice as before. She speaks as if she sings a lullaby –
the tune will haunt her always, and when she rocks her daughter to sleep while sorting through secrets, she will find herself humming it still
-- and it is such a pleasant song Lucinda tilts her head to better listen.
“I will tell you three things: one of fortune, one of fate, and one of freedom. Which will you hear first?”
Fortune and fate are the same thing, she thinks, but does not say. And in this, as she so rarely is, Lucinda is wrong.
