“Or maybe,” Quentin said, “he just doesn’t give a damn.”

SIX

Aylia Blackwood-Sayers was young to be considered an elder in most any place other than Salem. Not that age had anything to do with it, despite the title. Elders were made up of the heads of each family and those family members who had the strongest and best-controlled Talents.

Aylia, whose wise parents had not attempted to contain her Talents within a Barrier constructed by Duncan until she was an adult, had been a Blackwood elder since her eighteenth birthday.

She was barely past thirty now; her black hair was untouched by gray and her thin face unlined, and she moved with the easy, unthinking grace of an active and athletic person utterly comfortable inside her own skin.

The fact that she was also comfortable with the responsibilities of being an elder in her family showed in the level gray eyes and aura of dignity that clothed her always.

Even now.

She wasn’t anxious for a repeat of what her farseeing had shown her on Sunday night, but with the whole town so unsettled she could feel it even without an empathic Talent, she felt it was her responsibility to see what she could.

Her farseeing was accurate—but she believed it showed her only one thread of a future, a thread that could easily be torn, snipped, or just woven into a greater whole as choices and decisions were made along the way. As events were influenced by the people involved in them, especially once her farseeing showed her that thread of potential future. The agents were here now, and since she had not seen them or known they would come when she had farseen, she was uncertain whether the future she’d seen had been one in which they’d played no part or a future in which they’d taken a hand.

Not that she could be sure of that even if she was able to farsee again. It was one of the more capricious Talents even for one of her control, apt to desert one in the event of great need and often difficult to interpret even if it showed her something.

So she did what she could to ensure the best possible conditions for farseeing, retreating to the small cottage at the rear of their backyard that her husband, Michael, had built for her years before. He called it her studio, a place for her to escape the kids and the usual day-to-day demands of being a wife and mother, or just to be alone with her thoughts and her farseeing.

Michael wasn’t a member of the Five except by marriage to her, but he understood and respected his wife’s Talent and her responsibilities to her family. She was lucky in that; some of those who married into the Five, especially if they married elders, had a difficult time adjusting. Aylia knew how lucky she was, and deeply appreciated Michael’s acceptance of who and what she was, of all the baggage that came with being one of the Five.