I wait inside my house. The fire is lit but I keep it burning low to avoid too much smoke in the small space. Today I have fed the short flames with rosemary stalks to aid my memory of the vision, and to lift my dulled senses. I am always weary after a quest. The causes of this lie in some measure with the poisonous nature of the fairy toadstool. Its effects linger in the body a day or more sometimes. But there are other origins to my low spirits and lethargy. Journeying in my other guise tires me upon my return, for my limbs and sinews have been used in unfamiliar and unpracticed ways, so that now my body aches. More, I am downcast by the clear meaning of the vision. Wenna will not bear a child. That much is plain. I do not care for the woman, but I pity her. As a princess her position is now all but untenable in these politically unstable times. As a woman, she will face a barren future, and I would not wish that upon anyone. There is more at stake here, however, than Wenna’s happiness, for the vision foretold the possible death of Prince Brynach. To those uninitiated in the ways of reading a seeing, it might appear that all is lost. A hundred or more charging horses bearing soldiers sharp with weapons seen driving him into the lake … that must surely foretell nothing less than his enemies’ triumph, his own defeat, his very death. But it need not be so. Had he fallen to a sword, or an arrow, or an axe, then yes, I would have read the vision no other way. But he went into the water. He was taken by the lake. In this way he entered that liminal realm where two worlds meet, and from which it is possible to return. So, I pray the seeing shows not his ultimate demise, but a battle lost from which he may, may, recover.

I have sent a shepherd boy with a message for Nesta. If the princess wishes to hear my words herself she can choose to come, but I think she will not. It is important for her to keep her fears and her desires to herself, and whilst a visit from Nesta would go unremarked, anyone seeing Princess Wenna calling upon me would be suspicious of her motives. And when people are suspicious they want to find the truth, even if it means gouging out someone else’s secrets. Or perhaps, making up truths of their own. Either way, Wenna will not want tongues wagging on account of her business. Nesta will come to me as one wise woman to another, under guise of exchanging remedies, perhaps. She will listen to what I have to say and if her mistress trusts her to repeat my words faithfully, then so must I.