“Siblings!” she said, booming the word, then, shaking her head, corrected herself. “A sibling awaits.”

Though the woman betrayed no emotion, Alba saw something like delight flicker across the boy’s cheeks. Below her, the waters grew more insistent. “Brutish!” they steamed, curling around her lips and hair and ears. “Violent beginnings beget violent ends.”

“Really?” the boy breathed, and Alba heard the loneliness hiding in that word.

“Yes, a sibling,” she said, doing her best to shake the words brutish and violent from her mind. She felt a bit woozy. She tried to form the sentence she would say next in her head, to get it right. The man with the bulbous forehead was looking at her with consternation, his lip a twitching pink-and-gray worm tail around a grimace of teeth. The boy was staring at her—happiness beginning to bubble just so, rising like light beneath his placid facade, a veneer of cream.… Was his face shaped of cooked cream? Alba was dizzy, light-headed. She wanted to say, Joy will come to you with the birth of your sibling; yours will be a kind and benevolent rule.…

“Joy,” she started to say, but the mist, the vapor, suddenly all around, hissing, spitting, suffocating, suddenly in her lungs, her mouth, her throat, took her words and reshaped them.

“Joyless will be your reign!” she bellowed. “Murderous worm…”

Oh, oh no. As though from very far away, Alba the girl, the small pip of the village who chased goats with her father; Alba the girl, who liked to feel the sun on her face; Alba the girl, who knew where to dig for tubers under the oaks, saw herself transformed: Terrifying, horrific Alba the Oracle snarled at the boy. And the boy, oh, the delicate boy, happiness all gone, all light extinguished, gaped open mouthed.

“Murderous worm and worms at a banquet!” she heard herself growling. “Your rule has begun with worms feasting in coffins; fate will see you meet the same end.”

No, no, oh, no. Alba the girl tried to stop her own speech. The boy’s face, the delicate cream, was hardening.

“The sibling will bring you no joy,” she continued, hissing. “The sibling will bring your own fall. And then will the beast tear flesh apart. And then will fang and claw and pelt tear into skin. And then will worms and creeping things unstitch the hide.”

Oh, stop, Alba thought from very far away. Oh, please stop. Even from her great distance, she could see a crack beginning to form in the boy’s cheek and brow, just there, where the cream had grown firm.

“Despised, unloved, and abhorred, you’ll be brought down by your own blood. And no one will weep. And no one will mourn.”

At these words, the cooked cream that was once so blank and flat and soft turned thoroughly hard, and the crack that had been forming at the brow and cheek split wide.

No…, wept Alba the girl.

“No one will mourn,” repeated Alba the Oracle.