Should my daughter court this tradesman?

To trade in love is poor trade indeed, except when love is traded freely.

Should I plant more pear trees?

The pear is more fair than plum, the richer fruit.

—but caring not at all for any of these concerns, because she could not stop wondering what would become of the boy-king and the unborn babe.

She tried searching for answers, tried mirroring all the oracle’s methods of divination. Climbing the hill, she would scan the sky for birds, striving to determine their form and flight—Was it a raven? Had it flown from the right or left?—or discern their sounds—Had the woodpecker’s tapping come from that grove? She looked for creatures crossing her path. She listened for thunder; she watched for lightning. She gathered handfuls of stones and examined their shapes, their lines, their flecks of brightness. But she saw nothing clear, nothing definite. Everything bore signs only of woe. She saw only the pain and fear she had caused.

Her searching did not escape the attention of the oracle. Early one morning as Alba stood despairing on the hillside, growing cold at an owl’s distant shriek, the oracle walked out to meet her.

“Apprentice.”

Alba felt the oracle’s bony arm take her elbow. They stood together in the half-light, listening to the owl.

“Oracle… I am trying to read the signs, as you do, but I can see nothing but… terrible things.”

The oracle sighed. “It takes many years of practice, Apprentice, to see the wider view.”

Alba glanced at the oracle. In the dim light, her face had a gentle expression. Seeing Alba’s confusion, the old woman patted her arm.

“Some believe the lives of men are subject to the caprices of the gods or fates—whims and fancies that may be kind or cruel. Others believe that every moment the world will ever hold spun out with the creation of the stars, that all we will ever say or do was fixed in the first moments of creation. When you have lived as long as I, child, it matters little whether gods or fates or nature made our web—it’s how the web ripples with each event. A man may not step out of his house without stirring the birds gathered by his door—and the birds may not gather to sing without waking the man. Careful eyes can see these flickerings. You, child”—the oracle’s voice grew softer—“you fret about the boy-king. But you must know, you did nothing but reveal the harm already done to him. You did not make him who he is, or who he is becoming. You are a mirror, only.”

“Oracle, no, I saw it.” Alba shook her head. “I saw… such softness in his face, like cream, and then—oh, you saw it, too; you saw how his face grew hard, how it split, just here.…” She touched her cheek. “All at my words. And now… there’s so much room for coldness to enter and grow. And everywhere I look… all the signs… I worry what he is becoming. What he will do to the unborn babe.”