At last, she bumped against the stool where she and the oracle sat. Alba knelt, running her hands over the stones until she found the edges of the largest fissure. Settling herself above it, she whispered into the gloom.

“Oracle…” She hesitated. Was she addressing herself? “I seek your advice. I seek… I wish to know what will become of the boy. The boy-king.”

The water gurgled along its underground course.

“I wish to know what he will do… what will become of the babe.”

The shadows were filled with the noise of the burbling stream, but no whispers rose to answer.

“Please.” Alba lay on her stomach, calling into the stones. “Please show me. I must know what I’ve done.”

Burble.

Alba stretched her arm deep into the fissure. Against her skin, the rocks were cold and damp, colder than she thought possible. They cut and scratched as she reached, her whole arm to her shoulder now, feeling for the water she knew was somewhere beneath her. “Please,” she said, stretching out her fingertips, “show me.” And just then, just as she felt her fingers skim the surface, felt the shocking cold of water coursing under stone… something—a low rumbling—shifted in the fissure. Her arm was pinched tight, held fast… her limb squeezed in the sharpness of the rocks, the water now pulling at her hand. Trying to wrench herself away, she cried out: She could not free herself, but as she pulled again, pain, white-hot, flashed over her—illuminating, it seemed, the whole cavern in ghastly, watery light. For this was all she saw, a sickly flash of white, before she felt herself dissolving… dissolving into the darkness of the cavern, into the water coursing beneath the earth…

… and in a kind of dreaming, she felt herself in the coldness of the stream sliding under the rocks, trickling through gaps in the earth, past forms of stone and creeping things, then with sudden splashing, cascading out across the land, through forest and field, past farm and village and hamlet and hovel, alongside cobbled road and overgrown path, again through forest and field and forest… she was a river under wide sky, a river under brambled shadows, until she at last became aware of a sound, a persistent three-sided thudding that kept pace alongside her… a horse cantering along the path that followed the stream and a rider urging it on, his heels nudging the horse onward, onward… urging the horse toward the mountains and the dawn tracing their cliffs…

… and Alba, feeling herself splashing over pebble and stone, watched the rider begin to fall behind, but as she drew away, she saw how he held the reins with one hand and kept another close to his chest… he had a babe, another, two infants wrapped in a blanket, their cries hidden beneath the hoofbeats, and then the path turned away from the stream, and Alba struggled against the rushing of water, the force of it cascading down cliffs, she tried to shout against the deafening roar of the water…