“Yes. The retinue is arriving.”

Alba did not know what the oracle meant by retinue, but the old woman had pronounced it with much solemnity.

The oracle gestured to the chamber entrance. “Come.”

IV

THE WATERS SPEAK

Alba tried not to show her distress as she entered the chamber, but she hated it so. Though they used the word chamber, it was really a cavern. A cave. A hole in the hillside. It was dank and dark, and the air so sweet and sickly, Alba found it hard to breathe. When she was alone, she stayed as close as she could to the opening for the fresh air that blew from time to time and so she might, now and then, catch a glimpse of sky. But the oracle made her descend to the very bottom, where the dark was thick and wet and choking.

You will not hear the waters speaking from there, child.

Come to the waters, Apprentice.

You must listen to the waters.

The waters. Always the waters. There was no running water in the cave, though in the quiet sometimes, Alba could hear it dripping under the rocks, an underground stream that entered the earth higher in the mountains: Sometimes they washed in its pool. There it was clear and full of light, reflecting sun and stars and cloud and moon, showing both stone below and sky above. But here… in the dark… running its course in the earth below, the water was a dampness, a vapor, rising from cracks in the rock, slick and whispery and terrible.

Alba was to serve as seer today; the oracle would be watching. While the old woman settled herself at the back of the cave, Alba pulled the stool she was to sit on surreptitiously forward, just ahead of the largest of the fissures and away from its choking airs.

“Apprentice,” the oracle chided.

Grudgingly, Alba moved the chair back.

Lifting herself onto the stool, she could already feel the tendrils of damp air curling around her. How many years has the oracle sat in this chamber? Alba wondered. How can she stand it? She glanced at the old woman, now resting comfortably on her spidery haunches. Once, not long after the priests had first brought Alba to the mountain, she had summoned the courage to ask the oracle how long she had served as seer. The oracle had given her one of her predictably cryptic answers: I have seen three hundred thousand moons rise and fall, but when the sun finds me not beneath his eye, days cannot turn to years. Then, drawing close in the gloom of the cave, she had placed her palms on Alba’s cheeks and whispered, For you, too, Apprentice—in this darkness, your hours will number more than the grains of sand beneath your feet before you see a year of age.

Alba, not wanting to think about this remark or its wretched implications, shifted on the stool and tried to imagine she could still feel the sun on her face.