The Kiss of Deception (The Remnant Chronicles #1) - Mary E. Pearson Page 0,79

for a long while, as if she hadn’t heard me, but then finally looked up. “You saw, didn’t you? That day we passed the graveyard, you saw that Mikael was dead.”

I pushed away from the post. “What? No, I—”

“I’ve thought about it many times since then. That look on your face that day. Your offer to stop. You saw him dead.”

I shook my head vigorously. “No. It’s not like that.” I sat down beside her. “I’m not a Siarrah. I don’t see like my mother did. I just sensed something, something vague, but strong too, a feeling. That day I just sensed something was wrong.”

She weighed this and shrugged. “Then maybe it’s not the gift. Sometimes I have a strong sense about things. In fact, I had a feeling something was wrong with Mikael too. A sense that he wasn’t coming. It turned over and over inside me, but I refused to believe it. Maybe that was why I was even more eager for him to walk through the tavern door. I needed to be proved wrong.”

“Then you don’t think it’s the gift.”

“Your mother’s gift came in visions.” She looked down apologetically. “At least it used to.”

My mother stopped seeing visions after I was born. On occasion the vicious would imply I had stolen the gift from her while in her womb, which of course turned out to be laughable. Aunt Bernette said it wasn’t me at all, that her gift slowly diminished after she arrived at the citadelle from her native land. Others claimed she’d never had it at all, but years ago, when I was very young, I had witnessed things. I had watched her gray eyes lose their focus, her concentration spike. Once she had ushered us all out of harm’s way before a spooked horse trampled the path where we had just been standing. Another time she led us outside before the ground shook and stones crashed down, and often she shooed us away before my father would burst through in one of his foul moods.

She always brushed it off, claiming she had heard the horse or felt the ground move before we did, but back then, I was certain it was the gift. I had seen her face. She saw what would happen before it did, or saw it happen from afar, like the day she took to her room in grief on the day her father died, though she didn’t receive the news until two weeks later, when a messenger finally arrived. But in these latter years, there had been nothing.

“Even if it’s not a vision,” Pauline said, “it could still be a gift. There could be other kinds of knowing.”

A chill clutched my spine. “What did you say?”

She repeated her words, almost the same ones the priest had used that morning.

She must have seen the distress on my face, because she laughed. “Lia, don’t worry! I’m the one with the gift of seeing! Not you! In fact, I’m having a vision now!” She bounced to her feet and held her hands to her head in mock concentration. “I see a woman. A beautiful old woman in a new dress. Her hands are on her hips. Her lips are pursed. She’s impatient. She’s—”

I rolled my eyes. “She’s standing behind me, isn’t she?”

“Yes, I am,” Berdi said.

I spun and saw her standing in the tavern doorway just as described.

Pauline squealed with delight.

“Old?” Berdi said.

“Venerable,” Pauline corrected and kissed her cheek.

“You two ready?”

Oh, I was ready. I had been waiting for this night all week.

* * *

Crickets chirped, welcoming the shadows. The sky over the bay was draped with thin streamers of pink and violet while the rest deepened to cobalt. A bronzed sickle moon held a pinprick star. Terravin painted a magical landscape.

The air was still and warm, holding the whole town suspended. Safe. When we reached the main road, a crisscross of paper lanterns twinkled overhead. And then, as if the landscape alone weren’t enough, the song.

The prayer was sung as I’d never heard it sung before. A remembrance here. Another there. Voices separate, combining, gathering, giving, a melody coming together. It was sung at different paces, different words rising, falling, streaming like a choir washed together in a cresting wave, aching and true.

“Lia, you’re crying,” Pauline whispered.

Was I? I reached up and felt my cheeks, wet with tears. This was not crying. This was something else. As we got closer to town, Berdi’s voice, with the most beautiful timbre of all, moved from