Fate
Fantasy
The birds woke her when it was still dark. Reagan felt the tension in the air, a current, and she knew the summons was for her. Without thinking, she rose and put on her riding leathers. She crept through the stone corridor of her parents’ fortress, and it was simple to sneak past the sleeping guards.
Regan saddled her horse, Windemere, with deft hands. The steed did not make an irritated noise, just nuzzled her hand with his velvety nose, claiming the apple she’d brought. Shortly, she was up on his back, and he trotted through the yard. She took him over dirt-packed ground to disguise the sound of his hoofs. His ears flicked toward the training pen when they passed by.
Once they reached a broad hill, she stopped him and took in the rising sun. It was still low on the horizon, its yellow-orange chilled in the frosty sky. The hills and trees before them were crisp, a fine ice coating the grass. Her breath came out in puffs before her. Then she pressed his sides with her heels, and they trotted on. There was nothing like an autumn hunt, alone with your thoughts on the hill with only birds for company.
Before long, she was in deep woods. The sun had risen and melted the frost, dripping down dark branched into thirsty moss. She’d seen more than one rabbit scurry by, but didn’t notch her arrow to the string just yet.
Her parents had informed her last night that they’d chosen a husband for her. Or rather, a politically advantageous match for them, for their two kingdoms. She’d know it would come to this… eventually. She supposed she should have been glad she’d not been married off at sixteen. Other friends of hers had. Her parents had chosen instead to educate her. They hired tutors, and she knew German, Latin, and French. She knew how to ride, hunt, and do arithmetic. She knew the treaties that governed their lands, and she knew how to sleep on the ground. She did not know how to cook, unless you counted basic camping fare.
Was she running? She didn’t know. She only knew she’d woken up in cold, panicked sweats, tangled in sheets, her throat parched, her skin desperate for fresh air… Marriage.
She had perfect confidence in her ability to survive on her own, at least for a while. But she didn’t think she could do that to her parents.
A twig snapped, and she looked up, skin prickling. She saw nothing, but she felt the eyes on her. Just woods. No, there! The stag broke cover and ran. Like a trained hunting dog, Reagan took after it. She kicked Windemere into a gallop. She was all nervous energy, her muscles tense and hungry for release, a place to expend the jittery unsettled feelings.
The forest whipped past, a blur of leaves and fallen stumps. A stray branch caught her cheek with a searing scratch, but she welcomed the pain with the sharp winds. She was alive! Heart pumping beneath her skin, eyes bright, senses far reaching to the extent of the festival. She noted the ravens breaking from their branches with a startled caw, but she stayed focused, chasing the stag between trunks. Windemere kept pace. They were hot on her trail—
Windemere whinnied and stopped short. Reagan went sailing past his head, yanked from the saddle. Instinctive from her lessons in the drill yard, she rolled and stayed loose, protecting her neck. Even so, the wind was knocked from her lungs. She coughed. Distantly, she heard Windemere screech and then take off, his hooves thudding away.
She gasped again. The floor of her stomach was in her lungs, or the other way around. She gulped and didn’t move. Was anything broken? If she had hurt her back…
She focused on even breaths, staring straight up, and eventually the world stopped spinning. She tested her arms, her neck. Her head hurt, but it didn’t feel like she had a concussion. Just had the wind knocked out of her. She rolled over to her hands and knees, then eased herself up.
She clutched her bruised shoulder. No sight of Windemere. No sight of the stag either. She collected her bow from the dead leaves and looked around.
Was it just her, or were there more leaves on the trees than she remembered? She squinted. It was fall, and the only leaves on the branches were vivid shades of orange or red, or just plain brown. But above her, the branches were fuller. The moss beneath her feet was a vibrant green, squishy. Even the air, it was warm. Butterflies danced in the air before her as they passed. Butterflies?
She closed her eyes. She must have hit her head a lot harder than she thought. The air was… warm. She listened and heard a brook in the distance. She followed the sound. Her horse was gone, and she was hungry, and if she was going to go looking for him, she at least needed some water. She followed the sound.
The air only grew warmer, the sound of birds more cheerful. The sunlight through the branches was not the chilly glow of autumn, but the clear, encouraging light of spring. She stepped out into a small meadow. There was the stag, grazing on the full green grass. She considered raising her bow, but she had no horse to carry back the meat, and if she left her kill to find the horse, surely it would attract wolves, and she had no desire to fight those off just now.
There was the brook, to the right of an enormous tree. She slowed to a halt as she took in the size of the trunk. It was as wide as the gate to her parents’ fortress.
“Who’s there!” a voice demanded.
She stumbled back, notching her bow immediately and looking to the trees. A hermit, maybe, or bandits. Her situation was not good. She could hold her own in a fight, and she had her bow, but it depended on how many of them there were.
“Her, the little one in the leather. There, you see?”
“Ah, yes, interesting.”
“Show yourself!” Reagan demanded. The voices were rough, gravely, and rich. There were two, maybe three, who had spoken.
A low voice chuckled. “Show yourself. Humans are amusing. They do struggle to see what’s right before their eyes.”
“Child, look before you, we are here.” That one sounded almost feminine, but she didn’t drop her guard, spinning on her heels and aiming the bow to the edges of the woods where bandits could hide best.
“That looks dizzying,” the third voice said.
She loosed an arrow, and it disappeared into the tree.
“Careful! You could hurt somebody with those,” a voice called, displeased.
Her hands shook as she knocked another arrow to her bow. She hadn’t meant to release it, but she was tired, shaken, and afraid. She felt raw.
“Child,” a gentle voice called behind her. Reagan turned, hands still shaking, but she saw no one, just that tree.
“We’re right here.”
“I don’t—” and then her eyes adjusted. Like spotting the stag among the wooded bramble, faces emerged from the tree trunk. She blinked, disbelieving her own eyes.
They were faces, three of them, within the trunk of the tree. What she had mistaken for the rugged cords of bark were cheeks, noses, chins, eyes… one to the left, one in the center, one to the right.
She took a step back, too stunned to speak.
“She sees us,” the left face said. They were situated snuggly around each other, but distinct in character.
“What are you?” she asked. She’d never heard of anything like this in their fairytales. Not even in the Greek myths her parents had paid a fortune to acquire. This was… something new.
“We are seers,” the right faces said.
“Seers?” That scratched her memory. “Like the fates?”
“Fate, such a tricky word. Never as clean as one might like to believe,” the center face said.
“You see the future?” she asked.
“Futures, possible versions,” the left corrected.
“Nothing is set in stone. History is organic, a living thing, like us.”
“How have I never heard of you? I’ve been all over these hills, and I know the hunters. News of your existence so close to our castle would have made it to the ears of the king and queen.”
“And so, we get to the root of it,” one said.
“We do not appear to all mankind. Almost none.”
“Why me?”
“You have a choice to make.”
The tension in her heart seized. They were talking about the marriage. What choice were they talking about? Her parents ordered it; there was no choice. Except, she saw now what should have been obvious. Her gut, the deepest part of her, had rejected this. Yoking herself to a stranger. She knew herself better than most people knew themselves, and she knew she would not survive. The part of her that thirsted for more, for the unknown, which craved freedom, bucked at the coming bondage. That’s what her nightmare had told her. Her subconscious had carried her this far, on the back of her horse, deep into the woods, without saying a word to anyone.
“A lot of people have choices to make; I’m nothing special.”
“Not so. Not so.”
“With most, that would be true.”
“But you are not most.”
“Why?” she demanded.
“Your choice will shape the future of nations.”
“History is one choice piled on top of others.”
“Piles upon piles upon piles.”
“So, one choice should not matter,” she said.
“It does. The future heads in one direction. But there are pivot points.”
“Decisions which send the future one way—”
“Or another.”
“You are one of those.”
The weight of that sat heavy on her.
“Why?”
“Noble blood.”
“Power.”
“Plans.”
“I thought you said there was no such thing as fate.”
“Fate is flexible, a stream changes course at a stone in the bend.”
“So, I have a choice.”
“You do.”
“You do.”
“You do.”
A long silence.
“I see only two options. I obey my parents’ wishes, marry a stranger possibly twice my age, and let him break me as a stable master breaks a horse. I’d be like my mother, bearing children whether I want them or not, doing needlework, and minding “women’s matters.” That, or I go my own way, an outcast, living on the road. No place to call home but the woods and the stars, fending for myself on what I hunt or forage with my own hands. There are no other options.”
“So limited, just two?”
“There’s always more than two.”
“Then what?” she demanded. “Tell me! I’m listening.”
“The unknown. The future is always unknown.”
She ground her teeth.
“So, fate itself won’t let me run.”
She fell to her knees, overcome. The tears she had gasped through in panic on her bed returned now, pouring down her face. She collapsed, her hands burying in the dirt, finding roots. This would be the end of her.
Images washed over her, emotions, faces she would, or could, encounter, the lives she could touch. A fearlessness, a freeness, a grief, and other deep emotions she could not name, surged through her. She felt herself lifted from her flesh, come outside herself to touch the stream of time, her possible fates, it was… conscious. She felt, too, the darkness of letting her fear close off whole plains of possible futures for her.
The overwhelming grip of the seers released her. The visions abandoned her, and she could not call them back. They were not hers. She was not vast enough to contain the sum of their reach. But the emotions remained, the joy, the unique, ungrounded grief of loss over roads not travelled. Life not lived. Forehead pressed to the dirt, she wept.
The gentle seer spoke.
“Even an acorn must accept death if she wishes to grow into something new.”
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