Future

ALEEN and Bregdon met on the eve of the prophet’s birthing day. The transfer did not take long. He laid hands on Aleen and spoke words she did not understand, and she felt a great warmth shake into her, and then, at the end of it, a quickening, new life, rising within at the very moment the life of the prophet before her sank into death. His body fell limply to the ground, and she buried him on the top of his hill and went home alone.

Aleen gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, and she was very happy.

She named her daughter Adrian, and she raised her to be good and kind and brave. Adrian had the rare gift of shape-shifting, which Aleen had no knowledge how to tame, but Aleen taught her daughter everything else she knew of magic. Adrian fell in love with a village man Aleen did not like very well, but Aleen knew the ways of love, and she would not keep her daughter from it. She knew that to deny her daughter the beauty of love that she had chosen for herself would be to drive a wedge right down the middle of them all. And so Aleen let Adrian marry the man. And Aleen Saw, in her prophetess way, that her daughter, too, was barren.

But it was a different future she saw for Adrian.

Perhaps it was because Aleen was not ready to die before she could see Jem again, before she could find him, before she could look on his face that was surely wildly different from the one she had once loved. She wanted to meet his family and his children and the people he had come to know in his life. She wanted to assure herself that he had lived a happy life.

And so, rather than give her daughter the gift of a baby, as Bregdon had once given her, Aleen went in search of the baby she had Seen in her visions. She found the child in an abandoned cottage inside some unknown woods, many miles from White Wind.

The baby was fair of skin and quiet of nature, the opposite of Adrian in every way. Aleen picked her up, and the visions she saw shocked her. She knew what this little girl would do. She knew it would not be an easy path for a child. But she knew this girl was the exact right one for what was coming. Aleen would help her. She would see that the girl grew up brave and strong and bold, as she needed to be for the future that would be asked of her.

So she delivered the baby girl to her daughter, and she loved her granddaughter with a love that was vast and wild and fierce enough to keep her visions focused and true all the years of her life, even after her daughter took the child to the land of Fairendale.

The baby girl was called Cora.