Work Text:
The first time I met her was a cold night in April, not quite raining but still too overcast to make it a good idea go outside without a coat. She shivered, the chill lingering even now that I'd allowed her into my foyer; her lacy dress had been scant protection against the weather.
"People say you can tell their fortunes," she said.
"People say a lot of things," I said. Telling your neighbors' fortunes is risky business; prophecy bad luck and they'll be angry at you now, prophecy good luck and they'll be just as angry in three months.
"Will you tell mine?" she asked.
I knew what people said about her. That she'd come back from the war ten years ago, the only one in her regiment who had survived an ambush; that she claimed to live on her military pension, though there was no chance the meager sum could possibly support her lifestyle; that she was not afraid to walk the streets of Ravenswood Bluff at night, even on moonless nights.
But there was a hint of desperation in her eyes, and a strained note in her voice, and I was hardly about to turn her back out into the cold. I gestured at her to sit down by the fireplace and went to retrieve my tools.
I lit a candle from my hearth and set it in an ornate silver fixture, then gestured at her to do the same. They were small candles, too small to be much good for anything but this, and wouldn't take too long to burn down enough for my purposes. We watched their flames flicker in silence as the wax began to melt, until eventually enough hot wax had pooled in the base of their fixtures that I was ready to proceed.
I blew out the candles, poured the hot wax from each into a bowl of water, freshly chilled from sitting on my back porch, and set the bowl on the floor to watch the wax cool. I had just enough light from the hearth to make out the shapes. (Not enough, not quite, to make out her expression.)
The wax twisted and curled, eventually forming into the shape of a pair of trees, as ripples in the bowl formed the winds that threatened to knock them over. The trees bent, but did not break; as the ripples subsided, they morphed again, the tree's branches turning into a set of fingers as two hands reached out for each other.
"What does that... mean?" she whispered.
"There are trials ahead of you," I said. "That was the wind, blowing against the trees."
"Mmm."
I could hear a note of skepticism in her voice as I mentioned the trees. Those untrained in the art of ceromancy often struggled to discern the shape of the wax, even when it was much clearer than this. I wished for a moment that I had seen something more definitive, something that could prove what I was telling her; it wasn't as if it took particular skill to guess that there would be some sort of difficulty in her future.
"But the trials will not break you, as the wind did not break the tree," I continued. "By reaching out to your confidants, you can find the strength to weather them. ...That was the hands."
"Mmm," she said again, but this time her voice sounded more thoughtful than skeptical. "That was helpful, yes. You have my gratitude."
The next time I met her was at the funeral for one of my distant cousins. They'd strung him up for murder, and — I hadn't believed he was capable of it, I'd tried to speak in his defense when he'd first been accused — but I had been afraid to defend him more vigorously, afraid the crowd would call out for my blood next, and now he was dead.
It was as cold as the day I had first met her, but sometime in the intervening months she'd apparently learned not to mind it.
"When you told me there were trials ahead of me, is this what you meant?" she asked.
"No! I meant — challenges. Heavy burdens, but normal ones, a plague outbreak or something. Not — this."
She studied my face for a few seconds, her eyes dipping momentarily to my hands before returning to meet my gaze. "It's a tragedy, really. One person speaks against him, and the whole mob follows. He was still so young."
I nodded, feeling for the first time like someone understood. Like there was someone who wasn't going to condemn me just for thinking he wouldn't have killed his neighbor, certainly not for reasons so pointless as the ones he'd been accused of. "It isn't right," I said, before I could stop myself.
"It isn't," she said.
The next time I spoke to her was the last.
She found me in my house, staring desperately at wax shapes that refused to resolve into anything but the point of a sword. "I need your help," she said. "Do you trust me?"
It was an odd question. It felt sometimes like she was the only person in the entire town who really understood how I felt. So many people's futures had been cut off for nothing, and sometimes it felt like half my neighbors thought the only problem was that we hadn't strung up more people.
Maybe she was just used to people mistrusting her. Maybe there was nothing else to it.
"Of course," I said.
She breathed an audible sigh of relief. "I want to end the killings," she said. "I think we can. We just have to — stop mobbing people, stop accusing them of consorting with forbidden powers or whatever the latest nonsense is—"
I nodded, thinking back to the way my cousin's body had looked when they took him down. If he were here now, what would he say — that he'd been falsely accused, of course, but what else?
"You're right," I said. "I — did you think I wouldn't be—"
"No, no, of course not," she said. She hesitated, just for a moment, as something flickered across her face, then dove on. "But it'll be easiest if we're all agreed, you know? There's someone else I've brought in, the man who owns the mine, he thinks we can rewrite the laws to stop this from happening. No one else has to die."
I didn't like the man who owned the mine. But — well, I'd told her she needed to work with other people to survive the challenges ahead of her. I couldn't very well complain about her telling me the same thing.
"Of course," I said. "What do you need me to do?"
She hesitated for a moment, and something flickered in her eyes. "Just follow my lead," she said. "And don't let anyone trick you into pointing fingers."