Vaguely, Sarah wondered whether that was why her abilities had gotten so much stronger in the last week, because Tucker had made sure she’d eaten on a regular basis; before that, she had been very prone to skipping meals.
“He took care of you by instinct,” Leigh agreed, her tone casual as though part of the conversation had not happened silently. “That’s rare, you know. He values what you can do, even if he’s still adjusting to it. He’ll never ask you to be less than you are. And—he’s a bit psychic himself, though he isn’t aware of it. You couldn’t have chosen a better champion.”
Champion. An old word, used the way Leigh used it, but Sarah knew it fit. She ate a cracker absently and said aloud, “I didn’t choose him. I just…accepted him when he came.”
Leigh smiled. “Is that what you did?”
“It’s what I thought I did. I thought I was just…following the path I had to follow.”
“But that was your choice, wasn’t it? To follow the path?”
“I suppose. Except…I always had the feeling that even if I tried to do just the opposite, I’d still end up on the path somehow.”
“You might have. Fate has a way of being insistent about some things, no matter what we do. In any case, you haven’t followed blindly, Sarah. You’ve struggled and questioned. That’s important. We do control our own destinies, you know. In the end. Often imperfectly, but our lives and our fates are what we make of them.”
Sarah frowned. “Then what I saw, my vision…”
“Was a possible future. But not the only one.”
“Someone told me that there was a difference between prediction and prophecy. That one might come true—but the other always does.”
“An arguable point, I suppose. But it’s been my experience that the future is a series of infinite possibilities. Each step we take toward it, each choice and decision, alters the possibilities. This journey is important for you. We all have at least one in our lives, a path that leads us to a crossroads where we have to make the decisions that will determine our future. It’s a path you have to follow.”
Sarah felt a stab of uneasiness. The other woman was smiling, but there was still that darkness lurking and this talk of destiny…“But you said we controlled our destinies.”
Leigh laughed softly. “Sarah, hasn’t it occurred to you that what you foresaw was your future as you decided it would be?”
She blinked. “What?”
“Think about it. You saw a series of images, of symbols. You saw a journey culminating in—what?”
“Death. My death.”
Leigh didn’t seem surprised. “It’s quite likely that was purely symbolic. In visions, the death of the seer often represents a sudden and drastic change in one’s life. A crossroads where a choice must be made. The end of a way of life, of a way of thinking.”
That didn’t reassure Sarah terribly since she had some idea of what would happen if the other side got their hands on her.
The end of a way of life, indeed.
“All right. But you said—it was my future as I decided it would be?”
“Sarah, even the best and strongest of psychics must see through intensely subjective eyes. You might be objective when seeing someone else’s future but never when it’s your own. You know yourself, know your thoughts and wishes and hopes and dreams, and everything you see is filtered through that knowledge even if only subconsciously. So when your mind leaps through time to peek at the future, it’s with the total awareness of your own nature.”
“I still don’t…”
“All right. Think about Tucker. Do you really believe that you accepted him and his help because destiny insisted you should? Or had your mind looked ahead, seen him, known how it was in your nature to respond to him—and offered you a future possibility in which you did just that?”
Sarah thought about that for a long time, turning it over in her mind. She was hardly aware of Leigh’s steady gaze, or of absently eating two more crackers and finishing her coffee.
Finally, she said slowly, “That’s…a lot more complex than I thought it was. And confusing. How can I trust any of what I see if it’s all so subjective? What’s the good of being able to see the future if there are so many possible interpretations of what I see?”
Leigh smiled faintly. “Did you really think this was a good thing?”
Sarah gazed into those old, old eyes and slowly shook her head. “No. No, I didn’t.”
“It’s neither good nor bad,” Leigh told her. “It’s just another sense, like sight or hearing; your eyes and your ears can be fooled. So can this. You can mistake what you see or hear; you can mistake what this sense tells you as well. You can strain your eyes in bad light or too much light, or hurt your ears listening to loud noises; you can injure this sense too.”
“How?”
“By overworking it. By misusing it. By not allowing it the time and quiet to develop properly.”
Sarah heard a warning and shook her head. “I don’t have time. You know that.”
“You have to find Tucker.”
“Yes.”