I pushed the memory away, looking away from the woman before me, from the concern in her eyes, and went back to removing the rocks with renewed vigor—or would it be furious frustration?—freeing her in ten seconds flat.
“He deserves to pay for that, Wyn. I’m ready for all this to be over, but I’m not really ready for everything that comes between now and the ending I’ve seen.” Her voice was low and garbled, the consonants blending together so much I was having a bit of trouble understanding her.
“I know,” I said as I moved to stand, the dust in the air making it hard to breathe. “But you have to get through the bad in order to find the good.”
“There isn’t a lot of good around us right now,” she sighed. Both of us knew how hard that was to find right now.
“What did you do before there was magic?” The volume in my voice caught us both off guard. “When it was just you and no magic and no sights and no Drak, when it was just us going off into the night to crash Ryland’s graduation party?”
“We crashed Ryland’s graduation party.” She repeated my words back to me in an answer that was so sarcastic that, for a split second, she actually sounded like the teenager she was.
I tried to restrain the eye roll, but it came, anyway. In that way, we were a lot alike.
“Did we know if we were going to succeed?” I asked, plowing on in a desperate need to get to my point.
“No.” A tiny bit of a groan. At least she was catching on, even if she didn’t seem happy about it.
I plowed on before she had a chance to stop me. “Did we have a definitive outcome?”
“No … But, Wyn, we … We didn’t succeed.”
I smiled at how fast my set up had worked and turned to her with that same sly smile, the look on my face frustrating her more, and she groaned again.
“You’re right. We didn’t. We failed. But did the world end?”
She said nothing; she glared at me with those wide eyes, the silver so full of irritation I couldn’t help laughing, something that pissed her off more.
“No.” It was a growl more than a word.
I laughed harder.
“Did we keep trying?” My voice rose in excitement as I drove my point home.
The lines in Joclyn’s forehead increased with every word. She needed to stop that. We might be immortal, but that didn’t protect against wrinkles. I mean, had she seen Dramin?
“Did we keep fighting?”
She knew the answer to all of these as well as I did—yes, yes, we did—but I could already tell she was firmly standing her ground, too stubborn to say it, too scared to admit what came after.
“But what if we fail this time, too?” Her voice was a whisper.
“Then we try again.”
“But the sights—”
“And what if there were no sights, Jos?” I interrupted her steadily, not letting her disrupt my flow. “What if we had nothing to guide us and no guarantee of victory? We would still try. We did for centuries before you came along, and we will for centuries after if we need to. So what if you can see the future? If you told me anything, it’s that what you see isn’t set in stone. You’ve changed it before, so let’s change it again. Stop trying to guess what’s going to happen next and just find out for certain. There is more to see in life than the future, Jos. Sometimes, we have to look to the past to see the whole story.”
There it was—the answer that not only she needed, but I needed, as well. It scared the bejesus out of me to even think the sights could be wrong, that I could lose Thom the same way I had lost Talon, the same way I had lost all the others. In the end, even if I did lose them, I would do as I always had. I would keep moving, keep doing what I had always done. More than surviving, more than trying, I would find another way to succeed.
It was what we all needed to do: keep moving, find another path, find the courage to try again.
“You’re the queen, Jos. Ilyan chose you for a reason. The magic mud hole chose you for a reason. The Vil? that bit you chose you for a reason. Who cares what the reason was? Accept it, own it, and be it.”
It was the pep talk of the century. At least, that was what I was going to label it as. And judging by the way Jos was staring at me—with the look of someone who had just been slapped—I was going to have to count that as a win.
I knew I had probably given her way too much to chew on, and without knowing what was in her head … Well, it might have been too much. But I didn’t care. She needed to hear it.
Maybe I needed to, as well.
Knowing me, I probably did.
Mommy?
Her voice cut through the calm that had begun to move through the cathedral. It cut through me where I stood beside my best friend, a vivid reminder of what I had said, of why I needed to keep going. Why I needed to find a way to succeed.
Where are you, Mommy?
With a flinch, my magic rushed to the tips of my fingers in a violent wave. I was barely able to restrain it before it burst out of me, the impulse strong enough I had no doubt it was noticed.