“One question,” I said. “Why, under the seven points of power, did you think that not telling me this theory was in any way to my benefit?”

“Because it’s probably not true! You were right; it’s a bit of a reach. The terms are vague and something else – ”

“And if it is true?”

“What if it is? Does it help you to know? Just as you said, there’s nothing we can do about it! Are you any better off now than you were five minutes ago? There’s nothing actionable in the prophecy, just inevitable doom!”

“Of course there’s something actionable! What about the ‘jailers’?”

“Who cares about them?”

“Me! And you, I hope! Given the context, the ‘jailers’ are probably the higher-ups in this school that has us trapped – including Alania. Or the ones who arranged to bring me here and pursuaded me to sign the contract – including Instruktanto Cooper. Or the whole of Refujeyo, including… oh, most of the people I care about.”

“Actually, the ‘jailers’ are probably whoever successfully bound your curse.”

“You mean my parents?!”

“Oh. Sorry, I didn’t think.”

“Apparently not!” I clenched my teeth and forced myself to take a few deep, calming breaths. I wasn’t angry at Max; Max hadn’t done anything wrong. These were definitely ‘freaking out’ circumstances, but freaking out at him wasn’t helping. “Right. Well. Anyway. Thank you for telling me.” I headed back towards the school, but Max grabbed my elbow.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t do whatever harebrained scheme you’re cooking up in a fit of misplaced heroism to… well… as a result of this.”

It took me a few seconds to realise what he was implying. “Max, what the fuck? I’m not going to commit suicide as a response to some half-baked maybe-true reading of a prophecy.”

“… Oh. Well, good.”

“Do you honestly think I’m that dumb? Really?”

“Well, people can be… rash, if loved ones might be in danger, so…”

“‘Might be’. I lived in their house with a curse for fourteen years. This isn’t my first rodeo.”

“… Oh. Oh.” Max’s eyes widened a little as he stared at me, and it occurred to me that he probably hadn’t had cause to think through what growing up as a witch was like. “Well, um. Anyway. The prophecy is probably about something else. The one thing we know about your curse is that it’s been very resistant to waking up.”

“Or hasn’t met the right conditions yet. Conditions that we don’t know, and could happen at any time.”

“I’m sorry,” was all he said.

I shrugged and turned back to the school. “You didn’t curse me.”

As I walked away, I could’ve sworn I heard him mumble under his breath, “Not with that one, I didn’t.”

Out of respect for Max’s desire for caution, I found an excuse to take Kylie out of range of the intranet before sharing his theory with her. She thought for a bit, idly pulling up grass from the field we’d settled in, then shook her head.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think that sounds right at all.”

“Oh. Good.” I’d doubted it myself, but her certainty was reassuring. “Um, why?”

“Okay. Um. Just to make sure I’ve got all of this clear. Max’s theory is that, first, the “child” in the prophecy is your spell, for pretty much the same reasons you thought it was originally, and that the prophecy describes it awakening. And second, that you’re the “hero”, because that makes sense with your connection to the “child”. Third, the prophecy isn’t about saving you, because it specifies that’s not possible, so it’s for whoever the ‘jailers’ are, which could be any number of people in context. Right?”

“Yeah.”

“Right. So, I really don’t think the Destiny is going to start prophesying for spells. It’s only ever prophesied for people. Sure, the description of the Child sounds all nice and neat when you’re right there with a spell in your heart, but easy answers aren’t always correct. That’s not how this prophecy’s ever worked.”

“You’re sure?”

“Well… no. A year ago I would’ve been, but there’s a lot about this spell I don’t know, it seems. I’ll ask Lydia more about how it works and if it’s ever prophesied for anything that isn’t human before. But that’s not the important bit. It doesn’t really matter who the Child is right now – what matter is, you’re not the Hero.”

“Great! How do you know?”

“Firstly, Max has absolutely no reason to believe that you are. He’s guessing, based on the fact that he thinks your spell is in the prophecy, that you must be, too; but from the structure of the spell, if you were there, wouldn’t you be a jailer? Someone imprisoning the Child? You’re not a jailer, either, but you definitely aren’t the Hero. The spell says that the jailers’ safety can be bought with ‘a single Child sacrifice’ and to ‘prepare its heart in offering’. It’s specifically talking about the Child’s heart. But your spell doesn’t have a heart. You do.”

“Well, sure. But in the context of the poem, one could argue that it probably still means my – ”

“Yes, one could. The Destiny might fudge something like that, keeping the intent clear, to avoid introducing another actor into the prophecy. But the Hero is already in the Prophecy. It’s usually clear about these kinds fo things; if you were the Hero, the line would be ‘lay Hero’s heart in offering’, or something like that. So either you’re not the Hero, or it’s not about your heart, or both.”

That… made sense. That made a lot of sense. “Good. Good. That’s good.”

“And of course, the prophecy isn’t for the jailers. It’s for either the Hero or the Child, meaning at least one of those is in danger but can be saved.”

“It specifies that the Hero can’t, so it has to be the Child.”

“It says the Hero’s life can’t be saved, and that the Hero ‘dies’. That probably does mean literally, but it might be a radical metamorphosis kind of thing, becoming a new person with a new life.”

“Now it sounds like you’re reaching.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“How do you know it’s not a prophecy for the jailers?”

“The, uh… structure?… is wrong. The prophecies tell of death or misfortune, giving enough information to have a chance of avoiding it, right? And that’s the focus – the danger to be avoided. The first one about you, the Heartbound one, explained where you were and how you were about to die. The one about Max and Alania’s staff, the Staffbreaker one, explained where he was and what he was doing and how he was about to die. The one we have now, the Heiress one, explains what Saina will be doing and how she’s going to die. That’s the structure of these things. If this one’s supposed to be about the Jailers and you’re the Hero whose fate is just context, then why aren’t the Jailers mentioned until the last third? It doesn’t even tell us what danger they’re facing. It gives vague advice instead of a proper description of their possible future. So, this prophecy isn’t about them.”

“The Destiny ha been giving a lot of vague advice lately.”

“Yes, but not in the form of these rhyming disaster poems.”

Fair. The rhyming prophecies were qualitatively different to the random snippets of advice it had handed out. The Destiny’s random advice didn’t hijack my train of thought and etch itself into my brain, for one thing. This poem had, so we could probably assume it behaved like the other poems.

“Does it feel the same to you as it does to me?” I asked, because there was no time like the present to ask.

Kylie blinked. “What?”

“The prophecy. When it does those, those big rhyming ones. How does it feel for you?”

She shrugged. “Like nothing. You know that. I space out and can’t remember.”

“Oh. Right.”

“How does it feel for you?”

“Um. Creepy? It, um… it kind of… hijacks my brain, I guess? Not the whole brain,” I added quickly, at the sudden look of horror on her face. “It just hijacks my train of thought. Like getting a song stuck in your head, except it takes my entire focus, it doesn’t leave me any for anything else. Although now that I say it out loud, that does kind of sound like how you look when you prophesy. You go all blank and it’s like the Destiny just takes you over. Maybe I’m getting a diluted form of it.”

“Hmm. Maybe. That is consistent with how Lydia describes how the spell’s supposed to work. Apparently most of its hosts have some control or awareness when casting it, which I haven’t managed yet; probably because we’re outside of Fionnrath. A prophecy does two things – it perceives something humans can’t, and it communicates that thing to humans. The rest is just training and refining what it can see and how it tells you. Like the kuracar, at least the half of it that’s a prophecy, sees human body structures and how they differ from the average human body structures it already knows, and then puts that information in Kuracar Malas’ mind. The Destiny sees the future, and is supposed to communicate the part of it that affects Fionnrath for better or worse, but spells aren’t smart enough to do something that complicated and, and context-dependent on their own. Lydia says it borrows brainpower, you might say, from its host. She thinks that’s why it’s only prophesying in English for me – English is the only language that I and the Destiny both know.”

“… Huh.”

“Hmm?”

“I’m just thinking. Are we sure that Fionnrath’s Destiny prophesies for the good of Fionnrath?”

“Uh, yeah? That’s its job?”

“Sure. But since Fionnrath’s founding, it’s been inside the town, right? And specifically, inside people who consider it their life’s mission to serve the good of the town. Since you’ve had it, it hasn’t said anything about Fionnrath. Instead, not counting this Child prophecy and the Heiress prophecy, which were both given under kind of weird circumstances, it’s only ever prophesied for the people you really care about, right?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“So, are we sure that the spell is trained to prophesy for Fionnrath at all? Maybe it relies entirely on who its host thinks is important.”

“That… makes a lot of sense. Hmm. We probably shouldn’t tell Lydia about that.”

“Yeah. Nothing good can come of her suspecting it.”

“I don’t see why it matters to us, though. Aside from being kind of interesting.”

I shrugged. It mattered, because Max thought that Fionnrath’s Destiny had escaped the town intentionally and with specific motives, probably infiltrating and bringing down Refujeyo. But if the spell didn’t have motives, and only took cues on what was important from its host, then that was unlikely. And even if it had happened, it was no longer relevant, because it would now be taking its cues from Kylie, who I was pretty sure had no such plans.

I wondered why Max hadn’t told Kylie his theory about her spell’s reason for choosing her. The answer was obvious – he didn’t want the prophecy to ‘know’ he was onto it – but it seemed kind of pointless to try to keep information from a prophecy that could see the future. Max seemed to think that the Destiny was far more intelligent and sophisticated than Kylie did, than even Lydia did, and I had no idea how reliable that was. Max did know a lot more about how magic worked in general than Kylie or I, but Kylie had been learning a lot about prophecies in particular, and Lydia was an expert on this specific prophecy. I was starting to suspect that Max’s theory about the prophecy’s purpose here was just more of his overcaution, like how he’d freaked out that we were all going to go to jail forever or something the first time Kylie and I had ended up at Duniyasar. Max was afraid of magic; if I wanted to know how dangerous sharks were, I wouldn’t trust the opinion of a guy who was terrified of sharks, especially not while we were stranded in the open ocean.

It seemed like the more I learned or reasoned about anything that was going on, the less I knew. I just needed something, some new detail, to put everything in perspective and make it all click into place.

And I had no idea where to find one.