00:00She predicted his death every single morning.
00:04And every single morning, Prince K.L. walked through her door anyway.
00:10Tuesday, Thessaly said, without looking up from the silver bowl of ink-black water between her hands.
00:17Her fingers were stained to the wrist.
00:20They always were.
00:22The visions came whether she invited them or not.
00:25You die on a Tuesday.
00:28Sword through the left side.
00:30Someone you trust.
00:32You told me Monday last week.
00:34The future is revising itself.
00:37She finally looked at him.
00:39Her eyes, when the sight was on her, were the color of a wound, which should considerably more than it
00:45seems to.
00:47K.L. pulled up a chair, sat backwards on it, and smiled the smile that had reportedly destabilized three foreign
00:54courts.
00:55Or, he said, it means I have time.
01:00She stared at him.
01:01How much time?
01:03He asked.
01:05Thessaly looked back into the water.
01:07The ink swirled into shapes she didn't want to read.
01:10His face, always his face, lit golden in some visions, and ash gray in others.
01:17Not enough, she said quietly.
01:20Never enough.
01:21She had been the crown's oracle since she was 14, collared to the throne by the sight binding, a chain
01:28of old magic that meant she could not refuse a royal's question, and could not lie in her answering.
02:03The collar wasn't visible.
02:05Thessaly had controlled the eastern water routes, and less publicly, a private army of sight killers, assassins specifically trained to
02:13hunt and eliminate oracles before they could warn the courts they served.
02:18Someone wants the throne blind, Thessaly had told him.
02:22Someone wants me specifically blind, he'd corrected.
02:26There's a difference.
02:28He'd started sleeping outside her chamber door after that.
02:31She told him it was unnecessary.
02:34He'd said, humor me.
02:36You're a prince.
02:37I'm not in the habit of humoring you.
02:39You are the only person in this palace who isn't.
02:43A pause, his voice lower.
02:45I find it remarkable.
02:46I thought you should know.
02:48She'd spent the next three hours staring at the ceiling, which was deeply inconvenient.
02:54The visions were changing, too.
02:57Less death, more something she had no adequate word for.
03:02Kale's hands in hers.
03:04His voice saying her name without the formal intonation everyone else used.
03:09Like it was something he'd chosen rather than been assigned.
03:13She stopped recording those in her official journals.
03:16Some things felt too much like hope to be catalogued.
03:20The sight binding could be broken.
03:23She found it in the deep archive, a handwritten addendum in the original binding covenant.
03:29Two hundred years old, ink so faded she had to hold a candle to it.
03:35The chain dissolves upon the willing death of the oracle, or upon.
03:40The next word had been deliberately scratched out.
03:44Someone had known.
03:46Someone had always known there was another way to free her, and they had removed it.
03:51She brought it to Kale at midnight.
03:54Watched him read it twice, jaw-tightening.
03:57Watched him look up at her with an expression that cracked something open in the room.
04:02Someone in my family did this, he said.
04:06Yes.
04:08To keep you.
04:10Owned.
04:11She said it plainly, because she'd had years to make peace with plain things.
04:17Yes.
04:18He set the document down very carefully, like it might catch fire.
04:23I'm going to find the missing word, he said.
04:28Not a question.
04:30Not a royal command.
04:32Just a promise.
04:34Made to her specifically, in the quiet dark.
04:38She believed him.
04:40That was the most dangerous thing she'd ever done.
04:42The Duchess's sight killers came on a Tuesday.
04:47Thessaly saw them 40 seconds before they breached the wards.
04:5040 seconds of screaming the alarm.
04:54It also, she had just discovered, meant she could push a vision outward like a weapon.
05:00She hadn't known she could do that.
05:03Neither had the first sight killer, who walked directly into a projected vision of his own worst memory and crumpled.
05:10Kale handled the remaining three with a ruthless efficiency that reminded her he had not, in fact, survived three attempted
05:17coups on charm alone.
05:19When it was over, he was bleeding from his left side.
05:23Her breath stopped.
05:26It's shallow, he said immediately, reading her face.
05:29Thessaly, look at me.
05:30It's shallow.
05:32She pressed her hand over the wound and looked into the water vision that always lived behind her eyes,
05:36and saw, for the first time in four years, no version of his death at all.
05:42The prediction is gone, she said.
05:45He covered her hand with his.
05:47Then we have time, he said.
05:49Like I told you.
05:51The Duchess's alliance collapsed within a fortnight.
05:54The sight killers, without their patron's protection, scattered.
06:00Kale dissolved the betrothal formally, publicly, and with a speech his advisors described as
06:07diplomatically catastrophic, and that Thessaly, privately, found perfect.
06:13He brought her the full covenant the following week, the original, excavated from a locked fault his grandmother had sealed.
06:21The missing word?
06:22Restored.
06:23Red love.
06:25She read it three times.
06:28Willing death, she said slowly.
06:31Or, yes, he said.
06:34She looked up.
06:36I've been aware, he added, for quite some time.
06:40The binding loosened that night.
06:42Not gone, not yet, but changed.
06:46Like something preparing to release.
06:50And Thessaly, who had spent a decade watching Futures on Spool and Blackwater,
06:55looked into the bowl one final time,
06:57and saw something she had no framework for.
07:01A crown.
07:03Not Kale's crown.
07:05Not any crown she recognized.
07:08And beside it, her own hands, unstained, reaching for it.
07:15She didn't tell him.
07:16Not yet.
07:18Some Futures, she was learning, deserved to arrive on their own terms.
07:23Not yet.
07:23Not yet.
07:23Not yet.
07:23Not yet.
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