InsaneJournal

Ficlet: Seeing the Future (Rowena, PG)
Title: Seeing the Future
Author: zephre
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Rowena gen, mention of Salazar/Helga
Word Count: 781
Summary: Sometimes the future is unexpected.
Concrit Wanted? Sure!
Notes: Part of the Beginnings Series:
The Bringer of Hope (c. 1068, Salazar/Helga)
The Wolf and the Spy, Part 1 (c. 1070, Snape, Remus, Luna, others)
I have made some linguistic changes for this series, explained in more detail elsewhere, and I have used 10th century naming conventions while trying to keep everyone recognizable.


Augg's Ward, Alba
AD 1069


Rowena inghean Crinain regarded the cards before her with resignation. They foretold naught but sorrow, of course. Divination seemed to be the focus of all one's energy to discover just how bad any situation could become. Gundar cawed from Rowena's shoulder, picking up some of his mistress's unease.

She ran her hand lighly down his feathers, tugging gently at the tail, which for some reason calmed him rather than the opposite. Her ravens were always eccentric even among their fellows, and Gundar was the strangest yet to sit beside her.

"Well, my friend," she murmured as she turned the next card. "Do we welcome them all? Can we? There must be more than this poor fortress here if Salazar's plan is to work."

The Traitor stared up at her, crossing the Queen of Swords. "Well, that is clear enough, is it not?" Gundar cawed again, an angry, raw sound. Rowena shuffled and dealt again.

"Ah. Death under the Moon. Too easy, now that Salazar has found his pet werewolf." There was much in the cards of death and betrayal, but they helped Rowena not at all.  With the Bastard of Normandy threatening from the south, and Malcolm's court still echoing with treachery after the death of Macbeth, it was no great feat of prophecy to predict death and betrayal.

It was the threat of the common amughoi that concerned Rowena more than the battles of their kings. Could they continue to ignore the scourge as witches and wizards were killed across the countryside? Alone and isolated they were vulnerable, and only a precious few had managed to Apparate to safety. The flames may not kill each time, but the rope strangled a witch as well as an amughos, and stones broke magical bones as easily as non.

"There must be an answer," Rowena told herself as she shuffled and dealt once more. This time she laid the star instead of the cross, and she saw a more promising future.
 
"Four. Really, four? Salazar, obviously. Godric, too, given what he's been up to in the village. But the fourth?" She laid another card and stared at it.

"No!" she stood up and began to pace, incensed by the vision the cards laid before her.  "I refuse that future!"

Yet she could see it so clearly. Four of them, two men and two women, linked by their powers, linked to the elements. Rowena would hold the space, for it was her land that they worked. Salazar would ward them, protect and conceal. Godric would direct and build, she could see the towers growing in her mind's eye. And at the fourth place, Helge would be the touchstone from which they drew the necessary power.

How it galled Rowena to see it! That woman, shameless and scandalous, with her brood of Salazar-sired brats and the kind of power Rowena had not seen since her brother Duncan had ruled in Alba, would take an equal place beside a daughter of kings? A puffed-up Welsh widow lately living in some Anglian hovel?  It was the sort of thing that Salazar would have found equally galling, had he not been sleeping with the wench.

Rowena turned up the last card. "Temperance. Great Merlin." Could it truly work? Was Helge the missing piece, the solution to the problem of wards that had been causing so much cursing from Godric and silent anger in Salazar? Could they do together what no one else even believed possible? Could they save their people, offer them solace and succor, make them greater than they were, so that no amughoi could threaten them again?

Gundar ran his beak gently through her hair, grooming her as she stared unseeing out the window. Her inner eye could see the future now, the village grown in size, the lake a home to creatures of all kinds, a forest of wonders at their doorstep, preserved unto the next thousand years from the wars and fears of the amughoi. She could feel the castle rising up around her, its walls embracing the stones of Drustan's poor fortress, expanding it with mortar and magic. It would move, it would grow, it would feel.

Perhaps she had been too hasty in her judgment. Did not Malcolm himself say that was her besetting sin? There was work in the world that was greater than any one witch.

"Perhaps," she mused aloud, her fingers gentle and hypnotic on Gundar's back, "there is hope after all. We will begin it now."

Rowena sat down at her desk and wrote a note inviting Helge filia Ceyndeyrn to her table. With such small first steps are great journeys begun.

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*amughoi, "those without magic," Latin transliteration of a Greek word, from the Indo-Iranian magu. This eventually comes into English as "Muggle"