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waited. But he was not drawing his words from the sky, rather waiting for them to form within him and bubble up.
    And then he spoke, stilted, reading from a page that did not exist:
Moonlight on water brings Nature’s daughter,
    Swift-bred terror and sorrow of slaughter.
    Silver and sickle, the healing hand,
    Find the shell’s song; bring rain upon land.
    I waited, then burst out: “That is no fortune. That is a verse of poem.”
    “Nonetheless it belongs to you.”
    “But it means nothing to me!” I came out of the water, shaking the wet from my sandals. “Can you not say that I will die here? That the marsh will swallow me—something that makes sense?”
    “Those would be the things that do not make sense, for that will not happen.”
    “Why not? Because you speak some fanciful words? Because I gave you my heliotrope? If this is not your home, then I will make it mine. I will stay here, grow old here. Tend the goats.” I’d made that up. I was disappointed he’d given me no clear fortune, annoyed that my own choices were so simply negated.
    But he laughed at me. “You will not, the one Healer, any more than you will take your own life with an herb. You toy with your little idea of death, thinking you are sad to be left alone. You blame your gift of healing for your hesitation, but that is not why you hold on to life. You do not see—”
    “Don’t say that! You know nothing of me!”
    “I will say it. It is you who know nothing, silly girl. This is not your time. You are needed.”
    “Needed?” How dare he talk of changed fate, so smugly dangled like bait! “How am I needed?”
    Harker walked back toward me and inspected me for a minute. “You are not shy like your cousin,” he said. “You are hardly timid. Yet you share some of her stubbornness, and maybe more. Not unlike the others.”
    “What others?”
    “Your cousin told you nothing of her journey!” The seer announced this with delight, but immediately contorted in agony. He swerved, swore, and spun around, crying to the space around us, “I do not have to tell! I do not have to tell!” And in the next breath he cringed, hissing to himself: “Your fault, so your duty to bear…” The protests grew to indistinct whines and faded. Then the seer shook himself, recovered, then looked at me coyly again. “She told you nothing, Healer, which makes you most ignorant. Unfortunate for one so curious.”
    I
was
curious, gruelingly so. But I changed tactics, refusing to ask anything more, since the more I questioned the more he evaded. After a moment he repeated, taunting: “Nature’s daughter, one of the
four.
”
    I bit my tongue, waited.
    He moved a little then, fixing me with his gaze. “Single daughters of twin mothers, born on the same day in the same hour. Alike and yet opposite.”
    Harker was speaking of Lark, of me, of our nearly sister connection. He said it like a chant:
    “Her hair runs brown like the falling leaf, and yours is the rippling moonlight on a lake. Her eyes are the hazel of a new acorn and yours are the blue of the sea. Her skin is touched by sun, yours is the pale of the full moon.” He shuffled a little more, circling slowly so that he was almost behind me. “She stays quiet like a fawn; you move easily in company. She wears her feelings; you suffocate yours. So different. And yet…” Harker lifted his scarred hand to point at my back. “What is alike between you? What do you share with your dearest Lark?”
    I knew, small as it was. “We share a birthmark.”
    The seer nodded. “Yes. A mark. Just there above the blade edge of your left shoulder.” He reached a finger to touch it; I shivered, jerked away, and turned on him—
    He pulled back, cowering and shouting, “I am sorry! I am sorry! I am sorry!”
    “You did nothing…” I protested, but stopped. Harker was not apologizing to me; he was looking up to the empty, intense blue.
    There was silence while he searched, waiting for some answer, and then