The Prize in the Game | Page 3

fine oracle-priest," he said.
Emer looked down and smiled.
"I have to go," Conal said. It had never occurred to him that Darag would have acted on Inis's divination. They were seventeen, it was a year before any of them could take up arms. A year, which Conal had been counting off by months and days. How could anyone, how could Darag and Ferdia and Laig have gone off to defy that? He felt stricken. They all spent as much time as they could practising, but even so they would not be ready to take up arms until they were eighteen, six threes of years, nobody was. It was a law of Oriel, of the whole island of Tir Isarnagiri, of the whole world as far as Conal knew.
"I must go too," Elenn said.
"We must all go," Inis said, sounding as if he knew where he was again. "I have acted without thought." He hesitated, looking from Emer to Conal, then he sighed. "Come back to the dun, we must see the king."
"What? All of us? Why?" Nid looked up from her game for the first time, pushing her hair out of her eyes.
"Darag has gone to take up arms," Elenn explained to them. Nid and Leary exchanged a startled glance, then got to their feet as Inis gestured to them. Then, without looking, he put out his hands and held back Emer and Conal, one on each side of him, and let the others go ahead. Leary and Nid at once flanked Elenn, one on each side, Leary offering her shy compliments. She did not so much as glance back at Conal.
Inis sighed again as he held Conal back. "I did wrong, but I could not have done other; so I did in all the worlds."
"You said in all the worlds, ap Fathag," Emer said. "I don't understand how it would be possible to know, without looking into every world there is." Conal grinned at her behind Inis's back. That was the way to ask Inis questions if you wanted information out of him. Conal hadn't taken much notice of Emer before. She was a year younger than the rest of them, only sixteen. She'd just gone through a growing spurt and seemed all eyes and legs. She hadn't caused disruption among the rest of them the way her sister had. He'd been concentrating on Elenn, and Darag, of course. But now it seemed that, unlike her beautiful sister, she had more wit than hair.
"Some events have such weight that they cannot be changed," Inis said. "Most times we are free to choose, and if folk choose the same in other worlds it is because they are much the same folk and so choice arises. But some things touch the way the worlds are held together and with them it feels like choice but is not."
Conal frowned, wishing this riddle made sense. Emer drew breath to speak, let it out, drew it in again. "I don't think I can tell the difference between those events and any others," she said.
Inis laughed, the laugh Conal's mother Finca called his cracked cackle. Elenn and the others ahead turned to look, but Conal gestured them on and they started walking again. "If I cannot tell after all these years looking across the worlds, then how can you hope to, child?" he asked. "Being able to tell is part of what an oracle-priest must know. I cannot tell until afterwards, and that is only the second such time in my life."
"It would be very interesting to know the other time," Conal said.
Inis grinned at him, looking almost like any old man, except for the way his head was shaved in the front and the brightly coloured shawl that would have marked him as an oracle-priest however sane he seemed. "It was when I got Conary on King Nessa," he said.
It was such an ancient scandal, from so long before Conal was born, that he was surprised to see Emer look shocked. Maybe it wasn't well known in Connat. Conal's parents didn't like to talk about it, but all the same he had known since he was five years old.
"If only two events in all your length of life have been of such stature as to hold across all the worlds, then maybe there will be none in mine," Emer said.
"Such are lucky folk," Inis said, "And such are most folk, truth told. But I do not think either of you are so lucky."
"I know better than to ask," Conal said, looking ahead through the trees to where Elenn inclined towards Leary. They were holding hands. Nid had gone a little way ahead. "You know, grandfather, though my mind is quick for the branches of learning, and though I love you, I hate learning from you.