I lived with Osburga until the season started to turn, and the cold set in, the mornings frosty and the evenings holding a chill that crept into my bones. I had seen my father once, his eyes understanding, even if he was sad. He knew he couldn’t protect me. Only another woman like me had a chance of doing that.

Osburga didn’t teach me anything about the sight. We gathered herbs, and dug roots and chopped ingredients for soups and potions, and sometimes a man would show up and she would send me out of the cottage for a few hours. She slept soundly at night, thought I would wake at the faintest scratch in the forest. She said I would get used to it. As the autumn stretched on, I wondered if she was right about that like she was right about nearly everything else.

“You’re too careful,” she said one wintery morning, when not even the fire could warm me. She was sipping mead from her mug, and gnawing a hunk of bread, wrapped in a huge blanket as she sat at the table. I was crouched near the hearth, warming my hands, watching the flames, listening to the fire crackle. It reminded me of the snap of the horse’s leg.

“Don’t want to get burned,” I said over my shoulder.

“I wasn’t talking about the fire,” Osburga said.

I had known that, but I was afraid of her pushing me. This was not the first time that she had commented on my timidity. “How do I conquer the fear?” I asked, wanting more. The taste of something greater was within reach, but I couldn’t quite open myself to it. It had killed my gran, and driven my mother away. Why did I want it?

“You don’t conquer the fear, little witch,” she said. The term was endearing now, after months of it rolling off her tongue. “You accept the fear, and go forth in spite of it.”

“Accept the fear,” I echoed. My hands and face were finally warm. I stood and turned by backside to the hearth. I met her gaze as I tugged my shawl tighter around me. Osburga sipped from her mug without taking her eyes from me. I felt my throat tighten, and my mouth go nearly dry as I thought about all that I had seen of my mother’s journey from home. I had learned how to see her, to follow her path from our village to the forest, and from the forest to the open wild lands, and to a churchyard where she had met a nun, and then into a nunnery. The sight had taken me with her across these years. I could see where she had been, but I still did not know where she was.

“Perhaps she is still in the convent,” I said. Osburga and I had talked about this often. She knew that it was the last thing I could see about my mother. She went with the sister into the convent. She did not wear a habit when she went to prayer. That was all that I knew. “Maybe that’s why I can’t see her. I can’t see things that are, only things that were.”

Osburga was still studying me. She took another sip from her mug. The fire was roasting my rear, so I took a step towards her. She put the mug down on the table, and took a bite of the bread in her other hand. Saying nothing as I reasoned out a problem was Osburga’s preferred method of instruction. She said nothing, so I knew I had gotten it wrong.

“Accept the fear, ” I said again. Osburga continued chewing slowly. I sighed and crossed the room to the table, sitting opposite her. She tore off a hunk of the bread and passed it to me. I bit into it and methodically chewed along with her.

“Did you know that King Eadwig is ill?” she asked me.

A test. Osburga could see what was as easily as she could see what had been. She wanted me to accept the fear to see for myself.

A shiver ran over me, one that wasn’t related to the chill in the house. It was the kind of chill that accompanied a fever. Fear shook me. A fever could kill. I swallowed the lump in my throat, waiting for what the sight would show me. I closed by eyes, slowed my breathing, and felt the fear in my belly like a stone. I focused on it, drifting down to meet it. I opened to it, and then suddenly, I saw him. King Eadwig was burning with fever, in a grand bed, nearly out of his mind with pain. There were men standing around the bed, observing, powerless to do anything for him but offer beer and wine. He was sweating, and his skin was pale, like death had already touched him. I pressed a hand to my face, feeling the fever in my own cheek.

“He’s dying,” I croaked, my throat tight with fear. It was not to be spoken. The King was anointed by God. To speak of his death was to speak a curse.

I opened my eyes, peeling myself away from the vision that the sight had given me. Osburga was smiling at me. “Do you think they will accuse a woman of bewitching him?” she asked.

I knew nothing about King Eadwig, except that Cynewulf was his ealdorman, and that Cynewulf had ruined my mother’s life. “If there is a woman near enough to him that has offended the wrong man, I suppose they will.”

This seemed to please Osburga. She finished eating her bread and picked up the mead mug again. She took another drink, her eyes shifting from the golden liquid to me. The blanket she wore tumbled off her shoulder, and she tugged it up around herself again with her free hand. I shivered, wishing I had stayed near the fire. I munched the part of the loaf she had handed me and waited for whatever it was that she was turning over in her thoughts to escape from her mouth.

“Are you afraid to learn the truth about your mother?” she asked.

It made me wonder if she had known all this time, and not told me. I pushed away the thought. You could go looking for an answer, surely, but that didn’t mean that the sight would give you one. “I am afraid that when I find her, she will be dead.”

Osburga nodded. “Use that fear,” she said. She finished the mead and placed the empty mug on the table between us. I looked into the empty vessel, trying not to imagine it as a metaphor for what I would see when I finally found my mother.