The voices of the other schoolchildren filter to her like spectral shouts from the great beyond, muffled by a coarse woven shield. Every fiber of the barrier reads Soji tokens, Soji tokens, Soji tokens in the scrawl of feverish haste. The airtight mesh of these threads constricts like a burlap sack pulled by a drawstring until she can feel the grate against the skin of her cheek and the thinness of the air in the back of her throat. Her oxygen has almost run out.
Rue forces herself to breathe and takes a spoonful of her wheatmeal. Her hands are dirty with the earth of the fields; she has forgotten to wipe them off. She wishes desperately that she could rejoin her father in the farm after lunch, but he has decreed that she will spend her afternoons in school, as much for a social education as a professional one.
All around the table are her happily babbling classmates. To them, this is the start of the day, and the first great exhalation of the thoughts that have accrued in the long hours since yesterday’s end-of-school bell. Rue has been awake for six hours and is bone-tired from the fields. Given the drought, her family cannot afford the water to clean her hands.
“I wonder what the prophet is like in person,” says one child. “I got six in a row, but really, I’m not one to boast, I just followed my instincts,” says another. “You can’t just guess the examination patterns, the Soji tokens stop all that,” says a third.
Dirt. Rings and dirt. Rings. These are the differences between the other children’s hands and hers. Though none are wealthy, they are at the age where their awareness of unspoken pecking orders is beginning to form, and the corresponding social signals grow from their bodies like lichen. The fungi take shape as necklaces, hair bands, a few earrings, but most of all rings, rings pulled from grandparents’ jewelry cabinets or flipped for a penny out back of a metalworking shop or sown from fabric by candlelight. Gaudy or thread-thin or cheap as bran -- at this point in time the only thing the muddled hormonal signals of adolescence can agree on is that more is better.
Rue’s father can’t afford to buy rings, but she could weave rings out of roots or the stems of plants, as a few of the other girls have done. She has not done this. Her hands are grubby and naked as they fumble with her porridge.
Rue closes her eyes and pretends she is back with the scarecrows on her father’s farm, as she was mere hours ago. Each morning, she treads the same route through the field, mending rips in the mannequins’ fabric, stuffing straw into their sleeves, and always dreaming of ways to make them more fearsome. What’s funny is that while the sparrows fear the inanimate men, they flock to her like bees to nectar. When Rue stands next to a scarecrow, the birds wheel high in the sky, keeping their distance, but on the wheat-bound corridors between, they become bolder. At the moment where she is equidistant between two straw-stuffed oases, the sparrows dip low enough that their smell overwhelms the nutty perfume of the wheat and the flapping of their wings rings out like the arrhythmic beating of prehistoric drums. She is alone and nominally safe in the eye of their storm -- they have never dared to touch her -- but the instinct that raises her hackles is somewhere between disquiet and exhilarating danger. She feels clear-headed and crisp, as if the air is sharp and bitter, and although she feels relief when she reaches the next scarecrow and the birds are once again a thousand feet in the air, when she is done with her inspection something within her pulls her forward to seek the next breathless moment on the path in the terrible cloud of dirty birds.
Her father knows nothing of this, only that the scarecrows do their job of protecting the crop. “Issuing orders to the ranks of your soldiers,” he’ll call to her as she stomps the muck off her boots at the farmhouse door. “Tyrant of the sparrows,” he calls her.
Rue feels the same separation from her schoolmates as she does from the alien skybound shadows, but the former’s chatter is inane rather than frightfully thrilling. Around her peers, she spends most of her time retreating inward. She discards most of the bits and pieces of conversation that float up to her, but one snippet from a redhead boy makes it through. He has momentarily escaped by the easy hopefulness that comes from youth and pulls the table into an introspective silence. “This is our fifth day of examinations,” he says. “Our last shot. Do any of you guys really have any hope of foreseeing correctly?”
After lunch, she waits outside of the gnarled twin doors. She has done this every day this week. Rue wipes her hands on her jeans and again wishes there was water to clean them. There are no chairs, so she stands facing the doors, stiff and straight-backed as a new candle. The first time she stood in this position, she was awed by the grandeur of the glossy oak that reached from floor to ceiling, but now, four attempts later, all she feels is the oppressive stenosis of expectations. Do your best, her father told her that morning, hands on her shoulders, as he had every morning that week. Do your best and you can pass the examination. She repeats his words to herself as she stands, still as old bone, waiting. This is her last chance.
The doors whisper open and Rue enters the room full of elders. They chatter, stretch their arms, and pay her no mind. The week has been long and they are nearly done with it. The hope of an apprentice prophet has dried up like the River Ghee and each elder is ready to return to ordinary life and wait another year.
Rue is the only pupil in the room.
She sits in the single empty chair, trying to make herself small, and an elder pulls a Soji token from the bin. He holds it towards her, displaying each side in turn. It flies from his thumb to flip through the air. At the apex of its arc, the anxiety within her snaps and falls away like the yoke of an overburdened oxen. She has spent the first thirteen years of her life studying for this exam, and she is destined to fail, just as each of her classmates have. Rue is at ease: she has accepted her fate and is ready to move on. Iron, she calls out. When the flat stone clatters to the table, its face shows a stiff gray trapezoidal prism.
“Very good,” says the elder perfunctorily. He jots a tally mark, slides the Soji token to the table’s edge, and pulls another from the bin to repeat the procedure.
Once again, the stone soars high, and when she and the elder peer over it, her prediction is correct. He slides it to the end of the table to kiss the first stone.
When she has four in a row, two other elders meander over to see why this pupil has not yet been dismissed. There are only a few other students waiting their turn outside the examination room. As soon as she gets a token wrong they will dismiss her and proceed to the next candidate.
Rue does not know what is happening. In her previous four attempts, she has never gotten more than two. At least, she thinks, she’ll have something to boast about at the lunch table.
When Rue has three more correct, most of the rest of the elders have stopped talking. When the line of Soji tokens at the end of the examination table makes ten, the room is dead silent and bald heads crowd for a better view. She looks around at the wrinkled faces of the elders but they stare at the stones, not at her. She knows that these are the members of society who were the best predictors of Soji tokens in their day, and that none of them got more than eleven. None, of course, but the prophet himself. Hold it together. You’ll fail and it will all end soon and you can go home, she tells herself, but her self-assurance is drowned out by a louder thought: Why is this happening to me? Her voice is no less of a squeak as she calls out the etching, wheat or iron, and she is no less perplexed as the Soji tokens show that face on the table.
All of her classmates have different strategies. Some swear by picking either wheat or iron and sticking with it. Others alternate between the two. Others follow complex mathematical formulas that nevertheless result in deterministic patterns. Most of them, after the first couple days, think not of getting every stone correct, if they ever harbored that hope, but of getting as long of a streak as possible before one fateful mistake sends them home. Those who misguessed the first coin in each of their first couple trials are particularly likely to succumb to wild strategies as the week wears on: flipping tokens at home the night before and memorizing the pattern; meditating to clear their minds and letting the answers come to them; wandering the forest and looking for omens in the branches.
But the prevailing strategy, and the one that Rue subscribes to, is to concentrate and let the answer bubble up from whatever is in your heart. Rue’s heart, though, is beating faster than it ever has and provides no clues. When the Soji token begins its short journey through the air, she finds that she blurts out answers at random. At some points she feels a dull certainty as the token comes to rest that she has gotten it right, at others she feels a cautious optimism. She does not know where these feelings come from and is not sure if they matter, and sure enough they don’t appear to: stone after stone matches her choice.
Luck, thinks Rue, then pushes away the hateful thought as she guesses the twentieth coin.
After she gets it right, she rubs her eyes, blinking to keep them from closing. Most of her classmates have the same dark circles, the scars of late nights practicing with coins. Her father could not afford Soji tokens, so he gathered wheat seeds from the fields. “It flips, doesn't it?” He would say. Studying the flips was like ramming her head against a great sycamore to fell it -- try as she might, she never felt that she could make any progress, and on the rare nights when she did, it would be erased by the next day.
The sun sets as she guesses coin twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and twenty-nine. Wheat, Wheat, Iron. No one has made it this far in sixty-five years.
At some point, Rue imagines that she is choosing the coin’s outcome. The sensation is that she gives the command, no different than what her father pictures her doing to the scarecrows, and then the stones do her bidding. This is silly, she thinks -- she is merely predicting, and the twirling airbound token cannot act on her whims -- but the thought is hard to shake, and every repetition of the exercise builds her confidence.
Finally, the elder fishes around the corners of the bin for the last Soji token. It is past midnight as he holds it up to her, showing her the two sides as he has done every other time, but no one has looked at the clock for hours. Half of the examination table is covered in flipped Soji tokens: nine neat rows of ten, and below them a tenth row of nine.
No breath can be heard.
Every eye is on the stone, none on Rue. She can see a vein going in the fists of some elders. The fingers of others are totally slack and ghostly white, as if they are so engrossed that their heart has forgotten to pump blood. The Soji token twirls high, catching a glint of candlelight at the apex of its path. Rue’s brain stutters, caught on the line between the two choices. Wheat -- iron -- iron -- wheat. She opens her mouth to force an answer but nothing comes. It is as if she is pushing against a vacuum seal, and the harder she strains the stronger the resistance is, but there is no time to pull back and release the pressure.
The Soji token smacks the table hard, bounces, bounces again, and ricochets onto the ground. The elders scramble away from where it lands, then cluster as it comes to rest. Rue feels utterly idiotic. She has not even made a guess at the final Soji token. When the heads of the elders clear she leans around the corner of the examination table.
The Soji token is standing upright on its edge, perfectly balanced.
What seizes the room is not a sigh of relief but an increase of the existing tension, like another cinch of an already too-tight belt. Everyone is staring at each other, excitement and apprehension and honor and awe in their eyes. Finally, they turn to her, the bat-faced farm girl, mouths open wide. The elders kneel to the ground and bow their heads in supplication.
The head examiner totters to the grand double doors and pushes one open. In a reedy, breathless, cracked voice he announces to the pupils dozing in the foyer that the examinations have concluded.
The apprentice prophet has been crowned.
The first thing she notices about the prophet is his smile. This is what separates him from the portraits that adorn classrooms and decorate her spare change. In those snapshots he is firm, thoughtful, imposing -- but as he guides her through the palace the grin never falters from his face, stretching his features until they are unfamiliar. In her mind this man is discrete from the prophet who has been bandied about all her life.
He chatters as he shuffles along the corridors, explaining the living situation of the prophets in the castle, the structure of the council and how and when they consult the prophet, the predictions a prophet makes day to day.
“So,” he says, stopping abruptly and turning to face her in the middle of a corridor in the south wing. Over his shoulder, she can see a patchwork of thatched roofs dotting the Valley Ghee -- the people who are now her subjects. “How do you feel?”
Rue does not meet his gaze. “I feel greatly honored to be chosen, sir.”
“Two mistakes,” he replies, his tone turning sharp. “First of all, don’t address me as sir. You and I are equals, so there’s no need for terms of respect. Call me Gaspar. Those titles and stuff only get in the way. Secondly, you weren’t chosen -- there’s no choice involved at all -- your gift was discovered.”
Rue is silent for the rest of the tour.
When Gaspar deposits her at her room, high-ceilinged with candelabras burning orange in their niches, the sun has set.
“So,” he says, his warm smile spreading irrepressibly across his face, “how do you feel?”
“I’ve told you,” Rue says, meekly.
“You haven’t.”
“I feel greatly honored to be chosen.” It is a great effort to omit the sir.
Gaspar shakes his head. “No, no, no. This won’t do. You’ve regurgitated what you think you should say, based on how you’ve been brought up. Look inside yourself and be honest. Tell me what you feel. This is the most important part of being a prophet. To use your gift of sight, you must cut away all fears of impropriety, all desire to conform to others’ expectations, all worries of displeasing the listener. Each of these serve to subvert the truth. Push them away and find that glowing nodule of real information inside you. Speak truth, Rue. It’s a simple question - how do you feel?”
“It’s all wrong,” she whispers, so quiet she is not sure whether he is able to hear.
“Ah,” his voice is contemplative. “You believe it is a mistake that you are chosen as the prophet. Yet, you also know, there is no going back.”
“I guessed,” Rue says. “I didn’t see. I just guessed the order of the Soji tokens.”
“Then, how did you get all hundred of them correct?”
She shrugs, looking anywhere but at the prophet.
He puts a hand on her shoulder. “You foresaw. It will feel like that to start, I assure you. Foresight may feel like guesswork. But it is not. The coins never lie.”
“You got all hundred of the stones right on your first try,” she says. “I only got it on my fifth try. I didn’t even do well the first four times. I couldn’t get past two. The fifth -- it was dumb luck.”
“Stop!” The prophet cries, and his smile is gone. His face is dark and angular, the transformation as sudden as the sun slipping behind a cloud. She has touched on something central within him. His voice is harsh and unsteady and his fingers dig into her shoulder where they grip her. “Don’t ever say that word in my presence again.” And then, a little easier, “you have the gift. You have the sight. It will take some adjustment, but you’ll get there. You must believe in yourself.” He sighs, and suddenly all the fight is out of him. “Forgive me. On my end, I must remember that this is all very new to you. But on yours, you must understand that all the hopes of the people depend on you. They’re relying on you. It is quite a duty, but you are up to the task. If you believe in yourself, that is. Goodnight, Rue.”
Rue retreats into her bedroom.
She lies awake, wishing in vain for the patter of raindrops on the roof of the palace. They would sound much different here -- rather than the pounding of giant fists threatening to smash the wooden slats she remembers so vividly from childhood, the water would splash from the impervious stone parapets to fall harmlessly to earth. Yet no rain comes, and she shifts restlessly in sweaty bedsheets.
Across her bedroom, the Soji tokens form a neat ten-by-ten square above the mantle. They’ve been transported from the examiner’s table and fixed to this wall, where they are the room’s decorative focal point. Rue closes her eyes and tries to remember the pattern. The first stone was iron, yes, but what was the second? Iron again? Or was it wheat? She stands and runs her fingers over the tokens. As her eyes trace the zig-zag path across the hundred etchings, she sees vast swaths of patterns that she has forgotten -- more than that, they look totally unfamiliar, almost unnatural. Below the stones is a mirror. The girl in it is slight and unsteady, but truly clean for the first time in her life.
Rue continues to stare at herself until her expression hardens. Out loud, she repeats the words of the prophet. “The coins never lie. The coins never lie. The coins never lie.” Every time she says it, her voice loses some of its tremor. The moon is high above the castle by the time the knot below her collarbone has unwound and she slips beneath the covers.
The next days are the busiest of her life. Her first time riding on a horse is parading through the Valley Ghee on a chestnut stallion, its muscles rippling beneath her as the townsfolk throw dried wheat into the air. The young girls have ribbons in their hair; the young boys wave flags small and large; her father is beaming so broadly that tears leak down his face. Everyone is freshly washed and applauding and for one halcyon afternoon all the hardships fade from their shriveled faces as they unite in celebration of the apprentice prophet. At the start of the ride, Rue is self-conscious, but by the end she holds her head high.
“This is the hope you represent to the Valley Ghee,” the prophet tells her that night, carrying a cup of tea into her room. “The people believe you can save them, Rue. You did very well today.”
Every morning, Rue opens the blinds to see the line of supplicants waiting for the prophet curl around the foot of the castle. She had only come to see the prophet once before, as a very young child, when her father had a question about how to keep the birds away from his wheat. The lines are longer these days, the weathered faces more desperate. An odd mix of questions meet the prophet -- shall I save my cow for the milk it leaks, or slaughter it for meat? shall I plant my crop in hopes of a wet spring? shall I try for another child? -- and to each he gives grace and a firm, unequivocal answer after a moment of silent deliberation. The most common topic is the hardest to give a satisfactory answer to: water.
Rue, try as she might, feels no ability to replicate his answers. As each supplicant asks his question, she tries to imitate the prophet’s moment of reflection, but finds no answers inside of herself. When she guesses, her answers have no correlation with Gaspar’s. She sits in a throne equal to his but feels as a pebble beneath his toe. She grows to dread these sessions and yearns for the end of the queue of supplicants.
As the days pass, her frustration builds. When Gaspar is not holding court, he is with the council or otherwise absent, so she has few moments to learn his methodology. When she does find a moment and plucks up the courage to ask him how he came to a conclusion, in return she only receives a placating smile and a reminder that the truth is inside of her.
What makes this all the more difficult are the types of problems the prophet faces. By nature, the questions that bubble up to Gaspar are ones that can’t be solved by logic, investigation, or history -- these, in fact, the prophet refuses ruthlessly, as he does for a small boy who asks how many stones line the empty trace of the River Ghee (count them!) -- so there is little rhyme or reason to his answers, at least as far as Rue can surmise. This only adds to the calificed nugget of anxiety that sits in her stomach, each day more self-doubt adding to its mass.
One night several months after her appointment as apprentice, Rue stirs to the sound of branches whipping the castle’s belly. Finally, she thinks, rain. Rain means wheat. Night has become Rue’s refuge -- in the empty corridors, she need not shy from friendly councilors or make way for scurrying servants. She slips through the palace, her bare footsteps masked by the torrential downpour. The moonlight filters through windows twice her height and slim as a finger, illuminating her path with diagonal slits. The impact of the rain only cements how sheltered the stone interior is from the outdoors: in her farmhouse, the thumb-thick walls are surely swaying like tree branches. Her parents must have awoken at the first drops of rain, their bed against the wall, an inch from nature.
Rue steps onto a balcony and tastes the stormy air. It hits her tongue sharper than breakfast tea. Below her, the Valley Ghee is gone in a swipe of black rain like an angry brushstroke. Rue leans back and lets the drops hit her gullet, and knows that far below her every member of the town is doing the same, down to the smallest child. She lets the downpour engulf her until she feels its wet on every inch of her skin. Soaked to the bone and shivering, she smiles, thinking of her scarecrows. They are bathing just as she is. When she returns indoors her soles leave dark imprints on the stone floor with every stride.
On her way back through the labyrinthine passageways, the luster of a fireplace leaks beneath a lintel. On approach, she sees the prophet bent intently over a desk. She stares for a few moments, transfixed, and when he looks up, she feels a deep embarrassment, as if she has walked in on him doing something intensely private.
“You’re soaked to the bone,” he says, wonderingly.
“I got caught in the rain,” Rue says, feeling foolish. “I’ll go dry myself off.”
“Come warm yourself by the fire.” Gaspar smiles. During the day his face is often slow, almost lazy, but now in it she sees something sharp and flickering, like the tongues of flame in the grate behind him.
When she lands beside him and feels the welcome heat against her shins, Gaspar says, “have you ever played Soji before?”
Rue is dumbfounded. She has never heard the word Soji not succeeded by the word token before.
He takes her shivering silence in stride. “Just as I thought.” On the table are several dozen Soji tokens, grouped in piles. “The tokens, these days, are most famous for their role in choosing the prophet. But they are not simply stones pulled out of the ground and hewn for only the purpose of flipping. They are tokens for the game of Soji. It is the greatest game ever invented by man.” He walks her through it -- Soji is an ancient contest of resource allocation played by men of honor. It is a gambling game of skill and astonishingly intricate strategy that can be played alone or with any number of competitors. As Gaspar talks, he interweaves his explanations of rules and situations with incredible stories: men saving their sons from slavery via Soji; rulers wagering their kingdoms and coming up short; paupers turning to plutocrats overnight. By the time he has finished explaining the game and beating her at it twice, the rain has abated and the sun is a red semicircle on the horizon. Rue’s head is spinning and she yearns to play more, but he sweeps the tokens off the table and sends her to bed, with a promise that they will play again soon.
Night after night, they meet in the room with the fire and play. Although Rue learns rapidly, the student never bests the master. There is always a scenario she has not thought of, a tactic she has not considered, an unseen escape from every corner she backs Gaspar into. Several times she manages to reduce his fate to the flip of a Soji token, and each time he comes out the victor. Still, on these nights, she goes to bed buzzing with the thrill of a near win.
In daylight, Gaspar is stern and lethargic. He gives decisions with the flick of a finger and with a seemingly equal amount of thought. To all matters he is the same, whether it is the murmurs of war or the broken heart of a young lover. Soji is the only time he comes alive, his eyes darting to and fro as his fingers dance around the table. Even when he is still she can sense the gears whirring in his brain, calculating, postulating, sprinting down avenues of possibility.
Rue gradually recognizes the look in his eyes on those nights: love, true and pure. Over the years, she grows to love the game, too.
“How do I foresee?” Her question is abrupt. He looks up from the game state they are pouring over. Several years have passed -- she is a woman, not a girl, and as she has grown he has shrunk. Each of his movements now seem to groan like brittle wood. Still, she has not beaten him at Soji. “I don’t know how you do it. I know you expect me to pick it up, but I can’t. I need you to spell it out for me.”
Gaspar never takes his eyes off the tokens. He spins one stone between his fingers, lost in thought. She is about to repeat herself when he responds.
“I know I’ve told you that only men of honor and high status play Soji, but that was not always the case. Once, long ago, every household had a set of tokens, down to the poorest beggar. Soji, in fact, was associated with back-alleys and men on the edge of destitution. The most common currencies exchanged were dirty pennies and grains of rice. In that day, the Valley Ghee was controlled by a cruel king, as unfeeling and harsh as a human could be. His lords and ladies played the game too, of course, but considered themselves so obviously superior to the common folk that they rarely deigned to play with any below their status. One day, however, this changed. A woman of the dirt, thin as a willow branch and clothed in rags, dragged herself into the castle and demanded an audience with the king. When rebuffed, she shrieked at his servants to pass along her challenge: she demanded to battle the king in Soji. Initially, the king dismissed the woman without a second thought, but as she returned, day after day, he ruffled. This king was an arrogant man, besides callous and despotic, and made the mistake such men often do: thinking that because one has everything, he cannot lose. Finally, he granted the woman’s request. He anticipated no danger in her challenge, as his councilors had assured him that this woman was not a skilled Soji player, and besides, his stack of tokens was a thousand times larger than hers. Yet, when the game began, he found his opponent’s strategy to be utterly distinct from any other he had seen. She relied not at all on cunning or logic -- at least so far as the king and his men could tell -- instead, she played with total abandon, gambling maximally at each opportunity. The king grew increasingly frustrated as she remained, turn after turn, with enough tokens to play the next. He was outmatching her strategically in a way that should have ensured victory, but her pile of tokens steadily grew as his shrunk. When, after ninety-nine rounds, his pile equalled hers, he summoned his council and asked for their advice, his mind reeling. These councilors, the wisest men of the land, ran him through a number of scenarios, advising the most tactically sound plan. The king brushed them aside and shook his head. These so-called optimal strategies have not worked for me so far, he said, and I need to beat this woman on her own ground. On that fateful hundredth move, he orchestrated a gamble that involved every one of his coins, over the objections of his councilors. The woman smiled, showing yellowed, broken teeth, and without hesitation guessed the Soji token that twirled in the air.”
“So she won the game?” Asks Rue. “She won the castle from the king?”
“More than that. Yes, she won the castle -- this castle. She won the kingdom, too. She won this kingdom. That beggar was the first prophet. And that is why the tradition of identifying prophets with Soji tokens continues to this day.”
The embers crackle in the grate. The flame has long since gone out. Neither move to stir the fire. Rue shakes her head. “She guessed. She was outmatched in strategy so she guessed.”
Gaspar lazily spins a token between his first and second fingers, his expression as if he is reminiscing on a memory of his own, rather than a story. “Imagine that. All other kingdoms have been paid for in blood. This woman won her freedom with a game.”
Rue ignores him. “But, what she did is different from what you do.“ She shook her head, trying to put her thoughts in order. “She guessed and she got it right. That’s not seeing. That’s guesswork.”
“Is there any difference, if you get it right?”
Two turns later, Rue is defeated.
The next day the prophet permits her to join his session with the council. She sits in the back corner of the room, half sunk in a chair to stay out of sight.
Her ambition to learn how to foresee is numb, and replacing it is a feverish quest to win in Soji. There is always more to learn about the game. After ten years of nightly study, Rue is an expert herself, but not a master: its deepest intricacies continue to elude her. Still, she begins to see the parallels between Soji and the affairs of the Valley Ghee: both largely regard resource allocation, and both seem infinitely complex. Still, she learns that in each arena, for every problem, no matter how multifaceted or dire, there exists a corresponding solution.
The valley withers as does its wheat. Rain, when it does come, is little more than mist, and the hopeful wooden buckets that line the streets lose their color from the sun long before they fill. Some fields bring only a smattering of half-dead wheat; some fields fail entirely, baked and barren until they are indistinguishable from flat rock. Rue does not need to visit the farms to know this: she can see it on the faces of the prophet’s supplicants.
Gaspar, for his part, gets an unlimited supply of water, but continues to weaken. One night he does not appear at the Soji table and Rue hastens through the palace in alarm to find him. She encounters him in a deep mahogany chair in the west wing, staring blankly.
“I can’t get up,” he says, and when she meets his gaze she knows that if he speaks again he will cry.
“It’s alright,” she murmurs, flopping his empty skin-sack of an arm over her shoulder. Rue lifts and half-carries him to the Soji table, and for hours he says little. This is the first time she has seen his physical ailments weigh on him.
They play Soji later than usual that night, and neither suggests turning in. “There is talk of uprooting the kingdom,” he says as the moon dips below the horizon.
“I know,” says Rue, softly. The council, grim-faced and desperate, has deployed scouts to the far corners of the world in search of greener lands. Rue cannot imagine leaving the Valley Ghee. She cannot imagine starting over. “It won’t happen,” she says.
“If we cannot grow wheat, the alternative is starvation,” says Gaspar.
“No,” she says, and the word comes out firmer than she expects. It comes from within, and it must be true, it just must be. Her next sentence is the most resolute she has ever spoken. “We’ll never leave the Valley Ghee. The drought is temporary. The rain will return.”
Gaspar does not respond, and Rue sees it is because he is poring over the Soji tokens, eyes flashing from one to the next. In another heartbeat, Rue sees what he sees: the state of the game, almost without her realizing it, has the old prophet cornered. If she can execute the finale, she can win.
The next half hour passes in silence brittle like stale bread, the pair frantically rearranging tokens, flipping them in the air, exchanging wheat and iron. Finally, the game comes to the final flip, and almost sooner than the Soji token is out of Gaspar’s hand, Rue’s voice rings out, convicted. Iron. She knows before it hits the table that she has won.
The moment after is the open-mouthed silence of dead wreckage that chases a tornado. Rue takes a sharp inbreath and feels the sensation of emerging abovewater after many minutes of submersion. She worries that this will only worsen Gaspar’s gray mood, but when she finds the courage to look up, his kindly smile is on his face. “You have made me proud,” he says.
Then he wipes the floor with her in the next three games.
As Rue lies in bed that night, she recalls the feeling of certainty like a moment of clarity in fog. She knows that she’ll never forget it. When she flexes her fingers, she can almost feel the tips crackle with the spark of something novel. That’s what she needs to tap into. That’s how Gaspar must feel all the time, at every fork in the road, big or small, near or far. That is the skill of a prophet she must now cultivate.
Ten days later, Gaspar dies. Rue is surprised, and more surprised to realize she has been in denial of his condition. In his last moments, she kneels at his bedside. “No,” she whispers, as he fades. “I’m not ready for you to go. I have so much more to learn.” Her stomach immediately balloons with regret at her own words. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t make this about myself.”
But Gaspar retains his smile, barely twitching his muscles but conveying as much warmth as always. “Do not worry. Death has never been about the dying. It has always been about the living. And as to you, my apprentice, you are the prophet, and as fine a prophet as there ever was. There is nothing to learn but that there is nothing to learn. You have been ready since the day you predicted all hundred Soji tokens correctly.”
“No, no, no,” and Rue can feel herself crumbling, but can’t know whether it is due to the current moment or the dread of the ones after. The instant of confidence ten days ago feels as trivial as a grain of wheat. “I was just guessing those tokens. It was dumb luck.” She stops, inhaling her tears, and for a moment recalls the day they met, when he snarled like a mutt in response to that word.
Today Gaspar is gentle. “Dumb luck,” he says, and his little exhales imitate a chuckle. “I do like that expression very much. How very funny, the oxymoron. Dumb luck.”
When he is gone, the smile of his last laugh remains on his face, and Rue realizes that this is the default state of his features. When all is at rest, this is who Gaspar is.
When she leaves his chambers an eerie shudder shakes her shoulders and she is reminded of slipping through the grand double doors as she was crowned prophet so many years ago. Inside her skull she is shaking and screaming, but the undergird of cultural programming propels her feet forward, lifts her head high, proffers an appropriately regal expression to all onlookers. Her body, at least, knows who she must be.
Her subjects bowed to her before, but now they stoop deeper and with greater fear. Her words carry extra weight; when she summons tea, the servant scuttles away as if his life depends on it, and she realizes he is acting on speech that is now law, not merely a request from a master. Similarly, when she announces that she is not to be disturbed this evening and will formally begin her duties the following day, no resistance meets her. As she heads to her bedroom, Rue feels totally and utterly alone.
That night, she runs her fingers over the Soji tokens adorning the wall, just as she did on her first night in the castle. The ten by ten grid has stuck faithfully in its place all these years, but they have faded into the background of her consciousness. As her finger pad slips from one token to the next, grazing the rough indent that carves its symbol, she does not exactly remember the pattern, but it nevertheless feels somehow familiar. This is her pattern, the one and only. All these years, this sequence was constant, just as the order of events in the universe is fixed, and always has and will be. One difference in either and she would not be the prophet.
As she takes the throne that used to be Gaspar’s, the councilors stare up unblinkingly. She fits snugly into it. This is right; it is hers. The first of the supplicants approaches, bows his head, and poses his question. She answers without hesitation. The townsfolk have not skipped a beat. Neither will she.
At sunset, the decision falls to her. Each of the faces in the councilor’s circle is as empty and unreadable as waterworn stones. The scout, a boy of fifteen, gives his report in scared, hasty tones, and flees the room as soon as his questioning concludes. Every man turns to her.
“We have learned what we can. We have debated and discussed ad nauseam. The path forward remains unclear. We ask you, prophet, to look and see. Will we relocate the village from the Valley Ghee, or remain where we are?” They stare at her, these unflappable men trembling. She realizes that their terror comes not from which option she will speak to life -- which they will take as fact -- but of the impending certainty. They are scared of either answer. Suspense is their shield.
“I will tell you tomorrow,” she says, and leaves the room.
Rue has always preferred the still peace of the palace in slumber, and this night is no different. But tonight, there is no Soji to be played, no fireside companionship, no prophet to admire until the small hours. She is alone.
Instead, she heads in a new direction. The castle squeaks as she slips through its folds, piercing the night like a splinter. She slides down the hill, the parched soil crunching beneath her bare feet.
When she arrives at her destination, the door is half rotted and hangs from its hinges. Rue hesitates to knock. Has the farmhouse always been this shabby? She has vague memories of exploring every nook and cranny of its walls as a child, but now it feels like it could fit in the palm of her hand. She can circle it in a matter of seconds.
Through a gap in the curtained windows she can see her father’s sleeping face, cracked from dehydration like the soil he toils over. On it the unforgiving toil of decades have left deep etchings, so very different from the cherubic, unlined prophet. Even in sleep his face is screwed up like a fist clenching an anchor line. It is not the face of a man who will survive a hundred-mile move, no matter how fertile the promised land is.
She drifts away from the cottage, her childish motivation to seek the warmth of her parents evaporated. This is a path she must chart on her own.
Out back of the farmhouse, the wheat is wilted and irregular, the soil has shifted over the years, and the moon hides behind clouds, spilling ink over her surroundings, but her legs know the path as her fingers know to flip a Soji token. Without thought, she takes the same route she trod every morning as a girl.
No birds swoop to meet her along the way. She misses the thrill of their threatening presence. What are the scarecrows to protect her from if there are no sparrows?
The first mannequin looms at her from the gloom and she sees it with fresh eyes. He is oversized and uneven and shockingly unlike a man. When she squeezes his shoulder the dried grain collapses under the pressure and she pulls away as if burned, then wipes her palm on her pants. He is foreign to her as snow would be.
There may be a better spot many miles away, yes, but the journey will cost dearly. It will require abandoning every ounce of labor poured into the land over the centuries. It will mean leaving behind every field of wheat and much of what is in them, then attempting to rebuild them somewhere completely foreign. No one alive today will reap the full benefits of the move -- their children’s children would. Still, remaining in the Valley Ghee is condemning them to the slow death of a fish in an ever-draining pond.
She pushes away these thoughts. Don’t think, Gaspar taught her. Know.
Tyrant of the Sparrows, her father called her.
And at that phrase, as if it were a battle cry, they are all around her. Thousands of birds descend like a flash flood. Their black angles are differently textured than the rest of the night. Rue raises her arms, welcoming them as an old friend. She feels a dull sense of danger, as she always has, but knows they will not harm her.
Rue is wrong.
They are upon her, pecking and flapping and ripping their talons through her flesh. Her scream is erased by their deafening squaws. Who are you to decide this, they say. Who are you to condemn your people to death? Who are you to be the prophet, little girl? The battleworn scarecrow beside her offers no protection. Rue flails and flees.
She makes a tight angle with the slope as she sprints toward the castle, her legs burning. From her right approaches a man, running as hard as she is, on a course to intercept her. She recognizes him as he nears -- it is an elder, but his stick legs carry him faster than she would have expected. By his side jogs a boy, wide-eyed and grubby.
“Have you heard so soon?” He calls to her, as he approaches. She has a hard time reading his tone: in between panting breaths, she thinks she senses apprehension. Or is it excitement?
Rue does not know what he means. She ignores him and runs ahead. The birds chase her the whole way, cackling and swooping.
Only inside the castle does she stop running and collapses against the door, panting. She touches her robes to her arms, seeking to daub at her injuries -- but as she bends, hands on knees, she sees no pool of crimson grow beneath her. Her arms bear no marks of talons. Every inch of her is unscathed.
“You already know,” says the elder, landing beside her. “Of course you already knew. I don’t know why I didn’t realize.” Again, Rue shrugs him off. She rushes towards the back dormitories of the castle, a place she has never been before.
When she barges through the door and shakes awake the first councilor, his eyes bulge in fear. She will go room by room, waking them up one by one, if that is what it takes.
“What is it?” He hisses. His expression snaps from disconcert to wonder to fear as his mind kicks into gear. Rue slaps her hands against her shoulders, fending off the birds if they are still there. They are beating against her skin, clawing her at every free angle, but as she turns to fight them, they hide from view, only appearing as angry blurs darting from the corners of her vision. As she whirls she can see what she needs to: the frightened councilor, the breathless elder, the trembling, terrified boy.
“My name is Iain, prophet,” says the boy, in a prepubescent squeak. The elder rests his hand on the boy’s shoulder, quieting him.
Rue slips her hand into her pocket, caresses the Soji token that lives there between three fingers, shuts her eyes very tight, opens them again.
She and the elder speak simultaneously.
“The Village Ghee must move.”
“A new apprentice prophet has been crowned.”
The elder freezes, and so does Rue. Gradually, he brings match to candle, but the addition of light does not solve the silence. No bird is to be found in any corner. As the glow plays around the nooks of the bedroom, the night suddenly feels to Rue very late, as well as very ordinary. Her thoughts are of the boy, as he has begun to make the only sound in the castle. He has begun to cry.
Rue kneels, holds his shoulders, brings his chin up so they are eye to eye. “I know what you feel,” she says, gently. “You are afraid. You think that it is luck, not fate, that brought you here, and now there is a great weight on your shoulders. It’s overwhelming.”
Iain is still crying as he speaks but his voice is steady. “I am not afraid, prophet. I know that fate brought me here. I will foresee, just as you have. You will deliver us from the drought, I know it. If not, why do we suffer? Why do I watch our crops fail and our cows die and my father scrounge for grubs to eat? Why do my classmates spend recess counting each others’ ribs?”
She pauses. Her mouth opens, then closes, then opens again. The boy’s tears have dried. “So, no, prophet, there’s no luck in this world. We’ve all stopped believing in luck a long time ago. What we know now is fate. Fate and certainty. And you, prophet, you are the instrument of fate.”
Rue looks him dead in the eyes. He looks back, stern and solid, a boy grown in lean times who has been forced to harden before his body is ripe. Rue stands and turns towards the councilor. “What are you doing still in bed?” She barks. “Did you not hear what I told you? There are men to be alerted. There are plans to be drawn up. There is much to do and no time to waste.”
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