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It had been years.
Years since that woman, with those dancing blue-and-gold eyes had walked into Phedre’s life. But now that little girl was all grown up, and she had remembered what that woman had told her.
“Find Celaena Sardothien.”
It was years later, and Phedre was face to face with the same blond woman.
Or, almost. Phedre, now a young woman herself, thought that there was something different about the woman. She distinctly remembered seeing that woman for the first time—she looked like a sword, she had thought, honed to a sharp edge with a look that said dangerous. But Phedre hadn’t been afraid; she had known that it was not a danger directed towards her. Her magic had whispered it to her.
But the woman standing before her now, though she seemed to have the same face, if a bit older and more mature perhaps, seemed different in some nearly indescribable way. Where the woman had seemed like a honed blade before, she now seemed wilder. Just as dangerous, but with ragged edges. Like an eagle’s talons, the girl thought. Or the gleam of sharp fangs in the dark of night.
Phedre ignored the nagging at the back of her brain, where her own magic told her this woman was other, was different, and asked her question.
“I’m looking for Celaena Sardothien,” she said, the name rolling strangely off her tongue. She had practiced it again and again, repeating it over the years, a chant and a prayer and a lullaby, when the village boys had been cruel, and as her powers grew and the others shrank away from her, and when she realized she could not bear their fear any longer. She had repeated it, because Celaena Sardothien had become her savior, and she would never allow herself to forget.
The woman’s eyes, that unique mix of blue and gold, at first confused, staring at the village girl as though she could not remember her, suddenly stiffened at the girl’s request.
Phedre rushed to further explain—to try and trigger the woman’s memory. “You told me—you told me not to be afraid of what makes me shine brightly,” she said, and offered up a butterfly of water, and let it flit closer to the woman.
Those blue eyes followed it for a moment, and for the briefest moment, the girl could see pain, immense pain in those eyes, so much that even her magic shied away from its intensity, and—and then it was gone. Replaced by a blank expression. False, sang her magic. A lie.
“Celaena Sardothien is not here,” the woman said. Her face remained blank, and her voice was blank as well, but the girl’s magic had always led her towards the truth, as surely as water found its way to the ocean. It nagged at her again, stronger. The words the woman spoke were true—and Phedre found herself startled to think of the woman as a stranger, for this woman was not the woman from years ago, not the woman who had gifted her a golden coin and hope for the future, she was sure of it—but there was something more. An immense truth that her magic pulled her to, something bigger than words. The stranger looked again at the girl. She could see that blank mask beginning to crumble, and something far stronger lay beyond it. Phedre could not help but take a step back from the sheer force of it.
The stranger’s chest rose and fell rapidly. “Celaena Sardothien is dead,” she uttered, and spun on her heel away from the girl.
False, her magic breathed. False.