Raylene Elspeth does Nothing

Raylene remembers being a child, and wanting all the things that her teacher told her she would be. Wanting badly, so, so badly to escape the place she been born into, and the family that saw no future for her.

She also remembered being quite a studious, over-honest child.

‘No dear, you’re not supposed to tell them about their ‘obvious marital issues.’ It’s no matter to you, and really, do you want to put up with the fall out?’

But since she was also a somewhat lazy child, she grew out of it. That sounded like responsibility and really she’s never been up for that. Even if she was happy to outgrow her families poverty.

“You’d do well to eat the root of Halia-Mylitta before that trying time,” she said to her client. It wasn’t a lie, not fully, it was sound advice the day of, but it was nothing like a real premonition.

There wasn’t anything real in the tea leaves, or in the shadows of reflections, there wasn’t a thing to be found in the memory of dreams.

But there was certainly such a thing as what the midwife ordered.

Raylene Elspeth didn’t get premonitions; she gave basic advice wrapped up in the novelty of her training. That was how she made her living.

Making a living is arguable, she’d been raised for this false divination, and it was really only her care and keeping that she was risking by being a false prophet.

Not by lying mind, but by being wrong. Or more accurately, being wrong about the wrong things. It was acceptable to misidentify the reason for an occurrence, preferable even if it were a well-publicized one, even small-time domestic issues were best answered vaguely. 

But being ‘wrong’ about something that mattered? That was something she might have to pay for, and considering everything else. She felt her neck, once tight from her own thoughts.

Raylene wasn’t ready to undermine her future like that.

Still, she was glad to see her client in good health even if her nerves were more frayed than before the pregnancy. She decided to look away from what that could mean, and answer it instead with a mood agent and labor aid.

“Thank you so much for your time.” her client says before making her leave. The child had been a hard-won occurrence, and while much applauded the mother had been distressed before her visit. 

She was glad to offer such piece of mind if nothing else in this life. Though there was a time when she’d been assured that she would provide more, her predecessor, Camille Laxsha had supposed such things when she was inducted. 

So sure she seemed to a sorry little girl, and a family full of this certain distress. But that was just a faint memory.

It was supposed to be a revelation, the year before. “I saw more than was there, didn’t I?,” her teacher had said, whether drunkenness or outright cruelty, Raylene wanted her to be a liar. Back then, in the moment it hardly mattered to her.

But then a year late or more for her soured antecedent, she woke to something ‘wrong’ on a dark woad morning.

Now she sees herself, in the small-priced girl-wife who knows what it’s like to be as hated by their mother in-law as uncared for by their husband. And she sees the terror in a child that might be born wrong.

She was meant for more than that, but still. For once in the morning hours of this world, before she’d met with any one client, Raylene saw the King die. She saw the reason. How and when. She could be the butterfly wing, the thing that saves his life, but she doesn’t care.

She can’t say a thing. How can she say, “someone will kill you!” as a warning not a threat to a monarch who’s famed to earn such things? She’d be just as much a mad woman; it was the wrong kind of premonition set on the wrong brow.

She had not even had the velleity to bother thinking of it, and while she understood the stats and instability that came with the deaths of leaders, she’d long lost such a place to warn them. Heart and head, what she’d seen wasn’t hers to say.

And so she lays down the notion that she would change it, and keeps a tight hold on her now small life.

For all the things she’d thought she’d be when she was a child, at the moment she only really wants to be unaffiliated. Raylene had lived a cloistered life in the first place, bordered upon only by the aristocracy, and other such overvalued sorts.

“You see the truth, but you say it is nothing, because you’ve always seen it.”

The party line often has little to do with what will actually happen, or why it would happen like that, but if your living depends on that party line. Well. What value can the truth hold if that’s not what feeds you?

“No one wants to know what will happen, and no one wants to know what has happened. They only want to know what they wish was true.”

And really, just holding those thoughts in her mind and in her heart was enough to concern her, not with the king or the seers or that notion of the future to which they were bound, but with the lives of those people she actually knew.

She didn’t think much of the families that requested her services, it was all the same in relation to the day-laborer’s and even the new-money families that asked their futures of her.

It was a small thing, but even the king and his court imbibed in such selfishness as themselves and their own over the needs of all else.

And though she knew it hand in hand with the vision she’d woken from, there was nothing to be done with it. She didn’t know where she’d be by then other then here in her parlor, but she could do nothing but injure herself with a full admittance to anyone who’d stand a chance.