Rhiannon Posidonia | d4 | Done

Rhiannon Posidonia

Seventeen

Female

District 4

Moss had covered the thatched roof by the time she was born. Their house was set out between dunes scattered with bramble and driftwood. A set of shoals wound along the shoreline, and a dock that looked as though it might sink right into the ocean if one set too many steps out. From the kitchen window there sat a lighthouse on the bay, red stripe curling around the base like a candy cane hollowed out of stone.

Rhiannon didn’t mind washing dishes because she got to stare out at the shore and watch the ships come into harbor. When she was young, she’d imagine taking a boat to the far reaches of the world, across the endless ocean and over the tip of the earth until she wound up somewhere out of this world. She’d be the first to set foot in a hundred years on a land that held people who didn’t know a thing about people like her – no hunger games, no empty stomachs – just a passing whisper that people like her had ever existed.

Her mother and grandmother encouraged the story telling.

Often set across from her at the old oak dinner table in the two bedroom cottage, her grandmother would whisper about how when she was a girl, she’d known all the different places that still existed across the sea. One by one, she’d said, they went out, like lights on a line, until at last not a one of them spoke back to panem. But she’d never known if it was the matter of their lights going out forever, or that they simply had wished to remain in the darkness rather than speak to panem.

Could you blame them? Her grandmother tutted while she picked at her needlepoint.

Their family was queer enough without her head getting mixed up in stories from long gone by.

Rhiannon had realized it when she was five, and the women at the market whispered about her mother. An awfully good number of sailors would stop by her house to speak with Madam Deanna, as they would call her and she styled herself. The rumor going around was that she would give them a reading on their next trip out into the deep waters, and warn them of what sort of dangers that they needed to be on the lookout for. Never one to mince words, her mother would peel away to their core, reading their eyes and sometimes their hearts so that she could extract the truth.

But her reputation as a fortune teller preceded her. For there was a wrinkle in all of it, that time and again some of those sailors would stay more than to have their palm held, or their cards read. No – Madam Deanna was skilled at some of the darker arts, too.

So they called her the sea witch, the hag, the homewrecking bitch that lulled their men into a siren’s den.

And it wasn’t entirely untrue. Sometimes her mother would set up in the kitchen, hair brushed back and skin fresh with lotion. She’d spray on perfume and rouge her cheeks readying for their arrival. Her voice would be soft when they came in, breathy, as though she could scarcely breathe looking back at them.

She was magic, Rhiannon had decided, the way she could move from her chair, grab onto their hands and turn them over just so to get a better look at their heart lines. And she’d look up from their hand and into their eyes, until they’d flush and stammer through their words. When the reading was done, she’d tell Rhiannon to fetch some shells out by the shore, she had another private reading to do for them.

She supposed she could have faulted her mother for what sort of reputation that she’d wrought, but – they never went hungry. She never hit her, never let the men stay, and she certainly wasn’t a fool. They lived in their little crumbling house but it was warm in the winter and cool in spring; they had little to worry about.

You can have the gift too, if you want.

Her mother had been walking along the beach with her one evening at sunset. They had been watching the lights of the ships in the distance and talking about how the summer felt as though it was going to bring all sorts of storms to the coast. Her mother had smiled and stared at Rhiannon so long she’d felt a shiver run up her spin.

They’d talk now and again about magic, about how it was more reading a man and his heart than what was in the air or in heaven. Her grandmother would swear up and down that they were blessed with another sight, but her mother would roll her eyes and say that anyone could do it if they learned well enough.

Deanna had never once told her daughter how she felt as though they were all in a cosmic flow, moving this way and that, directed by sets of hands that got them to where they were supposed to go.

A world where we’re just on a path and pulled along. One that only a few of us can ever really see.

She’d stood with her as the waves crashed along the shore, and explained to Rhiannon that she was sure she’d be able to see it, too. Not only because she was her daughter, but that she’d be one that could see even more than she ever could.

Rhiannon puzzled with it for a while, and listened to the foam as it bubbled underfoot.

Maybe there was a comfort in destiny. She could take up the same sort of mantle, looking into the future, leading men to where they needed to go. It was noble, in a way, to help them find some sort of peace.

“I’ll accept it then,” She replied with a grin.

The world needed more magic, anyway.

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