The Embers of Heaven by Alma Alexander Page B

accurate and precise his predictions were, all on the basis of running his hands over the bones of people’s faces. Can you truly do this?”
     
    “Yes,” the girl said with a quiet serenity.
     
    “Do mine,” Sihuai said.
     
    “Oh, young sir!” she demurred, sweeping her long lashes down on her cheeks. “Your voice is so strong and assured. I am certain your future is already known to you…”
     
    “Here,” Tang said, folding their last copper into the girl’s hand. “It isn’t much but it’s all we have and that means we have paid you a treasure. Can you do all of us?”
     
    For answer she reached out a hand, and Tang guided it to Sihuai’s face. She ran long fingers across his features, and then pulled back. “You have the face of a scholar, or a sage,” she said. “You will write many scholarly books, and live far, far away from your home. But it will… it will be exile, of a sort. You will want to come back, but you won’t be able to, because you will be proscribed in the land of your childhood. You will have fame, but no fortune, and little happiness… and you will have many regrets in your life. Sorry. This is not very nice to tell. But that is in your face.”
     
    “What about me?” Tang said, thrusting his face forward into her hand and closing his eyes.
     
    “You are a man who knows how to make friends and keep the peace, although you have no idea of how you do this,” the girl said, and smiled with what was real warmth and almost affection despite her short acquaintance with her subject. “But the friends you make are often only on the surface, and the peace is dearly paid for. You will love a woman who will marry another, and that other man will be your friend, and it won’t be the first woman he gets that you will covet. You will hide your envy well, though. Your abilities will make you valuable to men in power—but they will balance their need of you with their fear of you, and you will need to learn to do the same.  Your life will be hard but you will always know how to find the treasure within it… although you might think in the end that you have paid too high a price for it.”
     
    “You really tell it like it is,” Tang said. “What about Iloh?”
     
    “Wait, I don’t think…” Iloh began, but Tang had already grabbed the girl’s hand and laid it on his friend’s face. Her fingertips feather-light on his cheekbones, on his lips. And then she sat back and gave him a long thoughtful look.
     
    “You will become a great man,” she said, “a prince, or a councilor… and if not that, then you will at least lead a band of outlaws from a mountain top. You have ambition and patience. You know how to hold people in the palm of your hand.” She hesitated, snatched her hand back, stepped backwards as if she had second thoughts about the rest of her reading. But she had accepted the copper, and she owed it. “But you will be stone-hearted,” she whispered. “You would command a hundred thousand deaths, and it would mean nothing to you if that was the price of achieving a cherished goal. You…” she hesitated again, but took a deep breath and continued, although a faint blush had come onto her cheeks, “you will have many women, but you will truly love only once—and that will be a songbird, a woman whose spirit is free, and one you can never truly have…”
     
    She bit her lip, as though she was regretting her candor now that she had said all that, and then turned around and hurried back the way she had come with the sureness that only a blind person walking a familiar path could understand.
     
    “Cheerful, isn’t she,” Iloh said after a moment, staring after her.
     
    The other two ‘beggars’ were still staring at Iloh’s face.
     
    Iloh glared at them. “It wasn’t my idea,” he growled. “It’s all a bunch of superstitious nonsense, anyway. Let’s eat; I, for one, am starving.”
     
    They went on, later, and spent the rest of the summer