Into the trigon we go,
With loyalty to break the soul.
Covered in blood and soot,
Down we fall and underfoot.
Mother Walsh continued to hum the same refrain over again. She stopped humming and dropped the curtain tie she was holding. “What about the second verse, Your Majesty?”
“There’s a second verse?” Elea asked, her interest piqued.
The older woman’s face turned red. “I thought you of all people would know it.”
She felt her own color rise as heat flooded her face. Everyone expected perfection from a princess, and she didn’t even know all the lines of an Urkan nursery rhyme. “Will you sing it to me?”
Mother Walsh cleared her throat and whispered, more than sang:
With arm, and nose, and eyes,
A new Yakura will arise.
Together, one, two, and three
Will bring to pass Aine’s Prophecy.
Elea gasped as she touched her throat. “It’s about the Trigon Prophecy; that’s why you assumed I would know it.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” she said, and bobbed an obsequious curtsy. “Aine said that Yakura, our country, would fall to her enemies, but that when someone with the gifts of Queen Eleanora was reborn, we would finally be free from our oppressors. A sign of the gift would be that the girl’s hair would be violet, the color of the daughter of the goddess’s hair.”
Swallowing heavily, Elea shook her head. “While I have violet hair, I do not possess all three gifts of Eleanora. I only have the smell.”
“You only have the gift of Eimhir?”
Elea could only nod, the familiar shame rising in her chest and throat. She was not enough. She always fell short of what she needed to be and who her people thought she was.
Mother Walsh’s large brow furrowed, and she stared at Elea so long that it made her feel like ants were crawling all over her skin. “Perhaps we misunderstood the prophecy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe one human princess was never supposed to hold all three of the goddess’s gifts. Rumor has it that your cousin is very strong.”
Elea felt as if the wind had been knocked out of her. It was so simple. Eleanora had three daughters.Together, one, two, and three Will bring to pass Aine’s Prophecy.
Her grandmother had the sight of Aine: the eyes.
Nora had the strength of Orla: the arm.
And she had the smell of Eimhir: the nose.
For hundreds of years, the key to Aine’s Prophecy had been hidden in plain sight—as a simple nursery rhyme.
“Mother Walsh, I believe you are right,” Elea said, standing up, her blood pumping and her heartbeat racing. “It makes sense that there would need to be three of us to form a trigon of power. The holy number.”
The smell of sweet honey filled the air.
Hope.
The older woman curtsied again. “I’ll be leaving you to your breakfast now, Your Majesty.”