Rainbow

It was Maeve who saw it first.

“Eleanor!” she squealed, her voice liquid sunshine. “Look!”

We were on our front porch, Maeve playing quietly with toys, me lost in a book as usual. I looked up from my page and followed her pointing finger.

It was spectacular, stretched across the sky in three glowing arcs, each one fainter and stranger than the last. The first burned bright with familiar colors, the second shimmered above it in reverse, and the third hung like a ghostly veil at the edge of the clouds, streaked with pale silver and turquoise.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Maeve breathed out, her voice delighted and full of wonder. “A triple rainbow.”

A triple rainbow.

Fuck.

We’ve always lived in the mountains, our village one of a dozen that exists in this range of bluish-gray misty peaks. I’ve read stories about the world beyond our civilization, but I’ve never ventured farther than a neighboring village, and, not being an adventurous person myself, I’d be supremely happy to keep things that way.

It’s a good village for people like me, who just want to keep things status quo. Our jobs are decided before we’re even born. Maeve and I will be seamstresses, since that is what our mother is, and hers before her, and so on and so on. I enjoy the work as much as I can. Maeve despises it because she doesn’t quite have the hang of it yet; she pricks her fingers often and runs to me crying. She’ll learn more when she’s finished with her schooling, and I think she’ll like it better then, too.

“I hate it,” she told me one day while I bandaged her finger. “I wish I could be the village doctor like Mateo.”

Ironically, her closest friend, Mateo - the son of our village doctor - has shown little interest in tending to his fellow classmates’ injuries, from what I’ve been able to see, and I see a lot. My sewing machine is set by the window of our shop, and I can see Maeve and her peers playing in the school yard from the window. Two weeks ago, a little girl fell and skinned her knee, and it was Maeve who ran to her, blowing on the little girl’s scab the way I do hers. From what I could see, Mateo observed the injury, but continued throwing the ball with a friend, back and forth, a guilty expression on his face.

“We’ll be seamstresses, side by side,” I told Maeve cheerfully, kissing her bandaged finger. “It’s all been decided.”

She frowned. “Not by us,” she said, a little sass in her voice. “Besides, Sarah-Kate says that everything will not always be the way it is now.”

My breath caught in my throat, as it did every time Sarah-Kate or her mother, Annalise, were mentioned. “Well, Sarah-Kate’s not the town mystic yet,” I said, trying to keep my voice light-hearted. “You don’t have to believe everything she says.”

My little sister returned to her work uncomplainingly - much as she disliked the needlework, she really wasn’t a complainer - but I heard her the words she muttered under her breath.

But I want to.

There were delighted voices throughout the village noticing the triple rainbow, one of whom, eventually, was my mother. She came out on the porch at Maeve’s insistence, and with a bit of my younger sister’s assistance as well, leaning against Maeve’s small body. They look so alike, my sister and my mother, with the same golden hair and deep blue eyes; I have dark hair and dark eyes, which I can only guess came from our father, who left the village without saying good-bye to anyone when Maeve was a baby, Mama says. I don’t remember him at all.

Mama doesn’t walk well, she deals with a lot of aches and pains that Mateo’s mother can’t do much about. “It’s back-breaking work, the seamstress life,” she joked sometimes, but was always diligent about insisting that I take breaks and be kind to my body.

She was a sad woman, my mother, always walking through the world as if dealing with a pain she could not put into words. It should have been a pleasure to see her face light up when she saw the triple rainbow.

“Never seen anything like it,” she said. Maeve grinned up at her.

My stomach was tied in knots, and my leg was shaking, as it always did when I was nervous. Much as I didn’t want to, I knew where I needed to go.

“Mama, I’m going to visit Annalise,” I said, hoping that my voice sounded matter-of-fact.

Her eyebrows lifted. “Now?”

“Yes, I just wanted to check with her about an order,” I said simply. It was a good cover story; families generally put in orders with us when they needed larger clothes for a growing child, and Annalise had Sarah-Kate as well as two younger sons in need of attire.

Mama gazed at me for a moment. We weren’t close, my mother and me. While we’d worked side by side from when I was fifteen until she was forced to retire when I was twenty-one, we rarely spoke. She seemed to have a hard time meeting my gaze for as long as I could remember. It felt strange now, to have her eyes and her attention so completely focused on me.

“Go if you must,” she said. I nodded, kissed Maeve, and took off down the path in front of our house, grateful for the ten minutes it would take me to arrive at Annalise’s front door.

When I was small, Mama explained all the jobs in the village to me. Many didn’t require clarification - the blacksmiths, the construction workers, the teachers. But Annalise, the town mystic? That one I didn’t get.

“She can see the future?” I said, frowning.

“Yes,” Mama said simply. We were alone in my bedroom - Maeve was a baby and asleep in her crib - and I was curled up in my bed, Mama in an armchair beside it. She never slept in the bed with me. I was seven years old, and I’d already noticed the lack of eye contact she made with me.

“Does she just tell everyone what’s going to happen all the time?” I asked.

Mama shook her head. “She finds people when she sees a vision that she believes they need to hear,” she explained. “Some more often than others.”

“Like Peter?”

My mother frowned at the mention of our village leader; she always did. I could tell that she and many others disliked Peter and his family, the ones that ruled over our village. They were gruff and rough, often making disparaging comments about the village’s productivity, yet seeming to do nothing themselves other than order others around. “Yes,” she said. “I believe Annalise often consults with Peter, much as she wishes she didn’t have to.”

“Will Annalise ever share a vision with me?” I asked.

A flash of something went over my mother’s face. “I would guess not,” she said, rising from her chair. “And if so, not for a long, long time. Good night, Eleanor.”

After she left, I thought long and hard, trying to identify the emotion that had flashed across my mother’s face.

Eventually I realized it was fear.

I didn’t need to knock on Annalise’s door; she was waiting for me, as I knew she would be. Her daughter Sarah-Kate ran to me as I entered their front yard. “Is Maeve at home?”

“Yes,” I said, trying to make my voice sound warm, and not anxious and angry. “If your mother says yes, you can go play with her.” Annalise nodded in agreement, and Sarah-Kate took off down the path. Our village was safe, and children ran about freely at all times.

Our village was safe.

But was it?

Annalise wasn’t looking at me. She was seated on the front steps of her home, gazing at the triple rainbow spaerkling across the sky.

“I won’t do it,” I said. I hated the way my voice sounded; I sounded like Maeve when she didn’t want to put on her pajamas.

“You will,” she replied simply, shifting her eyes from the triple rainbow to me. “It’s written in the stars, Eleanor. It always has been.”

I was sixteen years old when Annalise found me and told me the prophecy.

I was seated at the seamstress table, working. In our village, we studied at school until we were fifteen years old, and then we began an apprenticeship within our families, learning the work we would be doing to contribute to our village.

My mother was in bed when Annalise arrived. Mama was often in bed. Even on days when she seemed physically well, there was a heaviness to her, and I got the sense that sometimes simply being alive in the world exhausted her.

“Good morning, Annalise,” I said, my voice warm but surprised. “Can I help you? Are you here about an order?”

She shook her head. “I’ve had a vision,” she said quietly.

I nodded, my heart suddenly beating fast. “Should I get my mother?”

“It was about you,” Annalise said. “It will be a day, years from now - I don’t know when. There will be a triple rainbow in the sky." I laughed at first; we'd only ever seen double rainbows before, and rarely even those. I stopped laughing when I saw Annalise's face.

"There’s something you will do that day,” she said.

Then she told me.

“I won’t do it,” I repeated.

Much as I enjoyed the predictability of our village, I knew there were others who were unhappy. I hadn’t noticed it when I was a child - the whispers of discontent, the unhappiness with decisions made by Peter and the other village leaders. My closest friend was a blacksmith and it was what he said that made me most concerned.

“They’ve been changing the orders,” he explained. “Usually, it’s just teakettles and farming tools.”

“What is it now?” I asked.

He paused for a moment before telling me. “Weapons,” he whispered.

Weapons.

There was no need for weapons in our village.

Annalise had tears in her eyes. “I don’t wish this on you,” she said. “I wouldn’t wish it on any young person.”

“Then you do it,” I said. “If it needs to be done, then you do it. Why on Earth would it need to be me?”

Annalise’s hair was long and loose, and kept blowing in her face when the wind picked up. Her deep gray eyes had an unsettling steadiness to them. “I’m never told the why, Eleanor,” she said. “Only the what.”

There was something about the way she said it. She was uncertain; she’d looked at me as if she were trying to decide something. “You have a guess, though,” I said. “You have a guess as to why it has to be me.”

She was quiet for a long time before she nodded.

Even when I was a child, there were signs of corruption and evil in the village if you looked for them. I once walked by the house where Peter lived and overheard him roaring at one of the village messengers.

“Tell them I don’t agree,” he shouted, his eyes noticeably wild even from twenty feet away where I stood on the path. I remembered freezing in place in fear, but when Peter noticed me, he paused and smiled the charming smile I’d always seen on his face when he led village meetings. I felt better when I saw that smile.

When I’d heard his voice, cold, powerful, screaming at a member of our village, I’d felt afraid.

“There are many of us who would do this for you if we could.”

Annalise was telling the truth; I knew this. Much as I tried to ignore the conflicts in the village, I noticed that there were times when the same adults who seemed dissatisfied with Peter’s leadership would gather. Had they been plotting?

“Do any of them know - about this?” I asked her quietly. “About the triple rainbow?”

She shook her head.

“Well, why can’t one of them do it?” I demanded. “If it needs to be done, why not by someone who actually wants this?”

It was a valid question, I thought. I’d never been picked first for teams in schoolyard games, never shown any interest in village politics. I was always the person who kept her head down and tended to her work and her family. If it didn’t involve Maeve or my seamstress duties or a friend, I wasn’t interested.

She was quiet for a long time before she answered. “I’d thought of that, Eleanor,” she said. “But -”

“But what?”

She sighed. “Sometimes, all I see is a snippet of a vision,” she explained. “But this time - I saw what will happen if you do this, and I saw what will happen if it’s someone else.”

My heart sank. “And?”

Her eyes met mine, and she held my gaze steadily. “It has to be you.”

The house where Peter and his family lived sat on a small hilltop within the village. It rose above all the neighboring houses like a smaller echo of a castle, its stone walls carefully fitted and its narrow windows set high and deep. A modest tower crowned one corner of the roof, and though it lacked true grandeur, it still carried an air of quiet authority that made the surrounding cottages seem smaller in its shadow. Everyone in the village called it the Castle.

I walked by it almost every day after Annalise shared her prophecy with me. Not because I needed to; I did my work at home, so walks through the village were unnecessary unles I had an errand.

I had to, though. I had to walk by the Castle every day.

Looking back now, I must have been preparing.

We walked together, Annalise and me, toward the Castle, with a brief stop at my friend’s blacksmith shop along the way.

When we got to the front door, I looked at her pleadingly. “Can you come in with me?”

She nodded. We knocked together.

It was Peter himself who opened the door; I’d been expecting one of his brothers or his sons. He smiled warmly at me, that charming smile I’d seen so often at community events. “Eleanor!” he said. “And Annalise. Welcome. Do come in.”

We entered together into a large front room. There was a sizeable wooden table in the center of the room, covered with papers. My eyes strayed to it instantly; he must have followed my gaze, because Peter immediately began to gather the papers up, still flashing me that same smile.

“Such a mess,” he said. “I’ll get it out of the way. Annalise - is there - have you come to deliver a prophecy?”

He was nervous. He had dark hair that fell into his dark eyes, and he kept pushing it back on his forehead. His leg was shaking, too, just a restless twitch - the same one I had anytime I was nervous.

Suddenly I knew.

“Where is my father?” I asked Mama when I was little.

She frowned. “I’ll tell you this once, and never again,” she said slowly. “Your father saw the world and this village differently than I did. Once he told me his plans, I told him I wanted nothing to do with him. I wanted to go far away from him, but he forced me to stay in the village."

“How?”

She held me to her chest in a rare expression of comfort. “He told me if I left, he would take you away from me. He was fine with me going away, but he couldn’t lose you.”

“You’re my father,” I said quietly to Peter.

He looked surprised, even a little disoriented. “How -”

“Never mind,” I said, looking around the room. He hadn’t cleared away everything. Why had he even allowed us in? Up on the wall was a map of the villages in our mountains, with arrows and lines scribbled all over it. “You’re planning an attack,” I said. “An invasion of the other villages.”

“Eleanor -”

“Why did you leave us?”

His eyes blazed with fury now. “Your mother understood nothing,” he said quietly. “She wanted our village to be different - for people to be able to choose their professions, their lives. She wanted freedom instead of order, and my father left me with an edict to keep order in this community, and to spread that order throughout the mountainside.”

“How?” I asked. “With weapons? With a war?” I knew I was right when he avoided my gaze. “When -”

“The attack is set to begin tomorrow.”

This time it was Annalise who spoke. Peter looked amazed. “How did you -”

“It was written in the stars,” she said quietly.

They were the same words she’d spoken to me all those years ago, and it reminded me of what I needed to do.

He looked like me - or, I suppose, I looked like him. I’d always thought of myself as mild, content, maybe even a bit weak. I didn’t dream of freedom or glory. I was happy with the life I’d been assigned.

But others weren’t.

Maeve’s face flashed before my eyes.

But I want to.

She should get to decide, shouldn’t she? She should get to choose her life. They all should.

I looked at Annalise; she nodded.

I pulled the knife from my pocket. For just a moment, I glanced over Peter’s shoulder and glimpsed the triple rainbow, still glowing in the sky.

Then I plunged the knife into my father’s heart, just as the stars had said I would.