One-- What The Wind Said
Durga felt her coming on the wind, and if asked to prove her assertion she would smile thinly, mysterious as a smoke-sun horizon, and tell you nothing. She scrambled up the narrow path through laurel thicket and witchgrass, the summer's growth particularly snarling that year, with constant throes of rain and hot sun. She moved swiftly, her dirty skirts snagging often, and if you weren't looking directly in her face, you would think her a young woman the way she moved, yet she was well past seventy. Catching her grim, unbreathing face, the hard lines stacked around her eyes like a relief map of the mountainous land she came from, only then would you notice her age. No one would listen to her warnings; the town hadn't trusted her 'visions' in twenty suns. With her people you could be right 99,999 times out of a hundred thousand, but that one you got wrong would be held against you. Old Pastor Snod and his black-caped brethren didn't help much either.
When she climbed to the crest of the spur ridge, she noticed the wind had switched direction-- she could smell the pine coming up from the cove. Honeysuckle and something sour on top of that too. She had a little shack a little further up
