Helen celebrates her eighth birthday by baking all her favourite people a cake again. And then she goes away with Kas, to Iceland and Russia and back by way of Alaska.
When they fly in, Kas on Petaal's cloudpine and Helen on her own, Helen is wearing blue jeans and a pink T-shirt.
"I'm not sure I've even ever heard one before," she says. "But that sounds like what I think one would sound like if I did."
Helen tries to think her way through all the goddesses and their domains, to see which one seems most prophecy-ish, and then she shrugs and says, "Which?"
"Well," says Helen, "there must be some way to tell that prophecies are prophecies, or we wouldn't know things about them, would we? So how do we tell?"
"Ranata," she says, out loud to the named party but in utter silence to Inkeri, "I was talking to Inkeri and we think she did a prophecy, how do we tell?"
"Okay," says Helen. "Should I talk to the queen like this, or find her where she is and talk to her that way?"
She grins at Inkeri.
"Ranata says we should go find the queen and ask her and there aren't any prophets in the clan unless you are one."
"It's a thing I can do," says Helen. "Because I'm peculiar. I can listen where anybody is if I know where they are, or where anyplace is if I remember it well, and I can put my voice wherever I'm listening or make it go all over."
She shakes her head. "It's not my birth blessing or I would've said. My birth blessing's Amariah Lytess, daemons."