The oracle had not always spoken in inversions.
In the early years of her practice, she spoke plainly. She had the gift of clear sight, and she used it in the way gifts are supposed to be used: she answered what was asked.
The powerful came. They asked about their enemies and their territories and their wealth. She answered plainly, and the answers served them, and the answers became policy. The people who needed the oracle for ordinary life, for questions about planting and children and where to go when staying was wrong, found the consultation room occupied, or found that her answers had already been claimed and used by those who arrived before them.
She considered this for a season.
In the spring of the following year, a minister came and asked whether his trade expansion would succeed. She said: your plan is ruinous and will fail. He laughed. He understood it as flattery spoken in irony, the kind of false modesty powerful men expect from those they patronize. He left and implemented the plan. It failed, as she had said. But he believed she had been wrong. He never understood that she had told him the truth in the only language she had left herself.
Word spread differently among the people who did not have power. They had learned to listen more carefully, having had less given to them over the years. They heard the inversion. They came to her with different ears.
She said: you have no reason to travel. They heard: go. They went.
She said: your harvest will be poor this year. They planted more.
She said: your child is not in danger. The parents who knew how to listen left town before the flood.
The powerful never learned the inversion. They had too much confidence in receiving what they expected to notice that what they received was always the opposite of what they needed.
She continued answering everyone who came.