Free Sign of the Throne: Book One in the Solas Beir Trilogy by Melissa Eskue Ousley

during the Vietnam War, when they were displaced from their homes and became refugees, their way of life was disrupted and they were unable to make the traditional offerings for protection and blessing, and that’s when the attacks began.”
    Abby shuddered. “If all that’s true, I am never going to sleep again.”
    “Riordan, didn’t you tell me when you were a kid visiting your aunt here, that each evening she used to put out weird ‘offerings’ of milk and honey for the neighborhood cats?” Cassandra asked.
    “Yeah. I do remember that. It’s been a long time since I thought about it, and when I was a kid, I thought she was just a crazy old lady. But I think tonight has given me new insight. I should ask her about that. I haven’t seen her do it since we’ve lived here,” Riordan said.
    “You know what else is weird,” Cassandra said. “In class, I was discussing correlation and causation—the idea that one thing may be related to another, but does not necessarily cause it. I was using Newcastle Beach as an example—that this neighborhood has higher rates of students graduating high school and completing a college degree than the rest of Santa Linda, and how this is related to higher family income and housing prices in the community, but doesn’t cause them, and vice versa. And one of my students asked me about cats. She’s a volunteer at an animal shelter, and she said there were three times more stray cats in Newcastle than in all of Santa Linda.”
    “That’s odd,” Abby said.
    Cassandra nodded. “Isn’t it, though? So I used that as an example. Sometimes there are weird correlations that show a pattern, but have nothing to do with each other—like intellect and shoe size, or an increase in car wrecks and the occurrence of sun spots. But now I’m thinking, what if the stories are true? What if these shadow things, whatever they are, masquerade as stray cats? And what if people put out these offerings in exchange for protection and increased prosperity? I mean, you could certainly say that this community is blessed in a number of ways—even with fertility rates. I’m willing to bet we have a higher than average occurrence of twin births than the rest of Santa Linda, fertility treatments notwithstanding.”
    “Synchronicity,” Riordan said.
    “Sorry?” Abby asked.
    “Synchronicity,” he repeated. “Meaningful coincidences. Fate. Destiny. Everything happens for a reason.”
    “Sorry, I still don’t follow you,” Abby said.
    “Synchronicity,” Cassandra explained, “is the idea that there are meaningful patterns of coincidence that occur in life. Some people see this as a psychological phenomenon that occurs when you start noticing something. Say, if you were interested in buying a yellow car, you’d start noticing yellow cars everywhere you go. Others see it as a spiritual thing—a sign from God leading you where you should go, revealing the master plan.”
    “So there are no coincidences? Nothing just happens randomly?” Abby asked.
    “Well, randomness is debatable, at least in real life,” Cassandra said. “This is why I love teaching statistics. In statistics, we act like life occurs in a vacuum. When we look at probability, we say something is random if each trial is independent and has an equal chance of occurring.
    “So, if I’m rolling a die, and I’m trying to figure out my chances of rolling a six, I might roll it a hundred times and then figure out the probability based on the number of trials, the number of sides to the die, and how many times I get a six. But I’m assuming that I’m rolling it the same way each time and that the die is balanced, that it’s not weighted on one side or something. And this works in an example like this, but real life is messy.
    “If I’m thinking about my chances of running into someone I know in the grocery store or surviving a car wreck or a shark attack, or being hit by lightning, or whatever the example, there are a lot