Darkness Risen (The Ava'Lonan Herstories Book 4) Read Online Free PDF Page A

not
like the clutching fear in the billa’ja’way. But why? What was wrong here?
    Surely not a bath , she almost spoke to the sense
of wrongness, glancing around. This was routine. She demanded baths in this
very tub all the time, had demanded it hundreds of times, sometimes twice a
turn. Why not bathe here, rather than in the bathing pool in its own separate
lain? There was absolutely nothing different about this bath from the one
before it - why should it be wrong now? It was the same, the same low grunts of
the tub carriers, the same susurrating murmur of the warming (av’rita?) rite of
the basin carriers, the same slow, languid movements of the hands of the
bathers...
    Everything exactly the same. So why should she feel
any different now about the whole ritual, which was the same?
    Why indeed , the sense of wrongness seemed to say, and why indeed can you not just take the few steps to the bathing lain? Or if
even that is too much, just ‘tun there?
    “Do we displease you in some way, sweet Heir?” the head
bather asked quietly, and even his voice was modulated to strictly pleasant
tones. If she said yes, she knew that all the bathers, basin carriers and tub
carriers might be instantly put to shameful death or some more unpleasant fate.
Or they might go seeking their deaths to escape that same fate, for displeasing
her. So she, in some fit of mercy or perhaps in response to the wrongness,
shook her head no and tried to relax. Tried to fall into the rhythm of the
familiar, to lose herself in the luxury of the scented oils and bubbles. But
try or not as she might, the something continued to bother her. She said
nothing, did not cut the bath short. Instead she did something she had never
done before: she began to analyze this, one of her favorite pre-slumber rituals.
Every aspect she looked at and turned over every nuance. They finished the
bath, and still she studied the whole thing. Then, like a ray of silent, golden
Av through filmy gray background curtains of noise, she hit upon the wrongness
that plagued her about the bath, or rather what the wrongness might have been
trying to show her.
    It’s a bit - excessive , she admitted.
It was a luxury for luxury’s sake, not because she had done anything to deserve
it, but simply because she could have it so.
    This was still another piece of an uncomfortable
trend she was seeing take form within her. Why should trivial things like this
discomfit her? Why should the comfort and well-being of her servants be
significant, or the excesses that she learned from her mother bother her, or
the welfare of the common people interest her, or the secret words in her
mother’s secret meetings send her into paroxysms of panic, or the treatment of
prisoners concern her?
    Yes, prisoners. Him. This is his doing, curse
him. Him and his strange ‘Rite of Solu.’ All this nonsense began with him. She knew that this was what the rite was called because she had gone back and
talked to him, to ask him what the Rite was and how it might be reversed. And
after staring hatefully at her for a long time, he had replied that it was the
Rite of Solu and it could not be reversed, and why should she want it to be?
    But it had effected some kind of change in her, had
affected her thinking in some way. How? How had the rite changed her? He called it the Rite of Solu, but it was not like any Rite of Solu she had ever
performed. Since when does the Rite of Solu make the light of Av pour in
like a cascade of amber, filling one to the brim with light? Since when does it
scorch the soul, and fill the senses with such an awareness of life? Since when
does the Rite of Solu make one sense wrongness in everything one does?
    This was not the Rite of Solu she had been taught.
    And she had not practiced the Rite she had been
raised to in quite some time either, she realized with a guilty jolt as her
maids and maddi lotioned her and oiled her hair and readied her for sleep. The
new rite she had witnessed from the