Diadem from the Stars Read Online Free PDF Page A

darting, busy figures. Two asiri brushed past her, huge bundles of dirty sheets balanced on their heads. Aleytys wrinkled her nose with distaste. Laundry, she thought. Hate those damn soggy sheets. She pulled the hood up over her head and sauntered into the patio.
    With affectionate gentleness she slid her hands up and down the silken silvery bark of the housetree, letting the life-pulse tingle into her fingertips. As she purred with pleasure, she lifted her head and looked up at the sky. It was curving into a vast crystalline bowl of translucent blue-purple. Horli’s crimson edge was just beginning to poke over the top of the steep roof. The clean clear sky showed no trace of last night’s violent eruption. Aleytys rubbed her feet over the grass and stared up at the secret sky, curiosity a small hot point burning under her heart. The nashta bell rang and she turned back into the house.
    3
    Aleytys poked at the steamy lye-sour water with the poundstick. “Ai-Aschla,” she muttered, putting muscles into shoving the sheets around in the boiling water. The humidity in the low-ceiled room turned her hair into damp strings that slid into her eyes and mouth.
    She leaned on the poundstick for a moment and watched the asiri laughing and gossiping, her mouth twisted in a bitter smile at the well-marked area of silence separating her from that happy camaraderie. She sniffed and pushed the soggy strands of hair out of her face.
    Across the room Urdag looked up and frowned. As Aleytys met the cold hostile gaze, rebellion flared in her. She jabbed viciously at the sheets, then set the stick down on the floor, wiped her face and hands on the sweat rag, and calmly walked out of the room, ignoring Urdag’s angry shout.
    As she left the shelter of the building, Hesh’s radiation hit her face. Hastily she twitched the hood over her head and tucked in the stray ends of her long hair. The square was hot and peaceful, with a few stray currents of air pouring down the roof to shift the housetree’s fronds lazily about, their papery rustle emphasizing the hush. She leaned against the tree and sighed as the minty fragrance from the fronds drifted gently around her. “Aziz … muklis …” she murmured, closing her tired eyes.
    A sudden burst of angry shouting jerked her onto her toes facing the door. I’m not about to wait for this, she decided. With a last wary glance in the direction of the growing clamor, she fled across the grass and plunged into the entranceway.
    As she passed the heavy planked doors, which were shut only in winter at the first snow, she slowed to a walk, breathing more easily now that she was out of the house. She ambled through the dappled shade from the twin rows of horans marching down each side of the roadway, scuffing her feet so that small explosive puffs of white sand spurted up in front of her sandal toes. The four-fingered horan leaves were curling into loose rolls now, with their smooth silver under-surfaces turned to the suns’ light, so that their shadows were flickering rectangles, long and narrow like thickened branches.
    In the middle of the high wooden arch over the river, she stopped and leaned over the railing to gaze down into the crystal water tumbling past, pleased by the irregular shadow shapes of subtly varying shades of green and blue. In a kind of timeless trance she melted into the water going swhhsshsssswesshsshssh beneath her as the edges of the world drifted away, drowning in green and blue, drowning in the musical susurrus of the water’s voice.
    Aleytys … something … rippled, flowed, leaped, sensed the hard resistance of stone and the lesser barriers of the aging pilings, sensed the bending of the submerged grasses, and the tickling intrusion of scattered schools of fish. Far out at the edge of the expanding bubble of awareness that was-and-was-not-Aleytys, fugitive sparks of crimson caught at her, pulled her … it … whatever