Moonscatter Read Online Free PDF Page B

found no ease for her spirit, not when the only other thing she had to look at was the empty bed across the cell. Even in the cloud-mottled moonlight she could see the precision of the blanket folds, the crispness of the white pillow. Tayyan had never in her life left a bed like that, not without a lump here, a sag there, a wrinkle or two that her greatest effort couldn’t eliminate. A knocking at the door broke her from her brooding. She lifted her legs onto her bed, crossed her ankles and tugged her sleeping smock over her knees. “Come.”
    Yael-mri pulled the door open and stood in the dark rectangle, the candle she held stiffly before her painting inky shadow into the hollows and lines of her strong face. “The Silent Ones sent to tell me you were dreaming again.”
    Serroi’s hand trembled on her knee. “Yes.”
    The flame wavered as Yael-mri sighed, licked at a raised edge sending a liquid slide down one side of the candle. The smell of hot wax was suddenly strong in the small room. Absently Yael-mri straightened her arm, holding the candle farther from her. “The Shawar are troubled by these sendings. Their meditations are disturbed, and what’s worse, several makings have collapsed.”
    Serroi licked dry lips. When she met Yael-mri’s compassionate gaze, she stopped breathing, then tried to smile, but the twisting of her mouth felt more like a grimace so she let the smile die. “I’ll have to leave the Valley.”
    â€œI’m afraid so. Come to the prieti-varou when the bell sounds treilea. We’ll talk. I have some suggestions I want to make about your destination once you set out.”
    â€œI hear.” Serroi drew shaking fingers across her eyespot, trying to counter its painful throbbing. She grimaced. “At least I’ll be doing something, not just sitting around watching the rocks grow.”
    â€œYou do a great deal more than that.”
    Serroi shrugged. “Other people’s work.”
    Yael-mri watched her a moment, frowning thoughtfully. “Do you want someone to stay with you the rest of the night? Or should I send one of the healwomen?”
    â€œNo.” As Yael-mri still hesitated in the doorway, Serroi lifted her head, stared coldly at her. “Don’t worry, I won’t sleep again. There won’t be any dreams.”
    The door clicked shut, footfalls moved crisply away, fading as the thick walls cut off the sound. Serroi pulled the quilt off her bed and wrapped it around her shoulders. She touched her eyespot again, traced its outline, a long oval with its major axis parallel to the line of her brows, a dark green oval almost black against the bright olive of her skin, remembering other fingers that had touched her there, slim white fingers of surpassing beauty when she was a child and, later, the love touches of tan fingers rough with calluses from swordhilts and macai halters, thin and a little bony and very dear. Tayyan, lover and swordmate. Tayyan, abandoned on a street in Oras to bleed to death, her body tossed outside the walls for demons to eat . She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, then let her hands fall into her lap. The days had dribbled like quicksilver through her fingers, days unnumbered, one much like the other. Time. Too much time. Her grief was blunted, her guilt lost in fear as her Noris fought to reclaim her. She leaned against the wall, her eyes on the window as she watched the shifting clouds, the shadows dappling the mountainside. Find me something hard to do, Yael-mri, hunt out an impossible quest and I’ll hug it to me like it was my only child . Her lips twitched. Foolishness. Still — anything would be better than this wretched drifting .
    She spent the morning cleaning out one of the stables and washing down trailworn macain brought in by meien who came home dismissed from their wards, some of them running ahead of hostile mobs. The mindless labor brought