The Age of Light (The Ava'Lonan Herstories Book 1) (11 page)

Then came the smells. She smelled glamorous male and
female, almost overpowering, but they quickly faded and the scent of wild
kati’yori and rain assailed her. Then they, too, withdrew from dominance, and
she smelled a faint breath of sickness, medicines, soap, food, peppermint tea.
They came faster and faster, all alien yet familiar...

Then the sensations. Pleasant warmth. Cool air. The
cotton sheets, the springiness of the odd pallet. The hard stone floor under
weary feet. A warm soft body...

Faint flavors flickered into existence and were
gone...

Then the blackness began to lighten in weird,
amorphous splotches. Too caught up in the orgiastic sensory rush to be alarmed
by the bizarre experience, Jeliya watched with blind-folded eyes as something
began to take form before her in shades of silver, black, white, and a thousand
shades of gray. It was - it was her. She was seeing herself. As might be seen
from above.

Sweet mother Goddesses...!
Jeliya began to
tremble. Closed her mental ‘eyes,’ and opened them again. The mental image
never wavered. She looked up and the face in the image turned like a flower to
rain. Frantically, with all the waning strength she had, she pushed away from
him, the being through whom she was seeing -
herself
. Panicked, panicked
beyond reason, she crawled as far away from him as she could get, dragging the
desi
with her. She ignored the yearning of her body toward him as contact with him
broke. She huddled in on herself at the far edge of the pallet, whimpering. The
images paled and fled, along with all the other sensory feedback, and the pains
in her body slowly reasserted themselves.

What had happened was impossible - should have been
impossible! It was a foreshadow of the
Jur’Av’chi
, the
Joining, the deepest that two lovers could merge their souls without breaking
the taboo of Solu’san, which was the complete subsuming of one by another. It
began with a sharing of senses...

“Are you all right?” His voice was filled with
concern. She did not, could not answer him. What was he? What was he to touch
her so deeply, to touch her soul as if they had been lifelong mates? Was he a
joumbi
,
some sort of spirit? A
la’jabless
, eater
of souls? No, he felt too real. But what? Had he entered her mind illicitly,
touching her
ritu’chi
, taking of that which he had
not earned?

His cool hands touched her and she flinched away,
moaning in distress. She wanted to scream at him not to touch her, not to do
anything at all to her. She wanted to yell at him that such intimacy between
absolute strangers was on the border of obscene, for it implied that one had
entered the other’s mind by force. But her tongue was thick and frozen, and her
throat raw, with fear. He tried several times to touch her, but she cringed
away each time, finally crying out wordlessly when he took a firm hold of her.
Her head responded like a gong, and her cries became those of pain. His hands
jerked away as if scorched.

“Oh, sweet mother Earth, this might be a symptom I
hadn’t found out before.
Ky’pen’dati
, can
you hear me?”

How calm he seemed! As if he had not violated her.
She felt sick to her stomach, the broth turning to lead. Tears of fear and
revulsion seeped from her eyes.

“Jeliya?” When she made no reply but continued her
quiet weeping, his weight slithered forward on the pallet toward her. She
wriggled away. “Oh, no you don’t. Let’s not add concussion to your list of
ailments, shall we?” His hands caught her and pulled her back. She struggled,
fear lending her strength, and he was hard pressed to keep a hold of her.
“Jeliya, calm down! Don’t make me have to press you into sleep again - it’s not
good for you!”

At his words she struggled all the harder.
Press
into sleep? Not if I can help it!

And then her consciousness was yanked away from her
so fast that she dropped as if she had been pole-axed.

He sighed heavily. Gently he arranged her on the bed
and went to review what he had catalogued of the effects of thrista once more.

turning
light, draining to dark...

The
gila cat sang and she sang with it, its voice her own. She looked at the gila
cat and the feline looked at her, and then she was seeing herself through its
eyes and it regarded itself through hers. It laughed with her voice...

Consciousness flooded back to Jeliya. The cool hands
were on her forehead, and she fought not to pull away, instilling her
discipline, not willing to show weakness again. Not after the way she had
disgraced herself with mindless fear before. His touch was actually quite
pleasant, desirable even, implying that he had not defiled her mind - but after
the way he had connected to her senses, then taken her cognizance away...

“Little one? Are you with me?”

She nodded, grunted. Her pains were familiar things
now, and she could ignore them all except the headache. But she could not
ignore the urgent need to avoid contact with him. She had to find out what had
happened to cause this connection.

“How do you feel?”

“My head hurts,” she replied in a hoarse voice. It
did not shake with the effort she exerted in control.

“Would you like something for the pain? Or can you
tolerate it? Do you also want something to help you go back to sleep?” His
solicitousness put her at ease a bit.

“Something for the pain, yes, please,” she said. She
certainly did not want to sleep anymore, not after having her awareness torn
away from her so abruptly. Besides, she had some serious thinking to do. Her
mind churned with questions.

The weight on the bed shifted. She heard rummaging
noises, then the weight shifted again and he took her hand, placed something in
it.

“Here. Let this dissolve on your tongue. Try not to
chew it.”

With the slightest of hesitations she put the thing
in her mouth and sucked on it. To her surprise it was sweet, like crystallized
honey, with just the barest touch of bitterness. As it dissolved on her tongue
the ache behind her eyes began to melt away.

“What is this?” she asked, her voice still whispery.
“It works like bitter
r’wen
, and yet it
tasted like sweets; the pain remedies I’ve been forced to take before always
tasted horrible.”

“It’s just a little something I came up with,” he
said, his voice smiling. “I, too, had some trouble getting you to take the
medicine by itself, so I mixed it with honey and crystallized it.” She felt his
weight shift, then leave the bed surface. “I’ll be back to check on you in a
few -”

“Wait! Please don’t leave. I would like to talk to
you.” Her throat hurt from the strain of raising it, but there were questions
that she needed immediate answers to.

There was a pause, then, “As you wish.” The weight
resettled beside her, moved farther onto the bed. “What do you desire?”

“Please - how long have I been here?” she asked
anxiously.

“You have been in and out of fever delirium for a
ten’turn and one,” he answered.

Jeliya gasped and bit her lip. Eleven turns! Her
family would be sick with worry! And she had missed the
Bolorn’toyo
!

“Oh, no,” she whispered. She had to get in touch
with them as soon as possible, but she knew she was too weak at the moment to
send any kind of message to anyone.

“How much longer will it take for me to fully
recover?” she asked with dread.

He shifted and sighed. “I don’t know. I almost lost
you a couple of times to the fever and the poison. You’ve only now just come
out of it. To completely recover - maybe two, three more ten’turns.”

Jeliya shook her head. She could not stay missing
for another three ten’turns. That was simply out of the question.

“How long before I can safely travel?”

She heard the long hair swish, guessed he was
shaking his head. “I don’t know, little
ky’pen’dati
. Travel
is dangerous to one in your condition. This room that I have you in is
protected from air-borne diseases and other things that might exacerbate your
condition. To travel would expose you to all manner of things that might make you
even more ill than you are. We will see.”

She fretted, then pushed the concern away. She would
concentrate on getting better, building up her strength, and then, when she was
able, she would
av’tun
a message home. There were
probably
warru
out looking for her. Definitely they would trace her with a rite of finding.

“Is there anything more that you wish of me, little
ky’pen’dati
?”
the deep voice said, sounding faintly concerned.

Jeliya turned to the sound of his voice. There
were
other things she wished to know.

“Who, good one, are you? Are you a
Katari ol’bey’
one?”

A dark silver chuckle rang out above her.

“No, little climber. I am that which you tried to
ensnare in the forest with a -
most
ingenious trap.”

A small “oh” escaped her. It was him! The being she
had pursued for almost three ten’turns! She shuddered - to think that the one
she had tried to capture was the one who was nursing her back to health...

“The trap was not meant to harm you,” she said in a
small voice.

“Yes, I know. I went back for you, and I found it. I
studied it. It seems that it was meant to hold me for a while and then release
me. When I saw that I decided that you merely wanted to keep me in one place
for an unspecified time, for some reason. Would you enlighten me as to why you
sought to trap me in the first place?”

Jeliya shrugged and then regretted the motion.
“Because I wanted to talk to you; but every time I got near, you would bolt,”
she said.

“Ah, then it
was
you who pursued me through
the wilds,” he said, as if satisfied to confirm some suspicion. “Of course I
ran. I’ve had good reason to flee pursuit,” he replied, his voice strangely
free of accusation. “How was I to know your intentions? You might have wanted
my hide as a trophy.”

“Trophy?!” she said incredulously, outraged, her
voice coming out in a croak. “Who hunts you as a trophy?! It is against the law
of the Realm to hunt an
Av
’Touched for any
such reason! I was merely trying to get near enough to talk! What happened to
you that makes you think I would harm you?” She was so worked up that her head
began to hurt again.

“I’ve had spears thrown after me before,” he said
calmly, “and I’ve heard the whispered plans to acquire my skin for shields of
glory. Perhaps they did not think me -
Av
’Touched.” The
color of his voice turned slightly. “So you wanted to talk, did you? And that’s
why you felt the need to set a trap for me?” His voice was filled with some
amused thing, as if he knew she spoke truth, but still challenged her to prove
it.

“Yes! Since I couldn’t get near you I reasoned the
only way to accomplish my goal would be to trap you. I would have let you go as
soon as you’d heard me out. So I set the trap, hoping it would hold you long
enough to make you listen.” Jeliya knew he was testing her buttons, and took
control of herself. She also took note of the way he said ‘Av’Touched,’ as if
he were not quite comfortable or quite familiar with the word.

“And how - exactly - did you find me?”

“With difficulty,” she said with a slight smile. One
did not give away one’s hunting secrets to a stranger. And especially not to
one’s intended prey.

Again the chuckle. Then, “How did you know the trap
would work?”

She felt her face tingle with embarrassment. She
shifted slightly, her back making itself felt. “I didn’t, really. It was a long
shot. I figured that you were related to the
Katari
in some way, and I am versed in their lore and customs. It worked better than I
expected.” She took note that he had not yet asked her what she wanted so very
much to speak about. She wondered why.

“Yes, it did. I was thoroughly entranced by the
scent on the
gului
fruit. That
was
your
scent, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” she admitted reluctantly, her face burning,
the tingling of discomfiture spreading to her roots. She fought not to fidget,
a habit she had never quite been able to master. He laughed again.

“I figured as much. Your scent is delightful, by the
way. So then, why didn’t the trap spring? I was quite defenseless at the time.
It would have caught me, without a doubt.”

She could not help it. She squirmed at his baiting.
The enforced show of visible discomfort and embarrassment galled her. Being
galled, galled her.

“I was trying to get a better view of you,” she said
dryly. “I leaned out too far, and the branch broke.”