The Age of Light (The Ava'Lonan Herstories Book 1) Read Online Free

touch her lips and she tried to drink, but
coughed instead and choked, came up sputtering.
    “Gently - slowly. It is alright, try again.” The
second sip was more successful, and with the third her breathing began to ease
and her lungs opened. She gasped for breath, feeling as if she had been
trampled by a herd of yonido bulls.
    “Thank you,” she whispered, her voice hoarse from
the soreness of her throat. The hands, in the middle of helping her lie back,
flexed in surprise.
    “You spoke,” the voice said in wonderment. “Can it
be that you are over the delirium?”
    “Delirium?” she echoed, wondering dully why her eyes
and head hurt so much and why it was so dark. A general feeling of un-wellbeing
pervaded her. She grimaced and groaned, covered her aching eyes and felt for
the first time the thin swath of silk covering them. Her face felt hot and she
could count every vein in her eyelids, rasping her eyes like a layer of fine
sandpaper. The hands touched her forehead and the sides of her face, cool
against her fevered skin. She pressed them close - they felt good. She wondered
who the hands belonged to.
    “Yes, delirium. You’ve been very sick, dear one. But
the fever has finally broken enough that you are out of immediate danger. How
do you feel?” the voice asked. She made a face and the voice chuckled.
    “I feel nauseous and my head hurts to the Lora’lons ,”
she whispered.
    “Well, I am glad that you are at last coherent.”
    “Are you an ol’bey’one - a
healer?” she asked, her voice not sounding like her own.
    “I do have some talents in the ways of healing and
medicine. Are you hungry at all?”
    Her stomach did a slow roll to the left at the
thought of food. She bit her lip and shook her head, carefully. She could not
remember ever feeling this bad, not even when she had caught the coughing
sickness or the swelling of the neck glands as a child. Not ever to the point
where she was repulsed by food. She swallowed in a throat gone hot and
painfully dry.
    “I understand; but I want you to try to get this
down in spite of that. It’s a very light and mild broth - it shouldn’t upset
your stomach too much. Besides, it has a medicine in it for your eyes.”
    She nodded in acquiescence, instantly regretted it
as queasiness fought up her throat and turned everything from her mouth to her
stomach bitter green.
    “Oh sweet Ans’ra , I -”she
moaned, “think I - I’m going - to be sick!” and clutched at her belly. “What’s
wrong with me?” she cried, but anything else she was going to say was
overwhelmed by a dry heave. She fought it, tensing her whole body as she
clamped down on the rising taste of bile. The effort made her head explode with
red, dull starbursts of pain, grinding at her eyes and temples in time to her
pulse. The agony sharpened with each heartbeat until she screamed in torment,
vomiting forgotten, wanting to tear her head off and give it away. One scream
was all she managed. Her voice almost instantly gave out; soon she could only
whimper and groan as the pain became more and more intolerable. The hands
touched her and the voice tried to calm her, but the pain was simply too much.
The hands grabbed her wrists when she tried to beat her fists against her
temples in an irrational attempt to mask out the pain, even if with another,
different kind of pain.
    “Calm down, you’re only making it worse by thrashing
about!” the voice said, but she was beyond reason. The hands pinned her to the
bed. She threw her head from side to side, hot tears leaking from her eyes and
croaks coming from her raw, tortured throat.
    “Need lemon grass and tokba ,”
the voice said as the hands continued to hold her in a bruising grip. A renewed
slash of pain sliced through her eyes, ripped red in the darkness and she
howled like an anguished soul. The voice sighed. “No time. I can’t leave her
like this. I didn’t want to do it this way...”
    Cool fingers touched her head and the voice