Free The Light of the Oracle by Victoria Hanley Page A

leave the infirmary. She hoped to slip into the handmaids' hall unnoticed, but just as she arrived, handmaids began surging through the doors, Eloise and Clea in the lead.
    “Ooh, look,” Clea called, pointing at Bryn and widening her blue eyes. “A rat dressed up in a nightgown.”
    “Ooh!” Bryn answered, pointing at Clea. “A talking stinkweed dressed up as a handmaid.”
    Eloise lifted her eyebrows. “Rats should be exterminated.”
    They swept past Bryn. Charis, chosen by the hummingbird, and Narda, chosen by the crow, were close on their heels, tittering raucously.
    Bryn edged her way through the door and hurried to Dawn's curtain. Dawn, looking tired, was arranging the bedclothes. She looked up and stood frowning, her black braid hanging over a shoulder. “ You couldn't have
told
me you were feeling ill?” She tugged at her blanket, the knobs of her wrists poking from her sleeves. “Now
I
have to scrub latrines until the fall equinox, because of the stir I caused when I lost you.”
    “I'm so sorry, Dawn, please believe me. I'll help you until the equinox, every day faithfully, if you'll wake me.”
    Dawn scooped up her pillow. She hurled it at Bryn. “Get dressed so we don't miss breakfast. I'm hungry.”
    When Bryn went to join Kiran for chores, Jack greeted her enthusiastically before she got near the door, leaping up to put his paws on her. Obsidian, the black colt Bryn had met her first day at the Temple, nickered a greeting from the pasture fence. She'd named him Obsidian after the shiny glasslike stone fired in the depths of the earth.
    Inside the stables, Kiran picked up a fifty-pound sack of oats, hefting it as easily as if it were filled with down. He set the sack on the stable floor to split the top with his knife, and asked Bryn why she hadn't been there to help him the previous morning.
    “I couldn't be,” she said. “I was with the Master Priest and First Priestess.”
    He leaned on his rake to look at her. “What did they want with you?”
    Bryn hesitated. “They ordered me to keep it secret.”
    His cinnamon-brown eyes searched her face. “I'd no more spill your secrets than Jack would.” He picked up a feed bucket.
    Bryn believed him. She had learned to rely on Kiran's word: if he said he would fetch a skittish stallion from the far pasture, it was done; if he promised to put together a new teasel brush by tomorrow, he'd place it in her hand the following morning.
    She wanted to tell him about the magical night and the frightening morning afterward; she didn't want to keep so many confusing events to herself.
    So be it.
    Bryn's tale burst out in choppy sentences, from the thistledown's appearance by her bed to the dreams that had taken her as she slept in the Oracle's chamber.
    When she described Morlen's death, Kiran raised an eyebrow. “ You saw it happen?” he asked.
    “No. But I heard a voice saying he would die. It was a very vivid dream.”
    “That wasn't only a dream,” he said gently. “That was a vision, and the voice you heard was the voice of the Oracle.”
    Did he mean prophecy? Bryn rubbed a foot through the straw uneasily, remembering what had happened during the queen's visit.
Beware his sleeping death
. She'd put the incomprehensible words out of her mind. What could they possibly mean?
    “The Master Priest wanted me to give him all my … dreams.”
    “Naturally he did. Visions are the trade of the Temple.” He sounded bitter. “Did you tell him what you saw?”
    “About Morlen's death, yes,” Bryn said. “But during our journey to the Temple something happened … so that I didn't trust him with the other dream I had.”
    She told him about the girl by the roadside in the desert, screeching at Renchald and begging for water.
    Kiran leaned in toward her. He began to question her intently. When she finished answering him, his color was very high, making his freckles stand out darkly. “It could only have been Selid,” he said.
    “Selid?”
    “Chosen by