Read Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court for Free Online

again.
    Teller, Finch, Carver, and Angel—they were used to this. They'd lived with it for many years, first in the twenty-fifth holding and then as part of House Terafin, although it had seldom been this bad as she'd grown into her talent. Daine—given leave by a testy Alowan to sleep outside of the healerie—found it more trying.
    "It's not the screaming," he said, as he joined the weary procession in the hall that led to Jewel's room. "It's the frenzy. It sounds as if she's going mad with helplessness."
    "Unlike the rest of us, who are just going mad with lack of sleep." Light glinted off the surface of an expensive dagger. Shadows hugged the undersides of Carver's eyes.
    "Hey, you know what they say," Finch told him, shoving a very stubborn swathe of hair out of her eyes for the fifth time.
    "No. At this hour of night I barely know what
I
say, never mind anyone else. What do they say?"
    "No one has a right to sleep. It's a privilege."
    Daine snorted. "Sounds like you've been talking to midwives."
    "Yeah, well. The cook's wife just gave birth to her first child, and the midwife gave a long lecture the entire time she was birthing." Finch snorted. Angel stepped around her with practiced ease, and pushed the door to Jewel's room open. "I'd've decked her, myself. Hold that thing steady. She'll want the light."
    "She already has light," Jewel said, interrupting their conversation.
    Of course. Avandar stood in her room, unwavering shadow that he was. His fist was glowing, or rather, the rock that sat cradled in the curve of his palm was. The shadows beneath his eyes made Carver's look handsome.
    "You look like crap," Finch said sweetly.
    He gave her the frown she more or less expected.
    They'd grown around him, the way vines do around rocks, but they'd never managed to make him one of their own. Daine had already been swallowed whole. Of course, that might have more to do with the fact that he'd had to call Jay back from the brink of death, holding her soul inside his as he walked her back into the land of the living. .
    Which, she thought, only barely described the den this particular evening.
    "Get anything this time?" Teller asked hopefully. What he meant, what he wouldn't expose her by saying, was,
Are you willing to talk about it yet
?
    She shook her head. Stopped. Nodded.
    The door to her room was open; she could see them so clearly in the lamp-dimmed dark, she wondered if her vision weren't augmented somehow. If it was her gift, it was a bad sign.
    But the clearest face, pressed as it was between the shoulders of Angel and Carver—who would never lose the habit of drawing their weapons, even if the weapons drawn had changed, when they heard that cry—was Teller's.
    "Jay," he said. Quietly.
    Teller, to whom she could never lie. At least not successfully.
    Avandar was in the habit of correcting her den when they questioned her too commonly; he was not in the habit of interrupting them when their questions—or accusations, in this case—were contained beneath the surface of a single inquisitive word.
    Her shoulders slumped; she slouched into her height.
    "Jay?"
    "Kitchen," she whispered.
    She dropped into her chair, sliding it against the rugless kitchen floor with a satisfying squeak. Her feet were bare. Everyone got to see them; she propped them up on the table's edge and leaned back on two of the chair's four legs. It was warm enough that slippers made her feet sweat, and she hated sweating.
    Angel dropped the lamp at its place by her side, or in this case, by her feet. Teller took a seat, quill in hand, inkstand long and shadowed by the flickering of burning oil. His hands were steady. Hers, oddly enough, were not; she kept them in her lap. They all knew that as a bad sign.
    "You should be practicing," Avandar said quietly. "Whatever it is you've seen, it should be coming to you in your waking hours, and at your command.
You
are the seer; your visions are subject to your will."
    "Avandar—"
    "Or they should