Star Hunters by Jo Clayton Page A

the garden she felt again the suppressed anger and depression. No one to talk to about it. The Three.…
    She stroked her temple. For the first time they refused to talk to her, those captive spirits of the diadem. Her friends. “I need you. Harskari? Shadith? Swardheld? I need you. Please?” She closed her eyes and sought them in the darkness of her head. Nothing.
    Sithing, she unpinned her braids and combed her fingers through the red-gold mass, smiling with pleasure as the breeze lifted fine strands and blew them about her face. It was good to be back in touch with the feel and smell of living things. She pushed down her discomfort and tried to enjoy the moment of quiet. The garden was filled with quiet night noises, the rustling of the plants, the humming of invisible insects. She stroked the cool grass and felt her brief pleasure draining away. The bushes began stirring on their multiple stems, rattling seed pods in disturbing arrhythmic patterns that had little connection with the gusting of the breeze. They picked up her disturbance and tossed it back to her, snatched it again, and built it and built it until she was alone, unloving, unloved.…
    She jumped up and ran to the long window-door, the garden turning sour behind her. Where the thick drape hung, the glass was a pale mirror. She touched her face and frowned, examining her features in the ghostly reflection. Her mouth was pinched, looked lipless. Her eyes were dull, set in spreading dark stains. She ran her hands nervously over her body. Her breasts sagged as her shoulders curved forward. There was a roll of flesh around her waist. She stood like a lump.
    Shaking, chilled, hands and feet numb, mind numb, feeling bloated, ugly, she turned from the window and moved uncertainly about the garden. Her knees shook. She collapsed in a heap in the center of the grass, holding tight to herself, tears slipping silently down her cheeks, clinging to her skin.
    She wept on and on, wallowing in her miseries, the cycle repeating over and over until her body chilled into a physical depression as deep as the mental one.
    â€œAleytys!” Harskari’s annoyed voice cut sharply through the diadem’s chime. “Stop this nonsense.” In the heavy darkness of Aleytys’s mind, the narrow austere face of the long dead sorceress formed around snapping amber eyes.
    Aleytys shivered. The diadem was once again the agonizing trap it had been for her in the beginning of her involuntary custody of this soul trap created by a jealous man a million years dead. And the three souls trapped inside were hell-born sprites haunting her, spying on her, never leaving her alone. She tried to block out the waves-of fear, anger, hate, despair that washed over her in beats, round and round on an ascending spiral that surged toward infinity.
    â€œAleytys!” Harskari’s disembodied voice was filled with disgust. She waited a moment. “Stop this, daughter.” Then the imaged face nodded slowly. “So. I must. Obviously you can’t help yourself.”
    Aleytys felt a nudge. Then she was plunged into silence and darkness, shoved aside in her own body. She protested feebly and was ignored. Crouched in darkness, bathing in pain and horror, she felt her body rise and cross to the glass door.
    The door clicked shut behind her and her body dropped heavily onto the couch. Harskari withdrew her control. “Take hold, daughter!”
    Weakly Aleytys fitted herself back into her body. The experience in the garden had shaken her badly. In all the trials of a turbulent life she’d never come so close to losing herself. She sat gazing down at hands that opened, closed, and opened again. “You waited long enough to say something.”
    â€œYou were letting yourself drown.” Harskari ignored the complaint and frowned impatiently. “That was wholly unnecessary.”
    â€œI suppose so.” Aleytys spoke aloud even though the other voice