Chapter 163 Sound Bath

Chapter 163 Sound Bath
Rae
“Please,” Oryn says, gesturing toward the cushions spread across the dark floor. “Take a seat wherever your body feels most comfortable.”
That is an oddly mortal thing to say.
Fae usually say things like, stand before the court, place your hand upon the ancient stone, surrender your fear to the sacred root, or some other sentence that makes me feel as if I am about to accidentally agree to become a shrine.
But Oryn only waits near the centre of the room while two Bellgrave women move quietly around us.
They are dressed in soft grey, their hair tied back with silver thread. One carries folded blankets over both arms. The other holds a tray with three glasses of water, each one catching the low light.
“For grounding,” Oryn says when my eyes catch on them. “The sound can move through the body more deeply than expected.”
“Comforting,” I mutter.
Cian does not sit.
He stands beside me with one hand near mine and his gaze on Oryn, every line of him calm, like a blade before someone touches its sharp edge.
“If this becomes anything else,” Cian says, voice soft enough to make the room feel colder, “it ends very badly for you.”
Oryn smiles warmly, which is either brave or stupid. “I understand.”
“I mean it.”
“I believe you.” Oryn bows his head. “Nothing will be asked of her. Nothing will be taken. No command will be used. If either of you wishes to leave, we can stop.”
Cian holds his gaze for a moment longer. Then, finally, he sits.
I sit beside him, and Menace crawls from my shoulder into my lap, still watching the Bellgrave women with narrow-eyed suspicion. One of them offers him a tiny folded blanket.
He sniffs it, then drags it under himself with one paw, making himself comfortable in my space.
The women place a blanket over my legs and one beside Cian, though he looks at his as if it might be a trap made of wool. A glass of water is set near my hand. Another near his. The third is apparently for Menace, though I’ve never once seen him drink from a glass before.
Oryn settles across from us. “You may sit or lie down. Whatever feels safest.”
Cian stays sitting, arms crossed, legs spread wide.
I almost do too, because lying down in a strange fae court known for command magic feels somewhere between foolish and asking to become a cautionary tale.
But the cushion beneath me is warm, and the blanket is soft over my legs, and some exhausted part of me is so tired of being ready to stand.
Slowly, I lie back, and allow myself the hope that this will make me feel slightly better in some way.
“Close your eyes if you wish,” he says. “Or keep them open. There is no wrong way to receive sound. Begin only with your breath.”
I stare up at the dim ceiling and the tiny bells hanging above us.
Begin only with your breath.
Easy enough, in theory.
In practice, my breath has spent the last several weeks being chased through my body by terror, grief, magic, courts, kings, mothers, fathers, roads, roots, battles, and a fox-creature with very little respect for personal property.
Still, I try.
I breathe in.
Then I breathe out.
I try to focus on doing just that, and ignore all of the other voices in my mind.
Oryn’s voice lowers as he guides us through our bath. “Notice where the breath reaches. Notice where it stops. Do not force it deeper. Let the body show you what it has been guarding.”
Unfortunately, my body has been guarding everything.
My chest feels tight. My stomach feels strange. My throat feels thick, as if all the words I have swallowed are still gathered there, waiting for permission to become something.
The first bowl sounds low and deep. Then a dark note rises through the room, and I feel it before I understand that I am hearing it. It comes through the floor into my back, through the cushion, through the places where my bones meet the earth beneath Bellgrave’s stone.
My spine stiffens as the note rolls beneath me, patient and wide, humming through the base of my body until something low in my stomach answers with a small, frightened flutter.
Root, I think, because Nanna once had books about all sorts of mortal woo woo stacked beside her herb jars.
Root. Safety. Ground.
I almost laugh at the thought of feeling grounded inside Bellgrave of all places, but the note keeps moving, and my body slowly, reluctantly believes it.
Another bowl joins it.
This one is warmer, rounder. It moves through my hips and belly, through the place where fear often twists itself into knots and makes me feel sick. The sound is not gentle exactly. It is too strong for that. But it is kind.
That is the difference.
It does not avoid the tight places.
It seems to find them and waits.
My breath sinks lower.
In.
Out.
Oryn’s voice drifts through the room. “Let the sound pass where it can. Let it pause where it must.”
A crystal bowl begins next, high and clear. The note slips beneath my ribs and opens behind my heart.
I do not expect that.
My fingers tighten around Cian’s, because suddenly I am thinking of William’s hands holding a scan picture, Nanna running through rain with me under her coat, Cian kneeling over the ward-stone with every old nightmare breathing around him.
The sound does not take the grief away, but it gives it room, and time, and space for me to be with it, and then let it breathe.
Tears begin to slide from the corners of my eyes into my hair, and I let them go.
I let the sound take me.
Let it quiet the voices. Let it loosen the tight, clenched places inside me. Let it carry me somewhere I do not have to name or understand.
It moves through me in waves, flowing, touching, soothing, finding parts of me I did not know were still holding on.
And still, the sound keeps coming.