Chapter 164 It Let Me Breathe

Chapter 164 It Let Me Breathe
Rae
The bells above us tremble.
Tiny notes fall through the chamber, bright and scattered, brushing over my skin, my cheeks, my closed eyelids. They feel almost playful after the bowls, little pieces of silver light moving through the heavier tones.
Menace makes a small sound in my lap, and I open one eye.
He is on his back under his blanket, all three tails loose, paws curled to his chest.
Gone.
Utterly betrayed by comfort.
I close my eye again.
Then the gong sounds deep and slow.
It rolls through the room and through me, and my whole body answers. My shoulders drop. My jaw loosens. A place between my ribs that has felt braced for the next disaster begins to unclench, carefully.
The sound moves upward.
Or maybe I only notice it upward.
Through my chest.
My throat.
That is where it catches.
The next note is blue in my mind. I do not know why. It sits in my throat, vibrating softly around every unsaid thing. Every time someone called me Heartroot before Rae. Every time a court looked at me and saw power before person. Every time I did not know what to say because the world had become too large and everyone seemed to be waiting for me to answer.
My throat tightens so hard it almost hurts.
Oryn’s voice comes gently. “If sound meets resistance, let the breath sit beside it.”
Not fix it, or force it open. Just sit beside it.
So I breathe.
In.
Out.
The note trembles there, soft and steady, until the tightness in my throat starts to loosen by tiny degrees.
Not all at once. There is no grand release. No sudden transformation into a woman who knows exactly what she is doing.
Just enough that when I swallow, it does not feel as if I am swallowing stone.
Another crystal tone rises, higher again, settling behind my eyes. The darkness there turns violet-blue, deep and strange, and for a moment I feel suspended between body and dream. Not gone from myself. More inside myself than I usually manage to be.
The sounds layer together.
Bowl. Bell. Gong. Breath.
Water moving faintly at the edge of the room.
Cian’s hand around mine.
My own heartbeat, slow enough now that I can hear the spaces between.
At first, thoughts keep trying to rise.
Bright Thorn. Greywater. Roads. Courts. Roots. The pearl in my pocket. The father I will not meet. The grandmother I cannot go home to. Every person who has looked at me with hunger, hope, fear, reverence, expectation.
The sounds do not take those things away.
They make space around them.
The grief is still there, but it is no longer pressed against every wall inside me. The fear is still there, but it has somewhere to sit down. The responsibility is still heavy, but for once, no one is adding more to it.
No one asks me to bloom.
No one asks me to fix, mend, expose, name, heal, bless, choose, understand, forgive, lead, or become anything larger than the body lying on this cushion.
The sound asks nothing.
It only gives.
Somewhere deep beneath the tones, I feel the roots of the realm stir, breathing with me.
For once, the Heartroot inside me does not feel like a crown someone shoved into my chest. It does not feel like a title, a demand, or a destiny with teeth.
It feels like soil after rain. Dark. Quiet. Alive.
The final note fades so slowly I cannot tell when sound becomes silence, and I lay there with it for a long moment.
When I open my eyes, the room looks softer than it did before. The bowls gleam in the low light. The silver threads in the curtains shimmer. Oryn sits across from us, head bowed, hands resting on his knees.
Menace is asleep in my lap with his mouth slightly open.
I wipe my cheeks, but I am smiling, actually smiling.
Not because everything is fixed. Not because I have discovered inner peace and will now become unbearably serene. That sounds exhausting and unlikely.
But because my body feels lighter, looser, and warm.
A little strange, actually. Almost floaty, as if someone has removed three baskets of invisible stones from my ribs.
“That was…” I start, then stop because words are suddenly very small and clumsy things.
Oryn looks up. “Acceptable?”
I laugh softly. “I was going to say beautiful.”
Something like relief moves across his face.
Beside me, Cian has not moved.
I turn to him.
His eyes are open. His expression is grave. Deeply suspicious. Mildly horrified.
“Cian?”
He looks at me slowly.
“What,” he says with great care, “has he done to me?”
I blink. “Are you relaxed?”
“I am missing several layers of useful tension.”
A laugh bursts out of me before I can stop it.
Cian looks genuinely disturbed. “My shoulders feel light.”
“That’s good.”
“It is unnatural.”
“Maybe it’s healing.”
His eyes narrow toward Oryn. “Where is my trauma?”
Oryn smiles openly.
I press a hand over my own mouth, but it is too late. I am laughing properly now, loose and helpless, with tears still on my face and Menace asleep in my lap, and Cian sitting beside me as if Bellgrave has committed a crime by making his nervous system unclench.
Oryn bows his head again, but this time there is warmth in it.
“Bellgrave has taken enough from the realm,” he says quietly. “Today, I hoped we might give something back.”
The laughter softens in my chest.
I look around the room again, at the bowls and gongs, the still water, the bells waiting above us.
Sound can command.
Silence can punish.
A voice can be made into a weapon.
But this was none of those things.
This was sound without demand.
Power without taking.
Magic that did not ask me to carry anything.
I came to Bellgrave expecting another wound waiting for my hands.
Another court. Another problem. Another place where everyone looked at me and hoped I knew how to fix what they had let break.
But Bellgrave did not ask that of me.
For once, no one needed me to pull rot from the roots or make the ground remember how to live.
Bellgrave only gave me sound.
And somehow, impossibly, it let me breathe.