Deepwood: Karavans # 2 (46 page)

He ran past the stinkwood fire, still smoldering. He ran past wheat and corn, all dead; ran past the melon patch, all rotted; ran by the shriveled vegetable garden. He ran into the open door and stopped on the threshhold.

Meggie was screaming.

At first his mind refused to believe what it registered. But then he knew. He saw and he
knew.

In Lirra’s left hand was Meggie’s wrist. In Lirra’s right was a knife.

The rope belt around her waist had unwrapped itself and rose upright in the air. No: tail, not belt.

Lirra had
a tail.

She saw Torvic. As she tried to yank Meggie close to her body, she bared her teeth at him. “Weak!” she cried. “Weak! We raise what’s strong and cull the weak seed!”

Meggie still was screaming, pulling and jerking, feet scraping against the floor, trying to wrench herself free of Lirra’s hand.

“She’s weak!” Lirra cried. “My husband was weak! I had no choice! He was weak! I had to live!
I was hungry!
I had no choice!”

Torvic whispered, “Let her go …”

“Cull the weak seed!”

“Let her
go!
”

Lirra’s knife glinted. She yanked Meggie closer. Her hair, free now of its pinned coil, hung loose on either side of her face. Her eyes suddenly reminded him of a mad dog his da had once killed in the cornfield. “Do you want to live, Torvic? Do you want to
live?
”

Screaming. Screaming.

Again Torvic ran. He ran out of the cabin, past the vegetable garden, past the melon patch, beyond the wheat and corn. He ran to the still-smoldering fire and grabbed a length of stinkwood from it. It was burning at one end.

From the cabin he heard Meggie screaming. Lirra was still shouting that she
had to eat.

Back and back he ran, and into the cabin. He saw Meggie, saw her scrabbling on the ground with one arm strung up in the air, screaming and screaming as Lirra pulled her closer. Meggie was small. Meggie was weak. Meggie hadn’t eaten in two days. How could she withstand a grown woman?

Torvic ran at Lirra. He ran at Lirra with burning stinkwood in his hands, and thrust it directly toward her face. Flame leaped to her hair.

Now Lirra, not Meggie, screamed.

“Meggie!” Lirra had let go, was beating at her hair. Torvic grabbed Meggie’s hand. “Meggie, come on!” He pulled, he tugged, dragging his sister across the cabin floor. “Meggie! Come on!”

Lirra screamed and screamed.

He dragged Meggie to the cabin door, released her hand to reach down and grab whatever he could grab, and pulled her partially upright. “Meggie—run! Run! Run!”

Still Lirra screamed.

“Meggie, we have to run!” He pulled, he pushed, he dragged. He got her across the threshhold. “Run, Meggie, run!”

And then hands came down, man-sized hands, and caught them both. Meggie screamed. So did Torvic.

“Hush,” the man said irritably.

Torvic sucked in a breath.
“She wants to eat my sister!”

The man set them aside, set them out of the cabin and away from the door. “I have no particular use for human children, but neither do I eat them.”

Meggie was on the ground beside the bench. As the man went through the door, Torvic pulled her close, wrapping his arms around her the way Mam and Da did it. Meggie wasn’t screaming. Meggie wasn’t screaming.

Inside Lirra’s cabin, Lirra stopped screaming, too.

AUDRUN, SEATED WITH her back against the cliff beneath the overhang, gazed up at the creature Rhuan named draka. Still it perched atop the cliff opposite them. The coppery tail spilled over the edge, dangling loosely, and massive wings were partially
opened to rest against the clifftop. Sunning itself, Rhuan had said. It certainly seemed so. The creature had tucked its head back against itself just beneath its right wing, and to all appearances appeared to be napping.

“Could we just go on to the Kiba?” she asked. “You said it isn’t far.”

“The way is too exposed.”

“Is there a possibility we could … I don’t know, shoo it away? The draka?”

Rhuan looked at her a moment, then deep dimples blossomed as he grinned widely. “‘Shoo it away?’ It’s not a cat, Audrun. Draka don’t ‘shoo.’”

But she wasn’t amused. “I need to reach the Kiba as soon as possible, Rhuan. The lives of my family are at stake.”

His grin faded. “I know. I do know, Audrun.” He looked up at the sky. “The suns will soon begin to set. The draka should leave then.”

“And then we go on at night?” Audrun tried to rein in the tension in her voice. “Or will we have to remain here until the morning?”

“I think—
wait
.” His hand came down on her forearm. “It’s moving.”

She looked up, and relief shot through her body. The draka indeed was moving. It folded its wings, shook its head on its long, sinewy neck, then rose up onto extended legs. The tail slid up the cliff face and disappeared.

“Is it leaving?”

“Just wait.”

With a snap the draka spread its wings. Audrun saw again how huge they were, gleaming russet-gold in the sunlight. Abruptly it launched, leaping off of the cliff, and glided down, down until Audrun feared it would crash into the ground. But it skimmed the terraced pools, made a lazy turn, then with one beat of its wings lifted itself up into the air. Downdraft stirred wavelets across the pools, set the brush to rustling. The draka flew high and higher, climbing into the sky, and Audrun’s last view was of the scaled, gleaming body carried on wide wings into the distance.

“Shoo,” she murmured.

Rhuan, laughing, pulled her to her feet. “Now,” he said, “we will start for the Kiba. We won’t reach it by nightfall—we’ll have to sleep along the way—but if we leave not long after dawn tomorrow, we’ll be there by midmorning.”

Apprehension abruptly filled her belly. They were close, so very close, but there were no certainties that Rhuan’s primaries, gods or no, would accede to her demands.

ELLICA GROOMED THE earth around the sapling. She groomed the sapling itself. She waited for the dreya to step back out of their trees, but they did not. She waited and she waited.

Twelve trees surrounded her. Twelve trees made a
ring. The were tall, mature trees, patterned branches reaching high and higher yet, gleaming in the sunlight, silver-gray in the shadows as the suns went down. She knelt beside the thirteenth tree, the smallest of all, grooming its trunk, grooming its soil. She kept no count of the days. There was no such thing as time in Alisanos, not the kind of time she knew, the day by day accounting of her life. Days, weeks, months. Here, time did not matter. Only the trees. Only
her
tree.

The dreya had left her. They had slipped through clefts, leaving her behind. She was not one of them. She was only human.

But I have a tree.

“Ellica! Ellica!”

She looked up, reacting to the sound. The name was unfamiliar.

“Ellica!” A boy. It was a boy. He fell down beside her, pale face smeared with dirt. “Ellica!”

She looked beyond him. A man stood there, holding a young girl. A many-braided man, glass and gold glinting in the strands of his hair.

“You’re human,” he said, “or so this boy tells me. Have they taken you for their own?”

She moved closer to the sapling, providing it with shelter.

The boy cried out again. “Ellica!”

The girl in the man’s arms stared. Her face was frozen. Her eyes were made of ice.

“I have no time,” the braided man said. “Stay, or come; it matters not to me.”

“Ellica!”

The boy put hands upon her. Human hands, hands made of flesh. So much could harm flesh. So much could bruise it.

“Boy,” the man said, “she’s lost to the dreya. Leave her to them.”

“She’s my sister!”

“So is this one, boy. You may save one, it appears, but not the other. She won’t leave her tree.”

“EllicaEllicaEllica!”

She stared at the boy. Stared at the man. Saw the young girl with eyes that didn’t blink. A word formed in her mind. “Meggie?”

The boy flung himself at her. She caught him, to save the tree. So he wouldn’t land upon it.

The man said, “Bring your tree. It’s young enough to travel.” He shifted the girl in his arms. “Or stay. I don’t care. But the boy does. This one … well, this one may never know if you come or stay. Your tree may in fact be better company.”

“Meggie,” she said again.

“Boy,” the man said, “I have no time. These are your kin, not mine.”

“Ellica!”

She sank her hands deep into the earth, avoiding fragile roots. The soil was soft. It compacted easily, and then she brought the rootball out of the ground. She set the soil and tree into her skirts, wrapped the rootball carefully, then stood up. The man cradled the girl. She cradled her sapling.

“Three children and a tree,” the man muttered in disgust. “The hand-reader didn’t bother to tell me about all of
this.
“

BENEATH THE SHELTER of trees with the sound of running water in his ears, Rhuan did what he could to feed them both. Fruit, a tuber, seeds and nuts. Water they had aplenty but steps away. Audrun said she despaired of ever tasting meat again, but her heart wasn’t in the complaint, nor, he knew, was her mind on food.

The suns sank below the top of the cliffs. Now twilight reigned. As Audrun ate slowly, making the simple fare last, he began to tell her of the Kiba and of his people’s dwellings. They lived in stone, he explained, within natural cliff caves, behind walls of ruddy, rough stone chunks hacked out of rock. Piled and mortared as needed, the hewn rock offered shelter and defense.

Audrun’s tone was ironic. “And what would
gods
need defenses for? Why don’t you just summon this wild magic and make yourselves invulnerable?”

“We have enemies,” he said simply; then, as she began to repeat the second question, he raised his voice. “I’ve told you before: wild magic is unpredictable. We are at risk, too.”