Deepwood: Karavans # 2 (5 page)

“Oh, Mother.” Audrun held the infant more tightly yet, closing her eyes against the sympathetic expression on the guide’s face.

“But if it calms you to know, you will likely see nothing immediately. Alisanos seeks out the blood and bone, first. Lastly the flesh. It may take years, Audrun, for a complete change. By human reckoning.”

She swallowed around a painful lump in her throat, fighting back tears of fear, of anger, of helplessness.
“And are they gone? Those creatures that wanted the baby?”

He grimaced. “For the moment. But I am neither my sire, nor a primary, for all my recent posturing, and they will remember that at some point. They will seek us again.”

Anger, oh, yes, anger was in her heart. Anger and utter despair. The baby was safe again in her arms, a warm bundle wrapped in the remains of Rhuan’s leather tunic, but the karavan guide—the
Alisani-born
karavan guide!—had laid claim to her daughter. Yes, he explained it was for the child’s safety, and a part of her accepted that, but the balance of her mind and emotions rejected the idea outright. With Davyn absent, with Davyn
missing
, she could not bear to think of his daughter being claimed by another man.
O Mother, let him be safe. Let us find him, let him see his child!

Even as she cradled the baby against her chest, Rhuan stepped in behind her, undid the knot in his tunic sleeves, adjusted the length of the sling, and retied it at the back of her neck.

She felt a mixture of gratitude, embarrassment, and annoyance because he performed the act of a husband. “You may take it back,” she said. “Your tunic. I can carry her.”

He shrugged bare shoulders. “It’s easier with the sling.”

Yes, it would be, but he was a stranger, and male. It stirred a question. She latched onto it, relieved to find
a topic that did not emphasize their danger. “How do you know about such things?”

His smile was fleeting. “
Dioscuri
help in the creche.”

The words meant nothing. “What is that?”

“Children are kept together from birth. They are raised by secondaries and neuters, not their parents. Part of a
dioscuri’s
duty, before puberty, is to assist in the creche.”

She could not keep the skepticism from her tone. “And you said
dioscuri
are—children born to gods?”

Dimples flashed as he grinned. “Is it so difficult to believe I’m the son of a god?”

“Difficult?” The impulse was to laugh in desperate disbelief, but she curbed it even as she answered with pointed honesty. “More accurately impossible.”

Unoffended, he nodded, irony twisting a corner of his mouth. “Yes, well, Brodhi has said the same. I will have to tell you about Alisanos and the lives of my people, but later. For now, we would do best to move on.” He placed a warm hand on her shoulder and turned her. “I suspect we’ll be followed anyway, but if we can make it to the Kiba, we should be safe.”

Distracted, she allowed him to urge her into motion. “Where and what is that?”

His tone was odd. “Well, I know where it was the last time I was here. It may be elsewhere, now. But we’ll go first to where it was when I departed Alisanos.”

Audrun stopped dead, turning to face him. It took all of her strength to keep her voice level and nonconfrontational,
to banish panic. “You will forgive me, I do hope, that I must ask you to be clearer. That I require more information, more
explanation
. I know only that somehow we have come to be in Alisanos, that my pregnancy was inexplicably escalated, and that I now have a newborn to tend four months before the proper time. I am not alone, you see. I have more than myself to deal with. And also, there is my family to find, my children, my husband.” She drew in a breath that shook; steadied it with effort. “I know you mean well, but I must ask questions. I must
know
things. I require answers.”

The dimples were gone, as was the irony in his tone. He looked away from her a moment, glancing into the forest depths, then met her eyes again. “I will answer you as best I may. Always. I will keep you and the child as safe as I can. Always. But this is Alisanos. Very often, what once had answers may now have none.”

Abruptly, she was tired. Strength had run out in the aftermath of childbirth, of fear, of terrible anxiety. Her mind felt slow, sluggish, distant. Even the weight of a newborn taxed her. She let the sling take more of the baby’s weight. “But you know this place. You said you were born here.”

“I do, and I was. But Alisanos is … capricious. At present I don’t know where the borders are, where the heart of the wood—the Kiba—is. There are no maps of Alisanos, not even here.” He touched his head. “All that you have heard about Alisanos, all of those things that seem impossible and thus not to be believed, are
true. I will do my best for you. But I have been in your world for four human years. Here time is reckoned differently.” His tone intensified. “Audrun, you must understand—Alisanos is chaos. Is maelstrom. There are no such things here as roads, tracks, or pathways. The wood is wild. Things change overnight… or even by the moment, as human time is reckoned.”

“And this—Kiba?”

“My people are there, much of the time. We may find safety among them.”

Her tone was sharp. “‘May’?”

“May,” he repeated, with simple emphasis. “I can give you no certainties, Audrun. Not here.”

She found the correct term. “But you’re
dioscuri
.”

“I have some advantages,” he said carefully, “in some circumstances, against some of the inhabitants.”

Some, some, some. Tears formed unexpectedly. To Audrun,
some
was simply not enough. Angrily, she dashed the tears away. She looked at her fingertips, where moisture glinted. And recalled the words of the karavan diviner: blood, grief, loss.

She looked up and found calm brown eyes watching her. “The son of a god,” she began, “should know many things.”

“He does,” Rhuan said. “He just may not know the
right
things.”

It made no sense. She opened her mouth to ask a question, but froze. In the near distance, slicing through the forest, came a high, shrill, ululating scream.

“The baby,” Rhuan said, and before she could protest he had relieved her of sling and infant. “Go before me.” He turned her, pushed her into motion, even as he slipped the sling over his shoulders. “Run, Audrun.
Run
.”

B
RODHI WAS BROUGHT up short when he came upon the battered collection of surviving karavan wagons amid a storm-sundered grove. He looked upon the young woman kneeling before a small fire ring beside a huge elderling oak. He knew Bethid better than any of the assortment of humans he had met as a courier, but that did not necessarily explain her values to him, her thought processes, the motivations for her behavior. Now, as she worked, her thin face was strained, freedom of movement somewhat impeded by wet, sticky clothing. That she didn’t know he was present was obvious.

Though his eyes were now clear of the red membrane, and his flesh freed of the blood engorgement that deepened its hue, Brodhi could not stem the tide of anger rushing back as Bethid petitioned the Mother of Moons. Nor could he control the trace of bitter desperation threading his words, though she wouldn’t recognize it. No one had heard that tone in
his voice before, so none could interpret its meaning. “Your Mother of Moons has nothing to do with this, Bethid. It’s Alisanos you should concern yourself with.”

She looked up sharply, clearly startled. “Brodhi!”

She had built a sad little pyramid of carved wooden rune sticks within the modest rock ring atop a flat stone to keep it free of mud and puddled water. He recognized the instinct: as much a need to kindle flame against the memories of the terrible storm as anything else. Light. Heat. Warmth. But also a shield against fear, a method to restore familiarity with, and faith in, the world.

Anger stirred anew, tinged with a brittle chill. “Nothing you do will make it the same. It’s gone, Beth.”

She stared at him. “What’s gone?”

“The world you knew.”

It surprised him when she didn’t protest, but merely nodded. “Yes. It won’t—it
can’t
—ever be the same. But we can rebuild.” A sweeping gesture encompassed the remains of the grove, the wagons, the detritus of what had been a settlement. “There’s enough here to make a beginning.”

He took a step closer. Inside him, there was pain and a sense of futility. His eyes hazed red briefly; it took all his will to force the nictitating membrane back beneath his eyelids. “Do you even realize what has happened?” He flung out an arm. “Alisanos has
moved
, Bethid. It’s now but a half a mile away in that direction, not days away. Can you risk that? Any of you?”

Her blue eyes, which had followed his arm, now flicked back to his face. “We have to.”

Inexplicably, he wanted to cry. Too many emotions, too much frustration, filled his chest. His throat ached with the impulse, with the conflict in his soul. He was weak, he knew, to walk so close to the edge of a loss of self-control, particularly before a human. And that fanned his anger, refined it, aimed it at the woman who knelt before him. “You’re fools. All of you. You put blind trust in gods you don’t know, in rituals and prayers and petitions. You wear charms around your necks and hang them from tent poles and invoke the Mother’s mercy.” He spat aside. “You
waste your time
. And mine.”

Bethid’s expression was startled for a moment, then closed. She bent her attention to striking steel against flint in an attempt to light the shredded cloth and rune sticks. “This has nothing to do with you, Brodhi.”

His lips drew back from his teeth. “So long as I am in this world, it has everything to do with me!”

She merely shook her head, not bothering to answer. She had raised a shield against him, was now dismissive of anything he said. And that further infuriated him.

“Do you think you can withstand Alisanos? You can’t even light a fire!”

Bethid did not look at him, though her jaw was clenched.

The wild, burning rage threatened to burst out of him. Once again he needed physical release. Brodhi reached blindly to the elderling oak next to him and
employed a sharp flick of his wrist to yank a tattered branch from the trunk. With quick, vicious economy, he broke the branch into pieces. One step forward placed him looming over Bethid and her fire ring. He bent and quickly laid out the lengths of broken branches atop the rune sticks.

Bethid’s tone was crafted as if she spoke to a child. “That wood is green, Brodhi. And wet. It probably won’t catch fire, and even if it does, it won’t burn clean. It will only smoke.”

He knew that
she
knew that he knew that. She was patronizing him. It set his teeth on edge.

“Leave it,” he said sharply as she reached to remove the sticks. He leaned down abruptly, grasped her shoulder, and without gentleness shoved her from a kneeling position onto her buttocks in the mud. “I said,
leave it
.” He drew his knife, cut into the heel of his left hand, and, as it bled, held it over the fire ring. Smoke curled up as droplets struck the branches and rune sticks, followed by a flicker of clean, pure flame. He glared at her. “If you want to petition the Mother or any number of other gods, you might as well petition me. After all, I’m not in Alisanos. I am very much
here
.”

Bethid, still sitting sprawled with gaitered legs spread and elbows holding her torso up, stared at him in a mixture of shock, concern, and disbelief. “What is
wrong
with you, Brodhi?”

As the fire blazed up, Brodhi closed his bleeding hand. “What is wrong with me, you ask? I am
trapped
, that is what’s wrong with me! They have put me here
and refuse to listen to any arguments I may muster, even in the wake of Alisanos going active. Rhuan they allow home, but me they do not.” He turned away awkwardly, took two long steps, then wheeled back to face her, repeating his words in a ferocious, bitter resentment.
“Rhuan they allow home, but me they do not.”

“Brodhi—”

He gestured sharply, overriding her. “There is your fire, Bethid. I spilled my blood for it—let it not go to waste.”

She sat upright, wiping muddy hands against her leggings. “Wait, Brodhi.”

But he listened no more to her. He turned on his heel and strode away, taking long, ungraceful steps, steps that carried him from the grove, from the fire, from a young woman who could not possibly comprehend what manner of complexities, ambitions, and needs ruled his life.

She was
human
. She was not of Alisanos, to know what he was.

ELLICA, TUMBLED INTO the black floodtide of Alisanos as it consumed the Sancorran grasslands, roused to consciousness incrementally. But when at last she blinked the world into focus again, she discovered she lay sprawled on her back beneath a brown-tinted sky, bathed by the heat of two disparate suns. It was difficult to think, as if her mind
were bruised. Her body felt heavy, too heavy; various portions of it ached, or stung as if scratched. Her spine in particular burned, and now that she was nominally awake, she slipped a hand beneath her back to discover the cause of the pain. She felt thick, blade-edged grass. Exploring fingers found that the grass appeared to have
grown through her tunic and into her skin
.