Deepwood: Karavans # 2 (8 page)

She had restored as much modesty as was possible in the bodices of breast bindings, smallclothes, and tunic. With Davyn she had birthed and raised four children and was casual about such things as baring breasts to nurse, but Davyn was her
husband;
and her children,
her
children. Rhuan was a stranger. She knew next to nothing about him.
Well, except that he can come back to life after dying
. Not what one would expect to know about another.

Oh, and that he was the son of a god.

Audrun ceased folding clouts. She looked across the tree ring. Rhuan still lay on his back, sprawled in loose-limbed abandon with copper-colored braids a tangled tapestry against the ground. In fact, he appeared to be asleep. His belly, naked because the baldric carrying his throwing knives had slipped up to bare it, moved in even breaths against the low-slung, belted waistband of leather leggings, every bit as ornamented as his tunic. God’s son or no, he did not believe in subtlety. Or, she reflected, in modesty.

He was, Audrun supposed, as tired as she. Certainly his flesh bore the same sorts of flight-engendered
wounds, though admittedly he had not given birth. But he had gone to great lengths to aid her family, finding them on the track in bad weather, transporting her two youngest, making suggestions to others, and coming back to her in the midst of the storm. He had done what he could to save her as Alisanos approached, and she had refused to let him. Now they were both trapped.

Or was he? Audrun frowned, studying his slack, tanned face with its clear-cut profile. He had said she couldn’t leave. He had said, she thought, that
they
couldn’t leave. But how could that be true? He was of Alisanos, a child of the deepwood, and the son of a god. Who—and what—could prevent him from going where he wished?

Had he said
they
were trapped merely for her benefit, so she didn’t feel so alone?

If so, if he could indeed leave Alisanos, then he could do for her the greatest favor of all: he could look for her children, for her husband, to see if they were yet safe in Sancorra, or trapped as she was, as the littlest one was, in the dimness of the deepwood.

As if aware of her thoughts, he wakened. He did it all at once, body flexing into prepardness, eyes opening, fingers reaching to assure himself of the presence of throwing knives, of belt knife. He sat up, shook out his braids, and looked at her. Then he looked at the baby in her lap, and deep dimples blossomed. She had forgotten about those. “What will you call her?”

Audrun blinked. In the midst of chaos, she had not
thought that far. “Davyn and I decided if she were a girl, we’d name her Sarith.”

Rhuan nodded. “Pretty name. As suits a pretty baby.”

Not all men would find her so, at present. Audrun smiled down at her daughter—at
Sarith
—then glanced back at the guide. She waved a hand. “Where are we? And are we safe here?”

“For the moment.” He rose up onto his knees, settling the wide leather baldric crosswise against his bare chest. “This is a dreya ring.” He saw her puzzlement. “The trees. They’re alive.”

Audrun observed dryly, “Trees with sap and leaves usually are.”

“But these are dreya trees.” His gesture encompassed the close-grown, interlinked circle. The wood was a dull silvery color, the leaves nearly white. “Dreya live in them.”

Audrun glanced up, and up. The canopy of each individual tree was woven together into a great, spreading, leafy vault. It was cool and shadowed in the ring.

“Not up there.” Rhuan smiled, rising. He stepped to the nearest tree, gently touching the pale wood. “In here.”

“In the
trunk
?” Audrun was astonished. “You’re jesting with me!”

But he shook his head. “Not here. Not under these circumstances. No, dreya are beings. As I am.”

“But—” She started to say
you are human
, because on the outside he was so like mortal men, then recalled he
was something entirely else. “Beings who live in trees?”

“They
are
trees,” he answered, “when in this form. They are born as all trees are born, from nuts that become seedlings, then grow into saplings, through adolescence, and eventually into adulthood. In maturity, the heart and soul of a dreya tree can also take another form. Very like yours, in fact; dreya are women.”

Her response was reflexive. “No.”

Rhuan’s smile broadened into a grin. “Yes.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He looked at the sleeping baby. “Tell me that again, who gave birth to a new being only yesterday.”

Audrun frowned. “She isn’t a being. She’s human. Born of a man and a woman, a human man and woman, Mother be thanked, not from a
nut
.” She then announced it, to make it so, to make it real, as her people did: “This is Sarith. She is Sarith. This is my daughter.”

Gently, he said, “Sarith was born in Alisanos.”

Unexpectedly, tears filled Audrun’s eyes. She lifted the child, the human child, the infant named Sarith, and cradled her against her shoulder, one hand steadying the fuzzed head. “She may have been born here. That doesn’t make her
of
here.”

His smile had faded. “Doesn’t it?”

“I will take her out of here,” Audrun declared decisively. “I will find the way, and I will take her out of here, back into the world of humans. Back into
her
world.”

“She is of both worlds, Audrun. Bred and born of humans, yes, but she drew first breath in the deepwood. Your blood was spilled, the water of birth fed the soil. Alisanos is very aware of Sarith. Alisanos claims her as much as you do. And she—Sarith—she will know that. She will feel that. Even as I do.”

She glared at him through tears of anger and desperation. “You have already claimed her, have you not? You ‘adopted’ her, you said. And now Alisanos, too, claims her? Well, what about me? This is
my
child.
My
daughter.”

Audrun was startled to see sorrow in Rhuan’s eyes. “I believe my mother, my human mother, said much the same about her son, when I was born. But, as you see—” his gesture indicated himself from head to toe “—I am what I am. Born in and of Alisanos.”

She was moved to protest. She had to, to retain self-control. “But your father was from here,” she said. “He’s a
god
, you claim. Sarith’s parents are human.”

“One of them is,” he agreed, “if your husband wasn’t taken.”

Astonishment banished growing tension. “You’re saying
I
am not human? Now? Only a single day after Alisanos … uprooted itself?”

Rhuan’s eyes were kind. “Not anymore.”

Audrun lifted her hand into the air. She stared at it, turned it; saw the grime, the blood, the scrapes, the cuts. Familiar flesh, despite its wounds. She knew that flesh, knew the bluish veins running beneath her skin, the calluses on her palm. She was the same, exactly the
same. The change, he had said, would take years. She was still herself.

He saw her denial, though she spoke no word. “Yes,” he said. “Alisanos is aware of you, too. Decidedly aware.”

I
LONA WANDERED IN dimness, in darkness, in shadows she could not reconcile with reality. Part dream, part fever, part vision—possibly of foretelling. She was a hand-reader, not a diviner of dreams, of bones, of ash, or tea leaves; of rune-sticks, of entrails. She was not a blood-scryer, nor any number of other divination sects and denominations. She took a hand into her own, sublimated her sense of self, and journeyed gently into the corners and layers of a soul, to the myriad potentials of future, the sense of self that belonged to another, occasionally unknowing. It was her gift to see, but also to knit together; to know, sometimes, how all the pieces of a person would merge into a future immediate or distant, and into reality. She had never doubted her gift, knowing it had come upon her for a reason, that she was destined by the Mother of Moons to be a diviner as other true diviners were.

Charlatans abounded, making up or copying rituals
to tell a nonexistent future for an ignorant paying customer, but she was not, and had never, been such a one.

What she saw was real. What she read was true. But sometimes even her art resulted in no sane answer, in no description that lent itself to good or bad as concerned a client, only to confusion. She was honest at those times, explaining when she could not see, could not read what she sensed within a hand, a heart, soul. Because for no diviner—except the charlatans—was anything plain, of such clarity and knowledge that a future might be sworn to. Sometimes it was suggestion, no more. Sometimes it was a hint, a wisp, like fading perfume, lost to the moment if not to memory, and indescribable.

She walked amid the shadows of self-doubt, of ignorance, of helplessness, of the terrifying inability to comprehend. No hand-reader could read her own palm; Ilona, as all did at the first blossoming of a gift, had tried. She had learned early on that dreams were no more to her than artifacts of what had gone before, of concerns about what was yet to come, the tedium, the minutiae, the mere unspooling of fragments, of scenes, of potentials that meant nothing. She was certain of the chasm that lay between dreams and divination. It was difficult to explain for any diviner, but all of them who were truly gifted knew. What was the unfolding of a many-petaled flower for one was mundanity for another.

But this, this was neither dream nor divination. This
was a tangled skein of instants, of incidences she could not grasp, not even for a moment; nothing she could take, could examine, could integrate. But neither could she banish those instants, the incidences, to mundanity. Something was afoot in her subconscious.
Something
was taking her somewhere, telling her fractured, fragmented tales. Some
thing
had ensnared her gift, her art, and was leading it astray. Was making that gift its own, a conduit for its intent.

She was, she believed, in the settlement, in the grove, in her wagon, in her cot. If so, she might find Lerin, the dream-reader, who could possibly make sense of what she saw, what she felt, what she
knew
, but could not comprehend. Lerin might, if Lerin had survived the storm.

Ilona stirred. Pain lanced through her left forearm, setting nerves afire. She said nothing, made no complaint because the words would not form, and in a moment the shadows came again, the dimness, the darkness. Portents and potentials, memories and vision. She was wandering, carried away from the self she knew, that she trusted. She was something less or something more; decidedly something
other
. Beneath the colorful blankets her body twisted, denying the comprehension that she was helpless, was an instrument of another’s intent. She was Ilona.
Ilona
. Handreader. Sancorran. Jorda’s diviner …
one
of Jorda’s diviners.

But she was also lost. She knew it, and mourned.

BRODHI FOUND THE couriers’ common tent collapsed, poles scattered, oilcloth tattered, but nonetheless present when so little else throughout the wind-wracked settlement was. Suspicion formed; weight of some kind had pinned down the oilcoth. He began to unwrap the tumbled fabric until he saw booted feet, outflung arms, mouths bloodied, and faces crusted with grime, dirt, blood, and sand. Alorn. Timmon. Fellow couriers, if not precisely companions. Brodhi had none of those, save for Ferize.

He peeled back the oilcoth until both forms were free of encumbrance. Brodhi did then what any human would do, but that an Alisani—not Shoia but
Alisani
—would also do: he checked the sprawled bodies for signs of life.

Neither man was dead. Neither man was conscious, but life yet quickened in them. Brodhi, squatting between the sprawled couriers, looked from one to the other. Eyes were closed, hair tangled, faces bruised and scraped, dusted with ash and soil. Well, he could leave them as they were, to come to themselves on their own, or he could take pains to make them more comfortable. For a moment Brodhi flirted with the attractive impulse to rise and walk away, putting them from his mind, but he remained upon his journey, was still to be tested, and he had, as always, absolutely no idea which occurences were tests, and which were mere coincidence.

In the wake of the storm, of Alisanos becoming active and uprooting itself in order to change locations, anything was possible but Brodhi believed it was far more likely that, in the wake of the deepwood’s shifting, his actions and worth might be of more immediate interest, and thus were being considered by his people, by the primaries, who held the governance of his future in their hands. Ferize, in the guise of a young girl, had made it clear that he was to be seen as someone who cared for humans, to know their names, their habits, to
understand
them. He did not wish to. His interest, ambition, his
needs
lay elsewhere. But this journey, frustrating as it might be, was part and parcel of his rite of passage. He would not become what he wished to be if he did not complete the journey, did he not, in some way, become what the primaries demanded he become, were he to ascend. It was not for him to know what the journey entailed. Not until the culmination, the completion of his journey, was achieved, and his future settled.