Karavans (41 page)

“Because too much risk is involved,” Darmuth replied promptly, “and it may be sheer whimsy, not a test. Yes, you may face several options at any given point in time, but this
one? I think this option is entirely of your devising, not necessarily a true part of your quest.”

“You should remain at the settlement,” Rhuan told him abruptly. “This doesn’t require your presence or assistance.”

“Don’t be childish,” the demon snapped.

A joyous laugh bubbled up from deep inside. Rhuan gave way to it, mouth falling open, and was pleased to see the concern in Darmuth’s face. It wasn’t often he could so deeply discombobulate the demon, and it gave him intense pleasure.

“Don’t do this,” Darmuth said. “You have invested too much of yourself … your time here is nearly done.”

“But you don’t
know
,” Rhuan said plainly, “that this decision isn’t part of the quest. One of the tests. Do you?” He loosed a lazy grin. “You are, in accordance with the terms of engagement, an observer. Nothing more. You have no insight as to what tests I face.”

Darmuth’s eyes flickered between the rounded human pupil and the vertical slit of demonhood. For the barest moment, the tracery of a ruddy-colored scale pattern stained the flesh of his throat.

“It’s too large,” Darmuth said. “Too much for you.”

“It is what it is,” Rhuan retorted. “A choice. And the comment you applied to me earlier applies equally to you: You are not to interfere.”

“I guide.”

“You
accompany.
There’s a difference.”

The merest tip of Darmuth’s split tongue slid between his lips. The sibilants in his speech acquired a hiss. “Human wordssss. Human meaningssss.”

“And that,” Rhuan said with triumphant finality, “is precisely the point.”

For a brief moment fangs glinted in Darmuth’s mouth. “You are
dioscuri.
”

“Through no choosing of my own.”

Darmuth’s pupils slitted. The blood came up in his flesh. “Why?” he asked. “Why would a
dioscuri
wish to become human?”

Rhuan saw the sheen of scales flash at Darmuth’s throat. Such loss of self-control was rare. Were any of Jorda’s karavaners to see the demon now, they would know precisely what he was.

“Do you suppose,” he began lightly, “that Ferize asks Brodhi why he wishes
not
to become human?”

Darmuth inhaled a hissing breath.

“Precisely,” Rhuan said. “Observers ask no such thing. It’s for Brodhi to choose, and me … and neither you nor Ferize are to attempt to influence our decisions in any way.” Laughter was banished. No trace of amusement remained. “You are on your own quest, Darmuth. It’s not my place to interfere with that journey, any more than it’s your place to interfere with mine.” He lifted his left hand and displayed his unblemished palm to the demon. “Let me choose, Darmuth. Let me
choose
what I will be.”

Darmuth’s reply began as a hiss, but resolved itself into human speech. “I am somewhat fond of you, little
dioscuri.
You aren’t my get, but that changes nothing. I have no wish to lose you. Not to death, certainly, but not to the humans, either.”

Rhuan gentled his tone from anger into serenity. “We have time, Darmuth. No choice can yet be made.”

“But it can. It can! If you tempt Alisanos, if you tease Alisanos, you choose an ending.
Your
ending.”

“Let us hope not,” Rhuan said lightly, “but should it come to that, I would hope for some sort of ritual to mark my passing. Perhaps even a human one.”

“Rhuan—”

But he overrode the demon. “I want you to stay in the settlement. Help Ilona, if she needs it. And Jorda. As for me, it’s time I found the farmsteaders and gave them my answer.”

A
SENSE OF RELIEF trickled into Audrun as the death ritual for a man she didn’t know drew to a close. The two male diviners she knew no better completed a final blessing, arms outstretched over the wrapped body, and as the keening wail of grief from the widow rose again into the brightening day, the gathering of karavaners began to turn and depart the hilltop, including her own family.

Considering fidgeting Torvic had only been held in place by his mother’s hand clamped on one shoulder—Megritte, as was her habit, had sought a release from boredom by climbing into her father’s arms—Audrun felt her children had gotten through the lengthy ritual with a fair portion of self-control and parental equanimity.

“Yes,” she said before Torvic even asked, “you may go.” Freed of her confining hand, he dashed away. Megritte, with better manners—always, in her father’s presence—
asked
to go; she was put down and raced after her brother, though Ellica and Gillan lingered, exchanging privately anxious glances. Raising her voice, Audrun called after her youngest to assert renewed authority, “Go straight back to the wagon! We’re leaving as soon as we can!”

Davyn’s hand settled on her shoulder, then briefly massaged her neck with casual affection. “By the time the new
baby is as old as Torvic and Megritte, they will be of an age to help you, not add to your burdens.”

Head bent back into his strong fingers, Audrun managed a weak smile, aware of Ellica and Gillan glancing sidelong at her. She did her best to suppress her anxiety. It would not do to allow anyone, husband or children, to see how truly worried she was.
Or how much my back aches.
Even as she thought it, she pressed a hand against her lower spine.

“If it would please you,” Davyn said, “we could wait another night and go on tomorrow.”

It pricked her pride; apparently husband and older children knew after all how worried and weary she was. But Audrun understood the intent of the offer. Rather than turning their backs on the rest of the karavan as it made its way toward the settlement they had left but a few days before, they could allow the youngest to play, the oldest to help, and Audrun herself to rest. It was not in a man’s ken to truly grasp the physical requirements of pregnancy, and in that Davyn was no different than most, but he wasn’t utterly blind to her heightened emotions and lessened physical stamina.

“Thank you,” she said, “but it’s best we go on as soon as we may. Babies do not always count the days properly.”

“Ellica, Gillan, go ahead to the wagon.” Davyn’s voice rumbled pleasantly; though he would have done as offered, he was nonetheless relieved not to delay. “The oxen need hitching. We’ll leave once all is—” But he broke off. The hand on her shoulder tightened as his tone lilted into surprise. “He’s coming
here.
”

Audrun had been watching her steps down the grassy hill. Now she looked up, following the direction of Davyn’s gaze, and saw the Shoia guide.

Blessed Mother of Moons, he
was
coming here.

ILONA WAS STARTLED, as she returned to her wagon from the dawn rites, to discover that Darmuth was present, replacing the charred steps with the new
wood planks and pegs Rhuan had laid out the evening before. It was not out of the ordinary for Darmuth to undertake such efforts, but it was a task Rhuan had promised to do; despite a certain fecklessness of nature, he mostly completed what he’d begun. And Darmuth’s expression was nothing at all akin to the casual friendliness he generally bestowed upon her. She did not know him well, even though he had joined Jorda’s karavan a matter of months after Rhuan had done so, but she was accustomed to being at ease in his presence. Darmuth’s droll comments often made her laugh.

At this moment, as he tested the pegs fastening the new steps into the slotted folding mechanism, she sensed nothing remotely droll, but a thrumming ferocity in posture, in movement, and an expression that robbed her of the innocuous question forming in her mind.

He glanced up briefly, and she saw water-pale eyes hard as ice. Darmuth was a compactly built, strong man who very likely was not as old as his single silver-haired braid, wrapped with a crimson leather thong, suggested. His skin was smooth as butter, the tones rich as honey beneath the tribal tattoos he wore on both arms, bared by the chopped off sleeves of his black leather tunic. The rich purple sash doubled around his waist, and the gemstone set in one tooth had always lent him, in her view, a hint of rakish abandon.

It did not do so now.

Ilona summoned her wits and said, “
Oh.
” Which was not at all what she had intended to say, and left her feeling the fool.

Darmuth’s movements were quick, efficient, and tinged with a simmering, tensile anger she’d never seen in him. “I have been told,” he said, with a certain formality to his anger, “to help you.”

The words were stiff, as was his posture. Most unlike Darmuth.

She managed another word. No, two: “Thank you.”

“I have been
told
to help you. And so of course I will.”

That freed her mind and tongue. Now she understood. “Don’t tell me he’s leaving!”

“He is.” Darmuth tapped the new-made pegs with the wooden mallet to anchor them in their holes. “And
I
am told to remain in the settlement.”

The chill of his tone as much as realization unfurled pain in the pit of her stomach. “Why is he leaving? Where is he going?”

Darmuth folded and unfolded the steps to test their operation. They were whole again, functional, and nakedly new when viewed beside the others, weathered and stained, roughened by hard usage.

He rose. They were almost exactly the same height. He was short for a man, she tall for a woman. “Why is he leaving? Because the farmsteaders have asked him to guide them to Atalanda. Where is he going? Along the track skirting Alisanos.” Something flared in his pale eyes, something almost red, or cat-green. His pupils, not shrunken in response to the bright morning sun, seemed almost to elongate.

Except, of course, human pupils did no such thing. “You’re afraid,” Ilona blurted, shocked to hear those words issuing from her mouth with regard to Darmuth, but knowing them nonetheless for truth. “You believe the deepwood will take him.”

“It will,” he said. “Oh, it will. He is too tempting a morsel.” Darmuth’s gem-glinting smile was a blade newly honed, slicing into her flesh. “I am told to remain at the settlement. And so he lacks the first and best measure of his protection.”

Ilona felt oddly empty. Somehow, with three years of Rhuan’s company, difficult as he might occasionally be, had come the belief, the conviction, that he would always be there.

She was startled out of that thought by a hand clamping down on her forearm. Through the rich green shawl swathing her torso and the sleeves of her cream-colored woven tunic, she knew nonetheless she would bruise. Darmuth’s fingers seemed to burn.

“You might,” he said. “
You
might.”

Ilona felt completely disoriented, jerked out of assumptions she had no right to make. “Might what?”

“Go to him. Ask him to stay.”

Her startled laugh was short and sharp. “If Rhuan’s made up his mind—”

“Rhuan is a child. He has a child’s mind.”

It was a simpler matter to focus on physical pain as opposed to the emotional. Steadily, she said, “You’re hurting my arm.”

He unclamped his fingers instantly, eyes flickering, cold and cutting, behind briefly lowered lids. “Your pardon.”

“If he has made up his mind, and
you
can’t change it—” Ilona looked for and saw the brief grimace that told her she was correct in believing Darmuth had indeed tried, “—then there’s nothing I can say to dissuade him.” She rewrapped her shawl around her shoulders—tightly, very tightly, letting the yarn form a shield—wincing from the soreness in her forearm. “He’s a man full-grown, and he has the right to make his own decisions.”

“He’s a child,” Darmuth repeated. “His line is slow to mature. Why do you think I’m here?”

Behind the simmering anger, Ilona sensed a suppressed but growing fear in him, and a thread of desperation. She was tempted to grasp his wrist as he had grasped her arm, to turn the hand palm up so she could see into it.

At this moment, faced with the subtle ferocity of his feelings, even the thought of doing so filled her with fear.

She had never been afraid of Darmuth.

He saw it in her, she realized, saw the fear, the unease, the discovery that he might be something other than what she had always taken him for. For a moment, one sliver of a moment in a day full of them, Darmuth knew that she saw beyond the calm competence of Jorda’s second guide, saw deeper than ever she had before. That now she found him intimidating, and decidedly dangerous.

And yet he did nothing to dissuade her of that impression, to dismiss that certainty. Darmuth permitted her, by his unshielded emotions, to understand that Rhuan’s decision was somehow vital to him.

She wrenched her thoughts from the newborn curiosity that was Darmuth. It hurt to say it, but she did so. “I am not enough to sway him. You know that.”

A muscle along his jaw leaped. “You might be. You
should
be.”

That, somehow, was even more painful. “If I were, if I meant that to him and used it as leverage, I would lose him. This way we have at least something that goes a little beyond friendship, for all it lacks intimacy.” She did not know why she said such to Darmuth. He was not a man who encouraged confidences, by word or deed. “He makes his own choices, Darmuth. And he lives by them.”