Deepwood: Karavans # 2

by Jennifer Roberson

  Jorda grinned briefly, measuring the sticks Mikal had brought against the length of Ilona’s forearm. “So it is. Well, then, keep aboard however you may. But it should be done quickly; the Mother willing, the bone hasn’t broken the skin. If I can shift it back into alignment and bind it in place, she should heal well enough.” He nodded at Bethid. “Go ahead.”

  Bethid crawled up over Ilona, then lowered herself across the hand-reader’s body. Most of her weight was distributed from knees to right shoulder. Bethid laughed softly.

  “What is it?” Jorda asked, tearing strips of cloth for bandages.

  “Well, perhaps we shouldn’t tell her precisely how this was accomplished. I’m not sure she would appreciate knowing I enjoyed it—or that you suggested it!”

  His eyes flicked to hers, puzzled, then cleared as he recalled what was no secret among those who knew her: Bethid preferred women, not men. His teeth flashed briefly. “Better than Mikal or me, Beth. She’d smother.” He wrapped his big left hand around Ilona’s elbow, then closed the fingers of his right one over her wrist. “All right…” He pulled sharply, eliciting a cry of pain from Ilona. Bethid felt the lurch of the body beneath her, the reflexive attempt to escape. “There,” Jorda said. “Stay there, Beth. Let me splint this arm, and then you can get off.”

  Bethid grinned, then sighed melodramatically as the body beneath her writhed. “I could but wish …”

  “She’s a woman for men, you do realize.”

  “That’s why I said wish,” Bethid retorted dryly. “She’s with Rhuan, isn’t she?”

  “She says no …” With deft, practiced hands, Jorda cross-wrapped the splinted arm from wrist to elbow, tying off knots. “I thought so, too. But I don’t interfere in the personal lives of my diviners. All right—climb off.”

  Bethid levered herself up and crawled backward, taking care not to plant a knee or elbow in flesh instead of cot bedding. “He’s a fool if he’s not interested.”

  Jorda was cradling and lifting Ilona’s head again, holding the bottle of spirits to her lips. “Their business,” he said briefly, “—and perhaps it’s her not interested in him.”

  “I may not be interested in him, but from what I hear, they rather fall at his feet. One might think—”

  “One might,” Jorda said repressively, closing the topic. Then, “There, ’Lona, drink, if you please. It will do you good.”

  Bethid stood beside the cot, watching the diviner’s ineffective attempts to escape Jorda’s imprisoning palm and the trickle of spirits he poured into her mouth. As a courier, she spent more time on the road than in the settlements, but she had inhabited this one often enough to know those who came and went, those who visited Mikal’s ale-tent when they were present in the tent village. Ilona usually appeared there with Jorda, or with Branca and Melior, and now and then alone, when they returned from a journey. She and Ilona usually exchanged casual smiles of greeting, but that was the extent of their relationship. Ilona was a hand-reader; Bethid consulted rune-readers.

  She glanced uneasily out the wagon door. Well, she would if any rune-readers had survived the storm.

  That prompted memory, and a frown. “Brodhi said something …”

  “The Shoia?”

  “He found me as I was making the tea. He said Alisanos had moved. That it’s only a half-mile from here.” Now Jorda looked at her, green eyes startled. “I know,” she said grimly. “If that’s true, we may be in danger yet. What if it moves again?”

  “Mother,” Jorda muttered, glancing down at Ilona. Then he met Bethid’s eyes once more. “I’ll stay with her for now. Go ahead and look for your friends.”

  Bethid shot a glance at the hand-reader. The spirits had indeed brought sleep; her breathing was deep and slow. Bethid nodded and made her way out of the wagon. Mother of Moons, let me find Timmon and Alorn. She amended that immediately, fearing the Mother might take it literally. Let me find them alive and well!

  HE WALKED ON. And on. Davyn had no sense of how far he had initially gone in the midst of the storm, directed by the Shoia guide, and his return to the wagon had been so fraught with worry and fear that he had not marked the distance. Now every step seemed to carry him farther and farther, with no result.

  Beneath the warmth of the sun, his clothing had dried. Mud-stained and sand-crusted homespun tunic and trews were stiff, rubbing against his flesh as he moved. Leather boots remained damp, but mud still clung because the ground beneath his feet was soaked, puddled in places. Beaten prairie grass created a carpet of sorts to keep him from sinking in, but the going remained difficult. The top of his head was heated by the sun, while the wet, squishy footing kept his feet cold.

  The day now was fine. The clear, cloudless sky was a brilliant blue, and the sun turned a bright, benevolent face to the world. But a look at the earth beneath told the tale: in addition to mud, puddles, and flattened grass, the prairie was pocked with lightning-dug divots like thousands of vermin holes, marked by the remains of explosions of earth, clods scattered in all directions. Some of the holes were as deep as Davyn’s forearms were long. But the lightning had been amazingly precise, like a thin and tensile knife blade. And despite the overriding scent of mud and torn grass, Davyn smelled the astringency of power, the aftermath of extreme heat. The world, the air, the earth, had been selectively burned by capricious, malevolent lightning.

  Hunger nagged. Davyn had no idea how long it had been since he had last eaten. The storm had blotted out all sense of time as well as of direction, stealing the sun from its path across the sky. He could not say if was the same the day, or another. But he refused to stop walking. From a drawstring bag attached to his belt, he took dried, salted meat. It was tough enough to threaten the seating of his teeth in his jaw, but it gave him something to do, something to mitigate the fear, the anxiety, that underscored every moment. His heart was filled with both.

  He was alone upon the earth. The world felt larger, impossibly endless, less like a home than a challenge, akin to an enemy. The world had stolen his family, scattered those he loved. Davyn knew very well that no matter his efforts, it was possible he would find none of them. His children. His wife. Taken from him.

  “No.” He said it around the hard curl of dried meat in his mouth. “The Mother of Moons is not so heartless.”

  But Alisanos … Alisanos was. And the guide had warned him: a sentient world, he’d said; a world that moved, that took, that changed the humans it swallowed. There was guilt in Davyn’s soul, hag-riding him. But also an awareness that if Alisanos were truly so sentient, able to uproot itself and move at will, it was entirely possible nothing could have prevented the scattering, the loss, the winnowing of his family.

  Except perhaps to have been in Atalanda province.

  Davyn stopped dead. Around him spread the beaten grasslands, the lightning-scarred earth, the splattering of mud blasted up from the ground. Above him burned the sun. And within him, twisting like a knife, was the knowledge, the fear, that he was alone.

  “Mother,” he begged, tears threatening, “I beg you, let me find them. All of them.” And he named them: the wife, and the children, each, so the Mother would know whom he sought.

  THE INFANT, SATED, slept, cradled on her back in her mother’s cross-legged lap. Having removed her muslin underskirt, Audrun set about making the child a few clouts she could wear against the anticipated end result of nursing. Already the girl had dampened Rhuan’s donated leather tunic. Audrun untied it, shook it out one-handed, spread it across the ground. She didn’t dare look at the guide. Next she tore her underskirt into several lengths of cloth that would approximate clouts. Her muslin smallclothes had taken as much of a beating as the homespun tunic and skirts, full of holes, rents, tatters, and snags. But it was better than carrying a naked baby in a man’s ornamented leather tunic.

  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 a
bout 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.”

  Chapter 5

  ILONA 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 se
nsed 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.