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.”
“So while they are gods—or so they claim—your people don’t rule Alisanos.”
“Alisanos rules itself.”
Audrun efficiently sucked her fingers clean of fruit pulp. “Tell me more about this Kiba. Tell me what I may expect.”
He looked straight into her eyes. “Cruelty. In plenty.”
TWILIGHT FELL AMID the forest. Ellica, seated at the foot of a tree with a smaller version held tightly to her chest, watched the Shoia courier. He had said very little as they walked toward a place he called the Kiba. Now it was time to settle for the evening. He’d found a pocket of trees he said would do for shelter, such as it was, then set Torvic to searching for rocks with which they might build a fire ring.
Ellica objected. “Don’t send him away from us! This is Alisanos!”
The Shoia, gathering deadfall wood from their immediate environs, fixed his gaze upon her. She saw something in his eyes akin to contempt and frustration. “I would set you to the task, but I see you won’t release the tree you treat as a child.”
She opened her mouth to retort, but shut it again when no words came to defend her actions. It was in her, it was in her, that she tend the sapling.
“The boy needs a task.”
Busywork. She understood that.
“But you might put down that tree and tend your sister.”
Ellica looked at Meggie. The youngest of them had not spoken at all, and, when she lagged, the Shoia eventually lifted her into his arms and carried her. Now Meggie sat at a foot of a tree as well, collapsed into a huddle of knees and elbows. Her face was not visible.
“Meggie,” Ellica got up onto her knees and, still cradling the sapling, moved awkwardly the several paces to the tree. She settled again, sitting close enough that their bodies touched. Ellica felt the stiffness in the girl’s body, the trembling of her limbs. “Oh, Meggie.”
As she made shift to tend both tree and child, she was aware of the courier’s watchful gaze.
Chapter 33
“COME,” BRODHI SAID, “time to go. Now. Not tomorrow.”
He doubted they had gotten much, if any, sleep. Torvic and Ellica had settled Meggie between them throughout the night, half buried beneath a light layer of leafy boughs Brodhi had cut and arranged over them.
When there was no response save a slight shifting of the boughs, Brodhi began tossing them aside. “Time to go. We’ll make the Kiba today.”
Ellica’s head came up. She blinked at him blearily through bloodshot eyes, then began to push away the boughs. When free of them, she knelt beside the sapling kept close throughout the night. “What will happen at this Kiba?”
“Someone else will have your tending.” He bent and pulled more boughs off of Torvic and Meggie, baring their bodies. “I’ll be quit of you.” He jostled Torvic’s shoulder with a booted foot. “Up, boy. Time to go.”
Torvic sat up, frowning. “Let Meggie sleep. She cried all night.”
“Oh, I am most aware of that.” He made an imperative gesture. “Now, boy. Or I’ll leave your sister here.”
“You wouldn’t do that!” Ellica cried.
He told her the absolute truth. “Oh, but I would. When survival is risky at best, the weakest often must be left behind.”
“Or culled?” Torvic lunged to his feet and stood stiffly, trembling. “You would cull my sister?”
“Mother of Moons,” Ellica breathed. “You’re a monster.”
He had once called Rhuan that very same thing. Brodhi sighed. “Then get her up, and readied, and we’ll all go together. But waste no time.“
THE PRIMARIES, AUDRUN discovered, were all very alike. Whatever they were, gods or no, they decidedly stamped their get. Were she breeding foals or calves, she’d say that someone, somewhere, was prepotent: sire or dam. All were tall, even the females, all of robust stature, brown-eyed, all with the faint copper tint in their skin she had marked in Rhuan, and they, too, wore reddish hair in multiple, complex braids. Males and females were clad in rich, glossy hide; wide, ornamented belts; and snug tunics and leggings colored copper, russet, and bronze.
She stood beneath the double suns in the Kiba, in the gathering place of Rhuan’s folk, in its very center. It was a deep, steep bowl in the ground carved out of red rock, with round, vertical walls and two wide ramps of steep stairs set across from one another. The bowl was quite large and open to the sky, with blocks of carved stone set upon the floor against the walls. Audrun had counted one thousand blocks of stone. Above the bowl, looking down upon it and its surrounding area, rose tall, ruddy cliffs. Dwelling places, as Rhuan had said, were hewn out of those cliffs and caves, linked together by steep, interconnected stairways, shielded by walls.
Nine hundred and ninety-nine primaries were ranged around her, seated casually on the stone blocks. There was no single individual to keep order in the proceedings. They said what they said, asked what they asked, as it struck their fancy. She believed her head might crack open if she listened to much more.
Rhuan stood behind her left shoulder. He was not allowed to speak. He waited, legs slightly spread, knees slightly flexed, hands linked behind his back. Before descending one of the stair ramps into the Kiba, he had pulled the leather thong from his hair, which hung to his hips, loose and shining. Her hair was far less tidy than his; she had braided it while wet, taming the worst of the tangles, but was acutely aware that in her tattered clothing she presented an entirely unprepossessing appearance. The primaries were beautiful, each and every one, powerfully scintillating in the way of a deadly, elegant weapon.
Nine hundred and ninety-nine. Alario was missing.
“Again,” a female said, one knee drawn up with her booted foot atop the block, a forearm propped casually across that knee.
“Again?” Audrun was entirely exasperated. Courtesy had achieved nothing. “How many times, again? Are you deaf? Are you stupid? Are you children, to forget a thing as soon as it is said?” She drew in a breath. “I am married already. He’s human, as I am. We have five children. I want them returned to me, husband and children, each of them. You’re gods. You have that power.”
“We also have laws,” the female said. “You may have your huma
n husband, if he survives the challenge. If there is to be only one man for you, the other must die. But if Rhuan survives, then he is your husband.”
“No,” Audrun said, making a chopping gesture of emphatic refusal. “No, no, and no. No challenges. No deaths. I have only one husband, and Rhuan isn’t he. Whether my husband is here in Alisanos or free in the human world, I can’t say. But you can. Tell me where he is.”
No answer was forthcoming.
“Refusal to tell me suggests you don’t know,” Audrun pointed out. “And if you don’t know, then you aren’t gods, are you?”
Rhuan murmured, “I’m not sure this is the best tack to take.”
She turned and glared at him. “I have to take some tack, do I not? This is ridiculous, Rhuan! There’s no reason for them to refuse to tell me this, unless they have no answer.”
“Or unless they don’t wish to.”
His expression was odd. After a moment Audrun turned in a slow, complete circle, looking at various primaries as she moved. “Is this the truth? That you don’t wish to tell me? Does it amuse you to withhold the information? Does it provide some preverse form of pleasure?” She halted where she had begun, looking at the female who’d spoken. “Is it that you view humans as toys? Are we dolls to you? Puppets? Do you play with us until we break, and then throw us on the rubbish heap?”
And then an idea kindled in her mind. She recalled Alario and his arrogance. She recalled how he had infuriated her.
Audrun left the center of the Kiba. She walked, as if wandering idly, toward the ring of blocks used as seats. “Alario told me something not so long ago. I was questioning if you truly were gods. And he said something I find very interesting, now that I am here. Alario said: ‘We’re gods, little human, because we say we are.’” She paused, then walked on. “What if that is true? What if Alario told me the precise truth? What if you aren’t gods at all, but simply say you are?” She turned her hands palm up and spread her arms. “It could be done, of course. One may claim oneself whatever one chooses to. I could claim myself a male, if I wished, though I think none of you would believe it. It would be a simple thing to prove I lack certain physical characteristics that define males. But it’s a much more difficult thing to prove you are something when it isn’t obvious. Alario, though claiming himself a god, refused to bring my family to me. I ask you if my husband is even in Alisanos, and you refuse to answer.” She turned and faced the other direction, looking at other primaries. “Could it be,” she said, “that you aren’t who, or what, you say you are?” She walked on, glancing at dozens of brown eyes staring back at her. “Could it be that you are not gods at all, any of you, but something entirely different? Something less significant? Something insignificant. Perhaps in fact you are merely the descendants of a people who were taken by the deepwood just as my family was, and you have been poisoned by the wild magic. Could it be that you have become less than what you were because of that poison, and thus must hide the weakness? What if, in truth, you are just like humans?”
BETWEEN MIDDAY AND sundown, Ilona received six people who wished to have their hands read. Part of her wondered if accepting so many clients so close to when she could read no hands at all was wise, but how could she turn them away? There were no other surviving diviners in the grove or the settlement. And though she could always tell when a person was accustomed to seeing a different kind of diviner, she made no comment about it. All were desperate. There was no one else to see.
Ungainly with exhaustion, she planted shepherd’s crooks around her wagon, lighted pierced-tin lanterns, tidied the low, lacquered table with its silken cloth, and prepared a light supper. She needed rest, yes, and perhaps a better meal, but she was weary. This would do.
She climbed up into her wagon to light the lantern that hung over the folding steps. Once the wick had caught, she blew out the spill she’d taken from her cookfire and stepped down carefully, making certain the lantern remained lit. Satisfied that it would, she turned to descend the balance of the steps and stopped short at the bottom.
Alario smiled.
The step gave her somewhat of a higher vantage point than usual, with him. She stayed upon it, not stepping down to the earth.
“Will you come?” he asked.
She didn’t even trouble herself to ask where. “I will not.”
His smile remained in place. “I can show you places you’ve never seen before.”
Ilona lifted a brow. “So can my employer.”
“I need you, woman.”
“Woman.” And that was to impress. Ilona shook her head. “You don’t need me.”
“I do.”
“No. You merely need a womb.”
“Have you not asked yourself why I chose you? If it’s as you say, that I only need a womb, why do I come to you?”
“If I were younger,” Ilona said, “and more impressionable, I might surrender to your argument. I might feel most flattered. Were I were stupid and foolish. But I am neither that young, nor that impressionable, nor that easily flattered, and lately not at all stupid. Are you?”
He blinked. “Stupid?”
“Yes. Why else would you come to me again when you know I’m not interested?”
Though the sun was not yet gone, the lantern over the steps nonetheless painted him in highlights, russet, gold, and copper. Light ran like liquid over the warmth of his clothing, the sleek, supple scales of a long-dead beast. “What do you want, hand-reader?”
Ilona smiled. “Merely to be left alone. Truthfully, I can see how women give way to you. I dismiss none of your appeal, Alario. You have it in abundance … and much else to offer, I suspect, to a woman who answers to you. Just not to me.”
His smile had faded. Fire leaped in his eyes. “Are you cold to men?”
Ilona laughed. “No man I have been with would say so.”
He examined her the way other men had, men who claimed no courtesy. She was accustomed to that, as she drank ale in tents where other women did not, unless they be Sisters of the Road.
“There are women,” she said, “far more beautiful than I. Lusher of flesh than I. More accomodating than I. Seek one of them, Alario.”
But he had not surrendered. “I will take you to my son.”
She hoped very much she kept her reaction from showing on her face. “What, you think to win me with him? Why would I wish to go to him when you are right here?”
But neither was he a fool, Rhuan’s sire. “You desire the lesser being. You long for the dioscuri—while I am a god!”
Ilona smiled. “But I am only human. I would never look so high as to seek a god.”
The first flicker of red showed in his eyes. “He has married the woman.”
That reaction she feared very much he saw. “Then I wish him joy.”
“She is fecund.”
Still she held to her smile. “Then I wish him joy of children.”
Alario arched his brows. “Do you so? Another woman’s get?”
He was ruthless, and she knew it. He would tell her anything. Possibly even the truth. “Say what you like, Alario. I will not go with you.”
“You will.”
She stepped down to the ground. “I will not—”
He closed his hand around her throat. “No? You say me no? You defy me?”
Ilona shut her hands over the one embracing her throat.
Red flooded his eyes. “Then say no, woman. Say no to everyone!”
He flung her backward, hard, smashing her full force against the wagon steps.
Chapter 34
“AUDRUN—”
She raised her voice over Rhuan’s, infusing it with more confidence, giving them arrogance for arrogance. “How sad that would be. How tragic. Not gods at all, but ordinary people—just like humans. Taken by the deepwood, just like humans. People who are helpless, just like humans, but who choose to name themselves gods because to be and to act otherwise is to admit the truth: that Alisanos is the god, and you are merely its toys.”
She met the fierce eyes of the female who had questioned her and refused to give way. “Prove it,” she challenged directly. “Such a small thing for gods: bring children and the man who sired them to their mother.”
The female rose. She was quite tall, Audrun noted, certainly taller than she. And though she lacked the hard bulk of the males, she was clearly a very strong woman. The contours and angles of her face resembled those evident in the males, but there was a decidedly female cast to her features. No one would mistake her for a man.
She strode forward, moving with a powerful grace. Braided sidelocks dangled from her temples, weighted with beading. The rest of her hair was gathered back from her face, comprised of long, ornate braids that were themselves braided into one another. Audrun recalled how much time was required to take down all of Rhuan’s braids.
The female circled Audrun and Rhuan. Audrun watched her, though Rhuan kept his eyes fixed on the rank of primaries immediately within his line of sight. He made no attempt to follow the female’s movements. Audrun was again put in mind of an animal examining another, assessing scent, posture, and other visual signals.
Then the female halted immediately in front of Rhuan. “I see you are no more reconciled to us than you were before you departed.”
“No, Ylarra,” Rhuan said.
“Your dam’s blood runs strong.”
“It does.”
“Alario is ashamed of you.”
“And I of him.”
“Do you want this woman?”
“Forgive me, Audrun,” he murmured quietly, then raised his voice. “I do not want this woman.”
“She’s human. Isn’t that what you’d prefer?”
“When the time comes to choose a woman, I will choose her for myself, not because she unknowingly takes down my braids when I am unconscious. Ylarra, this woman has a husband. Let her keep him.”
The woman prowled, hands clasped behind her back. “Darmuth tells me you bed many human women.”
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