Karavans

by Jennifer Roberson

  But Gillan had told no one his fears. Not speaking them aloud meant they might not come true.

  He discovered now he could say none of them to Ellica, either. He was too stunned to learn his sister and best friend had become so close without his awareness.

  “If I go back,” she said, “Adric can find me.”

  “Nothing’s there, Elli.”

  “I would be there.”

  “But you can’t go back there, not by yourself! How would you live?”

  She opened her mouth to reply, but someone answered for her. “I’ll tell you how she can live. Just let me whisper it in your ear, sweetling!”

  Gillan spun around on the packed, narrow footpath between tents even as Ellica gasped and recoiled, catching herself against the guy ropes of the nearest tent. He was aware of the closeness of the man, his unsteadiness, and the reek of liquor. Behind him, Ellica was crying again.

  “Hassic!” A second voice, pitched to command, cut across the footpath. “Go on your way, Hassic. Sleep it off.”

  It was a woman, Gillan saw in his first startled glance. In fading light and little moon, the muted glow of tent lanterns, he had the impression of smallness, of wiriness, of short-cropped hair nearly as fair as his own, and brass glinting at her ears. Flanking her were two men. They wore blue mantles slung over left shoulders, fastened with silver brooches, but the woman did not. Couriers, the men. He had seen their like before, on the road to this place.

  “All I want—” the drunk began, weaving, but the two men at the woman’s back smoothly slid in beside him, one on each side.

  “—is to find a bed and sleep,” one of them finished. “Right, Alorn? Our friend Hassic has had a bit too much, but he’ll feel better in the morning.” He slung a companionable but restraining arm around Hassic’s shoulder even as the other man did the same from the other side. Gillan saw a look pass between the couriers and the blond woman. “Go ahead, Beth. We’ll see to him.”

  She nodded briefly, then turned her attention to Gillan and Ellica as the drunk was led away. “All right,” she said crisply, “he won’t be whispering anything into anyone’s ear tonight. Though likely that’s all he could have managed.” Her smile at Ellica was wry. “Not to suggest even that would have been enjoyable.” Her assessing gaze lingered on Ellica a moment, then reverted to Gillan. “What are you doing here? It truly isn’t the best place for people like you to be.”

  “People like us?” Gillan echoed, stung. Heat warmed his face. “Why? Who do you think we are?”

  “Karavaners,” the woman replied matter-of-factly, “and I’m not being rude; and yes, I can see it in your face. If you and your—sister?—want a drink, there are plenty of ale tents for you. But this particular area is where most of the—” Gillian got the impression she changed her intended words in midstride, “—‘friendlier’ kind of women look for men, so it really isn’t surprising Hassic thought she was for sale.”

  He couldn’t help himself. The words just came out of his mouth. “Is that why you’re here? Is that why you were with those two couriers?”

  She blinked, then hooted a sharp laugh. “Well, that is amusing! My mam always said I’d be taken for a whore, if I didn’t change my ways.” Her smile was unoffended. “No. I’ve been many things in my life, but I’ve never sold my favors to anyone, man or woman.” The glints he had noticed were brass hoops in her ears, and she was dressed like a man in a loose, long-sleeved woven tunic, leather bracers wrapping her forearms, wide leather belt with a pouch and scroll-case attached, and trousers baggy at the thighs but leather-wrapped from knee to ankle, hiding most of the boot beneath. A necklet of charms circled her throat. “So, do you want something to drink? I can take you to Mikal’s. No one will bother you there. He runs a clean tent.”

  “No.” Gillan shook his head, embarrassed he had insulted her—even if she didn’t appear to be insulted. “No, we have to go back. We’re leaving in the morning.”

  “Who’s your karavan-master?”

  Gillan called up the memory. “Mam said Jorda.”

  “Ah.” She nodded once; ear-hoops swung. “Jorda’s good. Not one of the best known, mind—the wealthy folk go with others—but he’s dependable, knows the roads, and has two of the best guides in the business, even if they are unpredictable. They’ll get you where you’re going.” She lifted pale brows. “Where are you bound?”

  “Atalanda province,” Ellica said quietly, speaking for the first time since they had been accosted. Her voice was thickened from crying, but no more tears coursed her face.

  The woman’s surprise was unfeigned. “This late? You’ll run into the rains.”

  “There’s a shorter route,” Gillan declared. “Da told us it will get us there sooner.”

  She shook her head. “I’m a courier; I know the roads. There’s only one route that’s shorter, but this time of year no one much uses it. Not with the rains coming. No one wants to be stuck in the mud so close to Alisanos. You’d be asking for trouble.”

  Defenses snapped into place. “Da wouldn’t take us that way if it wasn’t safe,” Gillan said sharply. “Ellica, come on. We’re going back.” He tugged at his sister’s arm. “Elli. Come on.”

  The woman’s voice rose as they departed. “Tell your da what I said!”

  TORVIC WAS FASCINATED with the guide’s declaration. “Alisanos moves?”

  The guide’s attention sharpened on the boy. A muscle jumped briefly in his jaw; Audrun wondered if he had spoken more plainly than intended with children present.

  “It moves,” he repeated, but added nothing more.

  “How?” Megritte asked, vastly intrigued.

  Audrun found the guide’s eyes on her, as if he waited to hear from her before continuing. She felt abruptly self-conscious; did he think she might remonstrate with Davyn about going that way? “As you say, Alisanos has never threatened the region we’ve come from,” she explained. “My husband and I grew up safe. Our children know that it exists, as we did, and that one wishes never to go there, but nothing more. There was no need; we lived far from the deepwood.”

  “There is a need now,” Rhuan said flatly. “Everyone must understand what Alisanos is when they travel so close to its borders. Lack of knowledge leads to trouble.”

  Davyn’s tone was brusque; Audrun knew he was annoyed. “We’ll discuss it with the children tonight.”

  Megritte impatiently insisted the guide answer her question. “How does it move?”

  “No one knows. It just does.” Rhuan glanced down at the map. Thin braids depending from his temples had not been worked into the heavy plaits trailing down his spine, but swung alongside his face. Coin-rings and colorful glass beads studded the elaborate braidwork.

  “Mam says demons live in Alisanos,” Megritte observed.

  Rhuan looked at her gravely. “Yes,” he agreed. “That’s where the demons are. Note, if you please—in view of our earlier conversation—that I am here.” He glanced briefly at Audrun, then to Davyn, and continued. “Jorda is meticulous in consulting the diviners with regard to such things, in listening to folk who understand the deepwood’s habits. Some people are sensitive to aspects that suggest imminent change; I am one. And there are signs that Alisanos is becoming unstable. I feel it.”

  “Feel what?” Davyn asked sharply. “How?”

  Torvic was fascinated. “Is it magic? Are you magic?”

  For the first time the guide completely ignored the children. He looked only at Davyn, and Audrun felt a chill sheathe her bones. “If the deepwood moves again …” She let it trail off. Alisanos, for all she’d heard the tales, felt unreal, insubstantial. She had been threatened as a misbehaving child that she could be sent to the deepwood, but her parents clearly did not mean it, nor did they appear to believe such a thing was truly possible. And Davyn had grown up as she did, apart from the region hosting Al-isanos; the idea of a place being able to move of its own accord struck both of them as unbelievable.

  She flicked a glance
at Davyn, who ground out, “I’ve heard the tales. We all have.”

  The guide was very still. His tone, despite the coiled readiness in his body, was surpassingly casual. “I saw a man today who was no longer precisely a man, not as we reckon it.”

  “The dead man,” Torvic blurted, before anyone else could.

  Megritte, following up as brightly, said, “He came to the wagon. Mam sent us away so he couldn’t steal us.”

  Davyn’s attention snapped to Audrun. “The man who died came to the wagon? Why? What did he want?”

  She drew a breath. “He said he wished me to take him back home, as I had a wagon.”

  “He smelled bad,” Megritte declared, making a face.

  The guide went on, speaking to Davyn. “He was human, once. Like you. But then Alisanos took him—”

  Davyn’s tone was alarmed as he interrupted. “And he came back out?”

  “Such as he had become, yes. That came back out.” Rhuan hooked a dangling sidelock braid behind one ear. “You risk a great deal following the shorter route.”

  Audrun kept her voice steady. She had an idea what the guide would say, and what Davyn would say to her in private, but she asked it anyway. “What would you have us do?”

  “Stay here,” Rhuan replied promptly. “Wait until next season, then let Jorda take you the long way around. There are other roads to Atalanda.”

  “Babies do not wait for such things,” Davyn said. “What if we stayed, as you suggest, and the deepwood shifted and took us anyway? What then?” He shook his head, rubbing pensively at golden stubble that caught the firelight. “This decision was not lightly made. I put much thought into it. We consulted the diviners. We were assured it was safe, so long as we did not tarry.” He glanced at Audrun. “The child will be born in four months. We must reach the lands in Atalanda where my wife’s kin live.”

  The guide glanced down at his map, eyes shuttered behind lowered lids rimmed with coppery lashes. “Then this is the way you go,” he said quietly, and continued his directions as if no one among them had ever mentioned Alisanos.

  Chapter 9

  BRODHI DOZED UNTIL his senses awakened into a tingling awareness running like fire through his blood. He knew at once why: Ferize was very near.

  Still alone in the couriers’ common tent, he hastily pulled on boots and laced up the stamped leather gaiters. Then paused, contemplating whether he wished to wear the blue robe and brooch of his employment or go unknown.

  He supposed it didn’t matter; he was likely recognizable to anyone who had seen him before. His clothing was much plainer than Rhuan’s, but he too wore the sacred braids and adorned them with personal talismans and ornamentation. No one truly knew very much about Shoia, but those who lived in the settlement were familiar with the only two living examples they had ever seen.

  Brodhi exited the tent and took the first turning of the walkways that led away from the tent city. He stepped off the path and into darkness, forsaking the lanterns, lamps, and fire rings of humans. He wanted nothing to do with humans this night.

  Beneath Grandmother Moon he strode away from habitation to the realm of darkness, of privacy. A close-clustered grove of high-crowned trees offered shelter. Brodhi stepped among them, aware of the faint burring warning of birds in the branches, the deep chirping of crickets. And then all went silent.

  Stillness pervaded, until it seemed even the world paused.

  He stood amid the trees, seeing what moonlight offered; little enough when the Grandmother reigned, but his vision was superior. He smiled, and waited patiently. Thinking nothing, wishing nothing, speaking no word.

  Eventually, with a muted rustling in the leaves, a woman climbed out of the nearest tree. She jumped the last three feet from the lowest limb and landed lightly, bringing order to unbound hair and loose garments with an elegant motion of her hands. Tonight she had chosen to be black-haired, black-clad. Then she faced Brodhi; her eyes, too, were black.

  “Well?” he inquired.

  She tilted her head slightly from side to side, registering a tension in his body no one else would see. Her eyes were fixed on him as if she hungered. “No,” she said. “Not yet. They expect you to complete the full term.”

  “No matter what?”

  “No matter what,” she affirmed. She circled him, examined him, touched him, smelled him; Brodhi stood still and permitted it, alpha male to alpha bitch. Ferize was half wild and all demon. But always when she returned from Al-isanos, she brought with her an edged, feral feyness in slitpupiled eyes, and the movements of a predator.

  Halting in front of him once again, she placed the palm of one hand over his heart. “Ah. I thought so; I could smell it on you.”

  “I do bathe,” he replied lightly. “Rather more often than humans, in fact.”

  “You feel it.”

  He relinquished prevarication. “Yes.”

  In the shadows, untouched by the moonlight, her eyes were masked by dark hollows above oblique, jutting cheekbones. Her other hand briefly touched the skin of his brow, tracing faint lines, then smoothing them away. “The discomfort is minor yet.”

  “Nothing to speak of,” he agreed.

  But Ferize elected to speak of it. “Will you stay here? So close?”

  “The province is in turmoil,” Brodhi said, “since the Hecari won it. My duty now is to serve the warlord-become-prince. But he may well choose his own couriers, rather than keeping us. Until I am sent for, or dismissed, I will remain here.”

  Ferize’s supple mouth twisted. “In this place, this Sancorra, you are Shoia, and thus not invested in the province’s defeat. He would do better, this warlord-become-prince, to keep you.” She lifted her hand, then pushed back the thin braid that had found its way forward of Brodhi’s left shoulder. “His men don’t know the roads, the hamlets, the farmsteads.” She circled him again, sliding one hand across the small of his back, his hip, his abdomen. And altered the subject. “Rhuan is here as well.”

  “Yes.”

  “How does he fare?”

  “I have not spared the time to ask him.”

  Ferize’s smile was faint. “Of course not. Then I must allow Darmuth to tell me—or seek Rhuan myself.”

  “He’s not your task.” Inwardly, he said, I am.

  “My task is to do whatever the primaries tell me to do.”

  She paused, stretched out her hand. “Here. A token; they do know you are trying.”

  “And failing.” Brodhi took the item from her hand and studied it beneath the moon. An elegant, narrow leaf of fine silver with a loop at one end, nearly weightless. A human might see the art, the beauty, and nothing more; Brodhi recognized the leaf for what it represented: a primary’s wager. He shut his hand upon it and felt the metal edges bite. “Whose?”

  “Ylara,” Ferize told him. “She favors you.”

  He offered the ornament back to her. “Will you?”

  Ferize accepted the leaf. She stepped closer, selected one of his sidelock braids, and began to undo the knotted silk binding at the bottom. When the braid was loose, she ran the hair through her hands as if she tested the texture and weight of fine, costly fabric. She lifted a lock of it and, eyes meeting his, took it into her mouth.

  Brodhi bit deeply into his bottom lip.

  She braided the rippled hair again, this time threading the leaf into the slender plait.

  “I have a tent,” he told her when she finished. “But I share it with others.”

  “Well then.” She lifted one shoulder in a slight but eloquent shrug in the mass of her hair as she moved close enough that their bodies touched. “We have the trees, do we not, here beneath the moon?”

  She tasted of mist and starlight, of earth and sky and stone. Against her mouth, as he set his arms around her, Brodhi murmured all of her names one after another.

  DAVYN KNEW VERY well his insistence on going the shorter route had displeased the guide. But the diviners had been consulted again and again; would the man have them ignor
e what the experts declared? Priests, oracles, seers, readers; the rune stones, the bones, the guts of a white goat, the drift of a black feather plucked from a living crow … only a fool turned his back on what had been stated so plainly. The baby must be born in Atalanda.

  He glanced at Audrun. Her expression was taut, closed, even to him. A wave of uncertainty swept through; and then he cursed himself for it. Before the war, he had not been so filled with doubt. Before the war, decisions had been simple. None was easy, beyond such things as telling Torvic and Megritte they might stay up a bit later, and though he treated some decisions as less than vital, he considered all of them carefully. Before the war, he had been satisfied with his decisions. Now none satisfied him.

  Now nothing did.

  But when they reached Atalanda, when they were settled near Audrun’s kin, they would begin again and find the peace they had shared in Sancorra.

  Thus, a decision. The same, made again. “We’ll go on.”

  The guide rose out of his squat. Davyn realized the man—he had named himself Shoia, a race Davyn didn’t know—was not so much shorter than himself, though he lacked the mass in shoulders and chest. “Gather your children,” the guide said. “Bring your wagon to those trees, where Jorda’s karavan is.” He indicated the grove. “You will have time for the final divination rites.”

  Davyn was startled. “Again?”

  “Yes. Depending on the omens, you will depart with us in the morning—or not.”

  “‘Not’?” Audrun quoted, clearly taken aback. “But we have a place with you, yes?”

  “You have a place with us, maybe.”

  Davyn frowned. “I don’t understand. You told my wife we have a place in the karavan.”

  Rhuan nodded. “And so you do—unless the diviner says otherwise. If all is favorable, you will depart with us in the morning.” His eyes flicked between them. “It’s customary. Jorda will not have you otherwise.” He tilted his head in the direction of the karavan grounds. “See Ilona,” he suggested. “She is no less diligent in her rituals, and while the result may not be favorable, she is kinder than Branca or Melior.”