Rhuan decided to let the question be rhetorical, as he had no answer. He gestured awkwardly with the arm Ferize held. “The supply wagon is that way.”
“I’m not taking you to the supply wagon,” Brodhi said. “I’m taking you to the woman.”
“What woman?”
“The hand-reader.”
Rhuan nearly tripped. “Why?”
“Because you would do better to rest where someone may be certain you don’t choke to death in your sleep, and I have no intention of being that person.”
“Oh, of course not.” Rhuan attempted to pull his arms away from Brodhi and Ferize, and failed. “She may have someone with her.” Someone such as the woman named Audrun, or worse: Audrun’s husband. Neither of them would place their trust in a guide who couldn’t walk without aid. He wouldn’t. “Brodhi, don’t.”
But Brodhi did. And as Ilona opened her wagon door at his call, dark curls falling to her waist, Rhuan saw in her face sudden startlement and concern.
“He’s drunk,” Brodhi declared, with an undertone of satisfaction apparent only to Rhuan and Ferize.
Rhuan opened his mouth to emphatically disagree, except that Ilona’s surprise and worry had already turned to wry resignation. Brodhi had purposely chosen the one explanation anyone would accept the night before departure. Anyone except Jorda, who might very well dismiss him on the spot, guide or no guide. Possibly because he was a guide.
“Put him on my cot,” Ilona directed. “I’ll bed down on the floor beside it.”
Brodhi pushed Rhuan up the steps; Ferize, who would not wish the hand-reader to see her clearly with the breath of Alisanos still upon her, remained at the bottom of the folding steps.
Ilona added, “Darmuth is with Jorda.”
No more explanation was required. It would be a bad idea to summon Darmuth in front of Jorda to tend his fellow guide if the karavan-master was to be kept ignorant of Rhuan’s state.
Brodhi dumped him unceremoniously onto Ilona’s cot and departed without a word. The only portion of relief Rhuan could find in the moment was that neither the farmsteader nor his wife was present to see it.
But Ilona was. Hitched up on a single elbow, he became aware of her standing next to the cot, examining him critically. “I’m not drunk.” He attempted casual confidence, but managed only childish defensiveness.
Ilona leaned over and placed a hand against his forehead, checking the heat of his body. Hair fell against his neck. “I know that.” She pushed him down against the bedclothes with a marked lack of consideration. “Did someone kill you again?”
“No!”
“Good. Then you still have several deaths left.” She took his beaded bag and set it aside, dropped a blanket over him. “Unless Jorda decides to levy one when he sees you tomorrow.”
Chapter 14
DESPITE RHUAN’S PROTESTS that he was perfectly capable of sleeping safely in his own bed with no supervision, Ilona did not allow him to rise from the cot. She knew enough of Brodhi—and the arrogant Shoia’s low opinion of his friendlier kinsman—to realize that if he felt Rhuan should have an eye kept on him, an eye should be kept. It had briefly occurred to her to ask Brodhi why his eye couldn’t do the keeping, but the question died unasked when she saw the woman shrouded in the darkness at the bottom of the wagon steps.
Brodhi. With a woman.
But the courier was an intensely private man, and Ilona supposed he might well have a woman at every stop along his route with no one the wiser. She had simply never seen him with a woman here in the tent settlement, other than his fellow courier, Bethid. And Bethid, Ilona knew, preferred women in her bed.
Of the woman with Brodhi she caught a glimpse only, before she turned her attention to Rhuan. But that glimpse, with thanks to the tin lantern hanging over the door, had briefly shown Ilona black, nondescript clothing, black hair, eyes shielded by shadowed sockets. And a face so pale as to approach transluscence. When Ilona had looked for the woman again as Brodhi went down the steps, she saw nothing at all but the man exiting, walking out into darkness.
And then she turned her attention back to her “patient.” Who did not in the least evoke patience in her, but rather resignation.
He wasn’t drunk, no matter what Brodhi said. She smelled no spirits on him. The salty tang of male sweat, yes; also an acrid trace of several substances she did not recognize, and the faintest whisper of scented oil.
She offered to brew him tea, but he was fading before she started the question and asleep before she finished. So Ilona brewed no tea. Instead, she pulled out her extra sleeping mat, cushion, and blankets, and prepared herself a bed on the floorboards. But she did not lie down at once, nor did she extinguish the lantern. She sat down upon her bedding, settled split skirts, and contemplated the man in her bed.
Rhuan in her bed. Which, she reflected with no little measure of irony, was unmapped territory for them both.
She had met the Shoia while she grieved for a dead lover, a guide killed by a Hecari patrol as he rode ahead of the karavan. With Tansit’s death rites on her mind and his ruined body in Jorda’s wagon, nothing in her answered to the Shoia’s charm and immense appeal as it might have otherwise, another time, another place.
And then he had been murdered within half an hour of meeting her. For his bones, he told her later, when he was alive again; Kantic diviners paid very well for Shoia bones. But though Rhuan’s bones were whole, the heart warded within them had been stopped.
If temporarily.
By the time Ilona had settled her grief—Tansit, unlike the Shoia, remained dead—Rhuan had insinuated himself deeply into the workings of the karavan. Her awareness and body woke to him—Ilona thought it likely every woman’s body eventually woke to Rhuan—but he himself had never indicated any interest of a sexual nature in her. They were friends. It was a relationship in which she found great comfort and contentment, and she would not risk that by looking for more.
Ilona studied the nearest hand showing from under the blanket. Once, she had taken that hand in her own, intending to read it as the dead flesh cooled so she might learn what final rite would be appropriate for a man she didn’t know. She had nearly lost herself in that moment, in him, transfixed by something she could only describe in a single word: maelstrom. He was unknown, unnamed, utterly untamed.
And alive, after all.
And she never again, until now, had the opportunity to read his hand.
The Shoia slept deeply, even breaths lifting the light blanket in an unceasing, steady rhythm. Without the animation evident when awake, his face nonetheless retained the appeal of the exotic: narrow, straight nose; high, oblique cheekbones; clean arches of bone over the eyes; hollows beneath the cheeks—no incongruous dimples appearing as he slept; a well-defined jawline; and a flexible mouth that, even in repose, retained the promise of laughter.
Rhuan and Brodhi resembled one another in many ways, from a similarity of symmetry in the arrangement of their features to a shared height and weight to coppery hair worn long in ornate braids. But Brodhi never even smiled that Ilona had witnessed, let alone succumbed to the laughter that ran so freely in Rhuan.
She asked Rhuan once why Brodhi was so austere, avoiding a cruder term, but Rhuan merely shrugged and said his older kinsman had always lacked a sense of humor.
Yet Brodhi had brought Rhuan here to her wagon because of concern for his kinsman’s welfare.
Rhuan was patently not drunk, no matter what Brodhi said. Ill? Perhaps. But his color was good, his lungs were clear, and his brow lacked the heat of fever. A Shoia thing, perhaps, and thus kept private from everyone. But if that, why would Brodhi not tend him? Or Brodhi’s woman?
Meanwhile, Rhuan slept deeply enough that Ilona knew she probably could read his hand without his awareness, but to do so challenged the friendship, risked the trust based on mutual respect and an acceptance uncomplicated by conditions and excuses.
Ilona sighed, smiled a wry smile, and began tugging a boot from her
foot. Her senses were such, even in sleep, that she would wake if Rhuan’s breathing altered; there was no sense in staying up with him. She as much as he needed a good night’s sleep before departure.
BRODHI, SILENT AS always, slipped into the wheat-colored couriers’ common tent, lighted from within by a hanging pierced-tin lantern. Timmon and Alorn remained absent, but Bethid was present and in the midst of changing into a sleeping garment. With annoyance Brodhi recalled human courtesy required—or at least strongly suggested—that he call out before entering, but Ferize’s presence and dealing with Rhuan had put the memory out of his head.
He stopped short just inside, summoning gruff words of apology; but Bethid’s grin and beckoning gesture reminded him before he spoke that she didn’t worry about such transgressions.
Her boots stood neatly at the foot of her pallet, along with her gaiters, scroll-case, and personal items. Trousers, tunic, belt, and cloak dangled from a roof hook. Bethid herself sat cross-legged on the pallet, half-nude as she wriggled arms and stuck her head through respective openings in her baggy sleep tunic. She tugged it down, still grinning at him. He caught a glimpse of lean, sinewy torso and small, darknippled breasts in the dappled glow of the lantern.
“Do I care?” Bethid asked archly. Short-cropped fair hair stood up in a tousled thicket. “No. Neither should you. Though I’m not sure you do care to start with—you personally, that is, since I’ve never seen you show the slightest interest in women or men—in which case it really doesn’t matter, does it, what you see? Of me, that is. And I don’t care.”
Brodhi elected not to decipher that. He knelt and began rolling up his bedding.
Bethid tugged the tunic into place around slim hips, watching his actions with dawning surprise. “You’re leaving?”
Brodhi tied bedroll thongs, caught up his courier’s accoutrements and a beaded leather bag similar to Rhuan’s, then lifted down the blue mantle from its hook. The change of weight distribution upon the main pole set the lantern to swinging. Candlelight guttered. “I’m leaving.”
She blinked disbelief. “But why? You’re not heading out, are you? At night? I mean, leaving the settlement?”
He paused, genuinely curious, absently noting the speckled play of lantern light, shaped by piercings, swaying back and forth across her face. “Why should it matter to you?”
Her mouth jerked sideways. “I suppose it doesn’t. I just meant that it’s not exactly safe to travel at night, with Hecari patrols around. Even if what Mikal said is true and they haven’t been here for weeks. We may be sanctioned couriers, but that never stopped the Hecari from doing whatever they like.”
He slung the cloak over one shoulder and reached up to still the lantern. “I’m not traveling. I’m bedding down elsewhere.”
Bethid stared at him. Then her wide mouth stretched into a knowing grin. “Ah-hah! You have an assignation.” Her pale brows arched up. “Anyone I know?”
“I do doubt it.”
Bethid didn’t give up even as he stepped to the flap, lifting her voice as he slipped out. “Male or female?”
Outside, Ferize took substance from the Grandmother’s thin moonlight, gliding from the darkness as Brodhi exited. She pulled the cloak from his shoulder and swirled it around her own until the rich blue fabric enveloped her slight, black-clad body.
“You might tell her,” Ferize suggested as they walked away from the tent.
A twig snapped under Brodhi’s boots. “Tell her what? That I have a woman—a wife, as they call it—and she happens to be a demon?”
“No. That I can be either human gender.” In pale light, her smile was liltingly wicked. “Or both at the same time.”
“Trust me,” he said, “of this I am certain: no human could ever possibly understand what you are, and what you can do. Part of the time I’m not certain I do.”
“And so I prefer it.” Ferize, mimicking humans, linked an arm through his as they walked. “Which would you like to sleep with this time?”
“‘This time’?” he echoed. “Is there to be another tonight? Should I reach deep inside and summon what little strength you left me the first time?”
Her throaty laugh stirred him, as it always did. “Oh, I do believe you will find it, should you wish to.” She lifted a fold of his mantle and smelled it, then lightly stroked the wool against her cheek. “Which would you prefer, male or female? Or both at once?”
Brodhi found within himself a laugh no human had ever heard. It was Ferize’s doing, as always, be it actual sorcery or what she provoked merely by her nearness. “All, and everything. If you’re up to it.”
Ferize’s response was less a human sigh than it was a feline growl, low and languorous, and infinitely pleased.
“In fact,” he began—then stopped.
Everything stopped. The words he meant to say, the movements he intended to make, even the thoughts within his mind.
Emptiness, and a fleeting sense of loneliness.
With Ferize here? How could that be possible? She filled his soul—or whatever part of him passed for such.
He saw her face, turned up in the moonlight. Saw the questions in her eyes, the beginnings of a frown as her lips parted to speak.
Brodhi fell to his knees.
She called his name. He heard it. She knelt down beside him, placing hands on either side of his face. She turned his head and made him look at her. Sweat broke out on his face, rolled down his body beneath his clothing. Breath hissed through clenched teeth as he fought to regain self-control.
Ferize’s expression cleared even as she pressed the film of dampness from his face with a corner of his cloak. She smiled, nodding slightly. “So.”
Expelling a vicious curse, Brodhi wrenched himself to his feet. Everything ached. “Don’t,” he said through his teeth, breathing hard. “Don’t you dare.”
Ferize, rising, laughed.
Catching his breath was easier now. “Don’t you dare tell Rhuan.”
“My poor Brodhi, whose pride won’t let him admit to any weakness. Most especially not to his blood-kin.” She did not sound particularly sympathetic.
“To that blood-kin,” he elucidated. “Specifically.” He stretched his back, wincing, and felt his muscles laggardly relinquish incipient cramps.
“Do you have more kevi, or did you give Rhuan all of it?”
Irritation sharpened his reply. “I don’t need any kevi.”
Ferize laid a hand against her cheek, miming startled recollection. “Oh, of course not. I was forgetting. Shame on me.” She resettled his cloak around her shoulders. “Well, come along, then. Let us discover how much stamina you have left for me, after a taste of Alisanos.”
Brodhi gathered the things he had dropped when he fell, rearranging them for ease of carrying. Discomfort was dissipating, but a residue remained. “You find it humorous, do you?”
Ferize was not one to shield her words for the sake of his feelings. She offered a cheerful smile. “But of course.” Brodhi scowled at her. “You spent more concern on Rhuan.”
She laughed again, the sound rising on the cooling air. “And again, but of course. He is the baby of the family, after all.” She twined her hand into his. “Come along, my dioscuri. All and everything, you said. That requires time, and the night grows short.”
Chapter 15
AUDRUN’S SLEEP WAS filled with dreams of blood, of tears, of grief. She saw her children struck down, swept away; she saw the wagon destroyed; she smelled the odor of death. Each image carried with it the clarity of true time, not the distance of dreams. And then the faces of her children disappeared, replaced by the face of the diviner. The woman who had given them admission to the karavan by reading their hands, but who had spoken the words that now filled Audrun’s dreams.
She awoke when Davyn turned over in his sleep and accidentally jabbed her with an elbow. The dreams remained clear and vivid. From beneath the floor planks of the high, huge wagon, swathed in blankets shared with her husband, Audrun did
not dream of the journey, but of the unknown danger threatening her children.
She fumbled beneath the layers of blankets and found her abdomen, shielded by the cloth of her tunic and skirts. All was stillness within. The child slept.
Audrun closed her eyes. I could ask for another reading. Surely the diviner would not begrudge her that. Once on the way, Ilona need examine no one concerning the safety of the karavan. She could read hands and discuss other matters.
But would she?
Audrun stroked the cloth covering her abdomen. I was a fool. I should have done as so many others do, and asked for no images other than those connected with the karavan. But she had asked, and now she knew. She was forewarned. Yet it gave her no guidance as to how she might halt the events that threatened her children. She felt cheated. Knowing danger existed need not always result in tragedy avoided.
Tears. Grief. Blood.
The diviner had said nothing about the importance of reaching Atalanda before the baby was born. But Audrun realized with a sense of dread that tears and grief and blood might well be her portion if they didn’t reach Atalanda in time.
She turned on her hip and elbow and moved closer to her husband. But even as the nearness of his body offered more warmth beneath the blankets, Audrun did not, could not, sleep.
RHUAN ROUSED TO a bitter aftertaste in his mouth, a jaw aching from clenching, and muscles that felt like water. For a long moment he lay very still with his eyes closed, evaluating his body, until he realized the scents he smelled had nothing to do with himself or his own bedroll.
Ilona? His eyes snapped open. He lay on a cot he recognized by the colorful blanket, which was rucked up around his waist, and the carved wagon ribs curving over his head, charms and talismans dangling. Beyond the glyph-painted canvas roof covering, the day was beginning as the sun crept slowly over horizon’s edge.
Rhuan sat up, suppressing a groan. Had he and Ilona—? No. He thought not. He recalled weakness, illness, Brodhi’s and Ferize’s half-carrying him to Ilona’s wagon, and Ilona herself dropping the blanket over him. He had been in no shape for intimacies.
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