Raves for Jennifer Roberson’s Deepwood:
“Roberson’s complex sequel to Karavans … Readers will be impatient to see what happens in the next volume.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Lots of action, competently drawn characters, and a world in which anything can happen. High-quality action fantasy.”
—Booklist
“Roberson prose is compelling, the book’s premise is well-presented, and the pages almost seem to turn themselves. This installment is a shining example of Roberson’s sterling attention to detail. Fans of the first book, Karavans, can expect an all-nighter!”
—Romantic Times
And for her previous volume, Karavans:
“The first volume in a new fantasy saga establishes a universe teeming with fascinating humans, demons and demigods … the pieces are in place for what promises to be a story of epic proportions.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Jennifer Roberson’s Karavans (the opening volume of her first new series in two decades!) is a storytelling tour de force with all the trappings of a classic fantasy saga: a cast of fully realized and singularly unique characters, desperate quests, ominous prophecies, and intertwining plotlines filled with dark magic and supernatural intrigue—all set in a war-torn realm drenched in blood. Fans who have enjoyed Roberson’s previous works will be absolutely blown away by this emotionally charged nomadic adventure through a world teetering on the brink of chaos. Set in one of the most vividly described and downright intriguing fantasy realms to come along in years, Karavans is arguably Roberson’s best work to date. Featuring breathtaking cover art by artist extraordinaire Todd Lockwood, this is a ‘must-read’ fantasy if there ever was one.”
—The Barnes & Noble Review
“The many mysteries set up are tantalizing enough to make me impatient for more.”
—Locus
DAW titles by Jennifer Roberson
KARAVANS
DEEPWOOD
THE SWORD-DANCER SAGA
SWORD-DANCER
SWORD-SINGER
SWORD-MAKER
SWORD-BREAKER
SWORD-BORN
SWORD-SWORN
CHRONICLES OF THE CHEYSULI
Omnibus Editions
SHAPECHANGERS SONG
LEGACY OF THE WOLF
CHILDREN OF THE LION
THE LION THRONE
THE GOLDEN KEY
(with Melanie Rawn and Kate Elliott)
ANTHOLOGIES
(as editor)
RETURN TO AVALON
HIGHWAYMEN: ROBBERS AND ROGUES
JENNIFER ROBERSON
DEEPWOOD
DAW BOOKS, INC.
DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, FOUNDER
375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
ELIZABETH R. WOLLHEIM
SHEILA E. GILBERT
PUBLISHERS
http://www.dawbooks.com
Copyright © 2007 by Jennifer Roberson.
All Rights Reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-101-64249-8
Cover art by Todd Lockwood.
Book designed by Elizabeth Glover.
DAW Books Collectors No. 1407.
DAW Books Inc. is distributed by Penguin Group (USA).
All characters in the book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
First Paperback Printing, August 2008
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED
U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES
—MARCA REGISTRADA
HECHO EN U.S.A.
Printed in the U.S.A.
For Drs. Beverly Scott (Phoenix) and
Jim Maciulla (Flagstaff),
veterinarians extraordinaire,
who have always gone those many extra miles
for my beloved Cardigan Welsh Corgis.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Epilogue
Prologue
AUDRUN SLEPT. AND woke. Slept, and woke again throughout the night, and also the day. Mind and body refused to remain awake and aware of the world. When, for the barest flicker of a moment, she roused to consciousness, there was no strength in her limbs, no impulse to awake, to arise, to recall who she was, to remember where she was. To be cognizant of the world.
A world forever changed.
Alisanos.
Now Audrun’s eyelids snapped open as she sucked in a strangled breath of recollection. Oh, yes, she remembered. She remembered all of it.
Vision, dazzled by a chiaroscuro of dark and light, of low-hanging, gnarled trees bearing broad, sharpedged fronds glittering like crystal, struggled to find clarity. But vision was fractured.
She squinted, lifted a trembling hand to shield her eyes. The world was bright, and warm. Blindingly bright. Leaves rippled overhead. Fronds bent down on delicate, pendulous stems, as if to touch her. Beneath her body blades of grass stirred against her flesh, insinuating themselves within the weave of her clothing. She turned her head to escape the glare of double suns, one white, one yellow; the sky, through the trees, was a dusty sepia.
Davyn. The children.
Five children, now; the newborn infant had spilled from her body well before its time. And lived.
Sound broke from her mouth.
“Be still,” someone said sharply.
Be still?
But no. Her body would not permit it. Her awareness, rousing now from exhaustion into tensile wakefulness, asserted memories. Audrun recalled the wind, the rain, the storm, the blackness rolling across the land, the absence of her family.
Alisanos. The deepwood. The nightmare.
And again the voice. “Be still.”
She could not do that. Could not be that.
Alarm sent the blood rushing through her veins, filling her with memories, with awareness, with the terrible pain of loss. Her throat closed on a gasp, on a sob; on a strangled outcry of grief.
Be still, he had said.
But first she hitched herself up on one bruised elbow. To look. To see. To register what she saw. Yet to understand none of it.
The karavan guide … who was not Shoia after all, but something else entirely. Dioscuri, he named himself: the son of a god. An Alisani god.
His back was to her, bare save for the leather baldric hooked slantwise from left shoulder to right hip. And braids, so many copper-hued braids, twisted, tangled, and threaded one upon another into a complex cluster of
ornamented plaits dangling down his spine. His posture was tangibly erect, with legs spread slightly, knees flexed, booted feet planted.
She could not see his face, but she could hear what he said. And understood none of it.
Rhuan stood his ground. Around him, with a stirring of vegetation, a trembling of leaves, came the sound of growling, of howling, of hissing, of noises she could not identify save for the tone, the threat. A suggestion of sinuous bodies. Of beings.
Human, none of them. This was Alisanos.
In a tone she had never heard, in a tongue not her own, he spoke to the bodies and beings. He was of Alisanos. He had said so. Confessed it, when she insisted on an answer. This was his world. These beings, these bodies, he knew.
He turned very slightly, still holding his place. She saw then that cradled within a leather sling constructed from his tunic was the infant, clasped within his arms against his chest. The girl. Born four months before her time, yet inexplicably full-term.
Mother of Moons. The beings, the bodies, the demons and the devils, wanted her child.
“Be still,” Rhuan said, in the midst of other words in a language she did not know.
This time she obeyed.
FERIZE WAS GONE. In Brodhi’s last view of her, she had been in demon form, with wings, fangs, claws, tail, catlike eyes, and opalescent scales. She had flown into the sky, into the depths of the storm, riding tumbling currents. Now she was absent, no doubt overcome by the sheer elation of demon form, of her natural, wilding state. Brodhi wished he might share in that, but he was ground-bound, his form like men, human men. He was no demon to shift his shape, to taste the air with a sinuous forked tongue. And not for the first time he wished himself otherwise, capable of sprouting wings to ride the skies beneath the sun. Even if it were the puny single sun of the world belonging to humans, and not the double suns of Alisanos. No, he was no demon, but dioscuri. In time he would be a god.
In time. Too much time! Deserted by Ferize, whom the human tongue named wife, Brodhi was left behind. Forgotten. Trapped among the humans by vows he had taken before the primaries of Alisanos, most of whom would as soon see him fail his tests, to abjure his journey. If he did so, all was lost. He would no longer be the halfling son of a god with a future of immeasurable length, immeasurable power, but something else. Something less.
A neuter.
Even the thought made him flush with anger, with shame, with something very akin to desperation. His third eyelid dropped, a scrim of semi-opaque membrane that painted the world ruddy. To those who knew him, those of Alisanos, it was warning, as was the subtle darkening of his skin. But here in the human world, such things were not understood.
Brodhi fought for self-control. But it was a difficult battle, in the aftermath of a conversation with Darmuth, who was, as Ferize, a demon. Rhuan’s demon. Darmuth had given him the news that Rhuan was back in Alisanos, having been overtaken when the deepwood, awakened, engulfed miles of new territory. Rhuan was in fact precisely where Brodhi wished to be. But that, Darmuth made clear, was denied him. If Brodhi voluntarily crossed from the human world to Alisanos, he would lose any chance of gaining the godhood he craved. Rhuan, who had been swallowed up entirely against his will, caught as humans had been, would not face the same reception.
The memory of Darmuth’s words renewed bitterness and anger. If either were to be overcome, he needed release in physical activity. Brodhi turned on his heel and left a grove that had survived the storm, save for the youngest of trees, and strode toward what remained of the tent village. With every step he named the Names of the Thousand Gods, one of whom was his sire.
Chapter 1
ILONA STOOD BENEATH a clear blue sky empty of the deadly storm. Her belted tunic and long split skirts were soaked and mud-soiled, sticking uncomfortably to her body. Curly hair, loosed from a twisted coil habitually anchored to her head with ornamented hair sticks, hung to her waist in wet disarray, dripping brown-tinged water. Though the sun was out again, no longer obscured by banks of roiling black clouds, she did not feel warm. She was too wet, too worn.
She and Jorda, the karavan-master who was her employer, had escaped the worst of the destruction wreaked by Alisanos because they obeyed Rhuan’s insistent command that they go east. Both knew the karavan guide, both trusted his instincts. They asked no questions; such things wasted time, and Rhuan said there was little left for them. But before fleeing, she and Jorda had done their best to send the karavaners eastward as well, echoing Rhuan’s instructions. She did not know who survived and who did not. Only that she had, and Jorda. She gave fervent thanks to the Mother of Moons for that survival.
Now there was something she needed to do, something to discover before she tended aches and exhaustion, the pain of a broken arm.
She was a diviner. Her gift, her art, was to read in others’ hands glimpses of their futures, to interpret what she could of what was visible. In Jorda’s hand she sought answers to many questions, to see, in the aftermath of the storm, what lay before him. She could not read her own hand, but knowing what lay in his, as her employer, might provide a peripheral knowledge.
Jorda, as soaked as she, stood before her, left hand extended. His riotous ruddy beard was drying in the newborn sunlight, though unless he undid the single gray-threaded braid at the back of his head, his hair would require more time. A lifetime of guiding karavans in all kinds of weather had carved deep seams into the flesh at the corners of his eyes, though much of his face was hidden by the beard. He was a broad, big, plainspoken man who had seen more than forty years, not given much to laughter because of his responsibilities as karavan-master, but was the most honorable man Ilona had ever met. The decision to apply for a position as karavan diviner, after years of working in various villages and hamlets as an itinerant hand-reader, was the best decision she had ever made. The travel could be wearing, but the security and companionship were not.
Now Ilona stared into Jorda’s wide, calloused palm. She was aware of faint disorientation, of pain. Her left forearm, held lightly against her chest, had been broken in the fall from Jorda’s stumbling draft horse, but she did her best to ignore it. Her right hand, from beneath, steadied his.
She saw the calluses, the scars, the thin lines common to all as creases in the palm. But nothing else. Nothing more. The hand was merely a hand, not a harbinger.
How can I see nothing? Stunned, Ilona looked into Jorda’s face. Between the top of his exuberant ruddy beard and the lower lids of his eyes there was not much flesh. But he was pale; that much she could see. And in his green eyes, concern.
“Is it bad?” he asked in a deep voice made raspy by the shouting he had done to warn his karavaners of Alisanos’ arrival. Something in her expression stirred him to repeat the question more urgently.
Ilona felt numb. “I see nothing.” She stared again into Jorda’s palm, mentally shoving away a burgeoning apprehension. “I see a hand. Just—a hand.” O Mother, tell me this isn’t happening!
Concern faded from Jorda’s tone. In it now was a peculiar, conversational lightness, as if he spoke to a child. “Well, perhaps that is to be expected. Your arm is broken, Ilona. Who could concentrate enough to read a hand when pain is all they know?”
The sensible words held no meaning for her, and did not assuage her fears. Blankly, she said, “Not since I was twelve has a hand been closed to me.” Not even Rhuan’s, the time she caught a glimpse, despite him being of the Shoia, a race very different from her own.
And then she recalled that the last time she had attempted to read Audrun’s hand, it had been closed to her. They had discussed whether the unborn child was blocking her art.
“You are wet, cold, exhausted, and in pain.” Jorda disengaged his hand from hers. “Let it be for now. You may try again later, when you have rested and I have tended that arm.”
“Jorda—”
“Let be, Ilona.” That tone was a command. “We’ll return to the grove, to your wagon—whatever may be left of it—to set
and splint that arm, and to let you rest. I think it should come as no surprise that your art is in abeyance, considering what has happened.” Jorda laid his big hands upon her shoulders, surprisingly gentle even in insistence, turned her around, and then touched her back lightly to urge her into motion.
Ilona permitted it, cradling her injured arm. Her mind was too full of thoughts and memories to protest, brimming with images seen in the midst of the terrible storm. Full, too, with a sick fear that tied her stomach into knots.
And then from ahead, from near the settlement, came the unexpected call of a woman. Ilona heard Jorda’s brief grunt of discovery and relief; she lifted her head to look and saw a slight, wiry young woman clad in the boots and leather gaiters of a courier jogging toward them. Fair hair, cropped short, was drying in the sun, standing up in tufts. Brass ear-hoops glinted.
Behind the woman, moving ponderously, came a heavy, thick, dark-haired man with a leather patch tied over one eye. Ilona murmured thanks to the Mother of Moons: Bethid and Mikal. Alive.
Bethid’s thin face was alight with joy. Laughing now in joyful relief she dropped to a walk and came up to them, reached out to embrace them. Ilona thrust her right hand up in a defensive gesture before Bethid wrapped arms around her.
Deepwood: Karavans # 2 Page 1
