The Wild Road

by Jennifer Roberson

  She came up to him, smiling, and he took the initiative. He captured her arms, pressed them against her body, and caught her bottom lip in his teeth. Ferize laughed softly and then poured out of imprisonment into a woman who stood just in front of Brodhi. Before he could do anything more, she spread flattened hands against his chest and pushed.

  An off-balance step collided with tree root. That step, accompanied by Ferize’s push, set his spine against the wide trunk of an elder tree. And it hurt. Ferize, as all demons, was much stronger than he, even in human form. He opened his mouth to speak, but Ferize deftly undid his leggings and slipped a hand inside.

  She gripped him. “Ah,” she said. “I doubt you will last long tonight.”

  “I last as long as is needful,” Brodhi retorted, stung.

  Ferize laughed, locked arms behind the back of his neck, and pulled herself upward, against him, tucking legs around him. He embraced her as she rode his bared hips. “Now,” she said.

  He had brought a blanket for that very reason. He lay her down upon it, knelt, and covered her body with his own.

  “Perhaps twice,” she said against his mouth.

  Brodhi grinned into darkness. “Oh, more. Certainly more. I’m a god, remember?”

  Ferize laughed. “Half a god.”

  HEARING RETURNED BEFORE vision, and Audrun realized she had fallen asleep upon the cot. She remembered nothing of the movements necessary to lie down, only knew that obviously she had resorted to them at some point.

  Eyes opened. She turned over onto her back, wincing from stiffness. It was dark in the chamber, no sunlight creeping between tapestry curtains covering the long, slotted window openings. Nighttime had fallen in Alisanos, as it did in her own world. But this nighttime, she did not doubt, was far more dangerous than the one she knew.

  She could see little of the other chamber from her bed, save for a faint shaft of moonlight forming a delicate column from fire ring to skyhole. Reflecting her long practice with assessments and decisions made on a daily basis, Audrun realized that she and the older children would have to be vigilant about the hole in the chamber ceiling. First, there was the possibility of rain; secondly, light from two suns was dangerous, and the skyhole would concentrate it.

  She felt groggy, still exhausted. Joints ached, limbs stung from cuts and slashes, and her abdomen was flaccid, sore.

  She turned onto her side, looking for her children. Gillan was asleep flat on his back, injured leg baring scales, discoloration. Ellica slept with the infant tree, its rootball nestled against her side. Torvic and Megritte lay curled up on one cot, arms and legs intertwined. Audrun saw the bellies of both her youngest rising rhythmically as they breathed. They slept so deeply, blessed by innocence, as if Alisanos had never come upon them.

  And then she realized that Torvic was not asleep at all. He lay in a tangle with Meggie, as she had noted, but his eyes were open and fixed upon her. And Audrun realized that while she had chosen Meggie to join her for a hug, she had not offered the same to her older children.

  She sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the cot. She stretched out her hand to him.

  Torvic came to it slowly, sliding carefully from under Meggie’s arms and legs without disturbing her. First his hand slipped into his mother’s. Then, as she guided him closer, all stiffness and reluctance bled away. He was her child again, her youngest son. And when he leaned into her, when he pressed himself against her and wrapped his arms as far around her as was possible, Audrun felt the upwelling of relief and a surge of love for him, as well as tears of gratitude that he was alive, and present, and unhurt.

  She pulled him close. She pressed his head against her shoulder. She slipped one hand through his hair, pulling tangles back into something that resembled neatness. And then she hugged him. Hugged him hard. And felt the beat of his heart in time with her own.

  “Mam?” Torvic asked, barely above a whisper.

  “Yes?”

  “When are we going to look for the baby?”

  “I have asked that primary to find her for us.”

  “Will he?”

  Audrun’s mouth twisted. She wanted to say he would but how could she be certain? Well, if he wanted her to lie with him willingly . . .

  She reached for the string of charms that lay against the hollow of her throat and found nothing. Nothing at all.

  The thong was lost. She inhabited Alisanos without a physical connection to the Mother.

  But before she could reflect on how disturbing and frightening a loss that was, Torvic pulled her attention back to himself.

  “When is Da coming?” he asked. “He could help find the baby.”

  Audrun turned her head so he would not see her weep afresh. “I can’t say, Torvic, but I know in my heart and soul that he’s looking for all of us.”

  And what would he find when he reached them?

  His children, Audrun told herself; his wife and his children.

  ALARIO, IN DARKNESS, watched the hand-reader tend her belongings. What little remained of the tea still warmed at the fire, its kettle set on an almost level rock. But the hand-reader forgot it in the midst of putting away the accoutrements of her art. When all was done save for the forgotten kettle, the woman climbed up the steps into her high-wheeled wagon. He heard her moving inside, saw the freshly-lighted glow from the single lantern hanging from the door frame.

  Smiling, he crossed to the wagon. It creaked as he mounted the steps. Alario blew out the lantern that depended from the wagon’s door frame. The glow faded, no longer sparking off bits of metal. The spreading tree canopy blocked much of the moon. A human would say no one could see in the dark.

  He was not human.

  Alario adopted Rhuan’s lighter voice. “I am late coming from the markers. Forgive me.”

  He needed no lantern to light the wagon’s interior. He saw the hand-reader’s smile, saw her pleasure in his company, saw the invitation in her eyes. She put out a hand. “Where are you? I can’t see you.”

  “We need no light,” he said. “Our bodies know one another.”

  Ilona laughed softly. “Not as well as might be expected. We spent too much time apart. Two nights is hardly enough time for either of us to learn the other’s body.”

  Alario bared his teeth in a grin that would frighten her, could she see it. “Indeed,” he said. “Two nights is much too soon to know anything of one another.”

  Her hand searched again. “Where are you?”

  “Here.” Alario caught her hand in his, pressed it against his breast. He knelt upon the pallet even as she did and cradled her head in his hands. “Here.”

  Chapter 18

  RHUAN ROUSED TO wet grass, damp earth, and Maiden Moon glowing overhead, as if to judge him. That thought was not comforting; he was unsure if, in the human world, this Mother the people talked about endlessly was, in fact, a goddess or nothing more than a globe of light used to track the seasons. He squinted up at the moon/goddess, and then wished he hadn’t. It hurt his face to squint.

  Still muzzy, he took stock of his body. He lay sprawled upon his back, one knee bent upward, the other leg flat. Arms were splayed out. Parts of him ached, and parts of him seemed perfectly normal. The back of his head had apparently collided with something sharp. And his face hurt. He touched it gently, exploring tender areas.

  “Ow,” he muttered, having learned that complaint on his first day in the human world. “Ow ow ow.”

  “Oh, come up from there,” Darmuth said, standing over him.

  Before Rhuan could forbid him, Darmuth reached down, caught a wrist, and pulled him upright into a seated position.

  “Ow! Darmuth—!” His complaint trailed off, muffled by the two hands he pressed over his aching face. “That hurts!”

  “Of course it hurts. Your nose is broken.”

&
nbsp; “My nose?”

  “And probably a cheekbone, maybe both. But all will heal.” Darmuth paused. “And that missing tooth will grow back. You may not be as pretty as usual, but it’s temporary.”

  Rhuan sought with his tongue, found the gap in the top teeth. He also found a swollen and split bottom lip. He pressed the back of his hand against it, and saw the smear of night-blackened blood when he took the hand away. “Did somebody kill me again?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  Rhuan pondered that a moment. “No.”

  “Later,” Darmuth said tersely. “Stay here. Your face will feel better if you remain seated.”

  “My face would feel better if you hadn’t yanked me off the ground!”

  “Stay here,” Darmuth repeated, the first trace of urgency entering his tone, “and consign me to whatever punishment you feel is appropriate when I return.”

  “Darmuth—”

  “Later. I’ll explain when I return.”

  “But where are you—”

  “Later!”

  Rhuan stared after the demon until he could no longer see him. Then he eased himself back down upon the earth, spine against cold soil. “Ow.” He counted up the injuries he knew about: face, nose, cheekbones, missing tooth, a split lip. And the back of his head. Possibly more damage existed, but he was in no mood to seek it out.

  It was unlike Darmuth to sound so definitive. And yet Rhuan had to honor the request—no, the command—to stay where he was, because Darmuth only sounded like that on occasions of great consequence.

  It hurt his head too much to sit up, and standing likely would be much worse. He would do as Darmuth commanded and stay right where he was, under the eye of Maiden Moon. He lay with boot soles planted and legs crooked up. Maiden Moon’s observance of him did not falter. He realized it was his imagination suggesting that the moon was more than merely a thing in the sky at night. Nonetheless, he cupped one hand and set the edge against his brow, blocking the moon entirely.

  “I don’t understand,” Rhuan muttered. “I don’t understand. Why is it always me this happens to? It’s just like people saying I kill people.” Well, he had killed people. But only those whose death kept innocent people safe. He inspected the bridge of his nose with gentle fingertips, moving the cartilage back and forth with care. Another thought occured, hardened into certainty: “Bone hunters.”

  He was believed to be Shoia, and Shoia bones were worth much to practitioners who burned them to ash and grit and then read the resulting heaps. Opportunistic humans had learned that quickly.

  Rhuan frowned, then wished he hadn’t; it hurt. What would it take for a human, or two or three of them, to sneak up on him as he concentrated on his task of planting tree limbs to mark spots for cairns, or on marking the map pinned to Mikal’s board? That they had proved unsuccessful might well be because of Darmuth’s arrival. If so, the humans were probably dead. Darmuth, over the years in the human world, had actually killed more people than Rhuan.

  “And they’ll blame me for that, too.” He wiped a trickle of blood away from his sore lip, tongued the gap between teeth. “There are others you might murder for their bones, not mine.” And then he realized that such a thought was entirely inappropriate. He looked up at Maiden Moon once again, thinking aloud: “Well, best that no bones are taken from anyone. Of course. From anyone. But especially not from me.” The idea of his being cut up for his bones and hauled off to the ant hills before he could resurrect from a temporary death was a horrible thought. “I would like my bones to stay right where they are, if you please, in the correct assemblage beneath my flesh . . . and why am I lying here talking to the moon?” He pressed fingertips against brow and massaged sore skin. “Of course it may be that I’m talking to myself and not to the moon at all, in whatever seasonal garb she—or he, for that matter—wears.” Rhuan peered up at the moon again. “If you’re truly up there in the heavens . . . or if anything is up there, actually—could you perhaps make this headache go away?”

  DARMUTH FOLLOWED THE scent, the faint muskiness of a mature male primary preparing to breed. It was something no human would ever notice. Within moments he also knew where Alario was. Knew that the primary had bred a female. Knew that she was the hand-reader.

  He paused beside the wide bole of an elder tree near Ilona’s wagon and hid himself in darkness. Confrontation, oh yes, it would come. But Darmuth could perhaps make a larger impression if he had aid.

  He quested for her, found her. With Brodhi, undoubtedly doing precisely what Alario did. “Ferize. If you can, come.”

  He felt the quickening of her interest—and her annoyance. “Now? Why? Can it not wait until I have completely exhausted my dioscuri?”

  “Alario is here.”

  That prompted a flicker of curiosity. “Why?”

  “To beget another dioscuri.”

  Now she was clearly startled. “Then he means to kill Rhuan before the challenge can ever go forth.”

  “That is my thought. Ferize, can you come?”

  “I’ll come. Brodhi is half asleep anyway, poor boy.”

  Her presence in his mind faded. Darmuth set a shoulder against the striated tree trunk, crossed his arms, and kept an eye on the hand-reader’s wagon. No illumination glowed from the interior, no silhouettes moved against pale canvas. All was dark, and all was still.

  Alario had completed the act for which he had come. That much Darmuth could tell from the alteration of the primary’s scent. He was a male satiated, replete. Ilona had been bred.

  Whether she was fertilized, Darmuth couldn’t know any more than primaries or dioscuri. She was human; knowledge would come later when her courses continued or stopped. That much he knew of human anatomy.

  Alario could be nearly silent as he moved, and he was silent now. Darmuth saw the faint shifting of the wagon, the careful opening of the wagon door so it would not creak. The night was dark, but not black. Banked coals at each wagon lent pale illumination. But Darmuth’s eyesight was superior to a human’s, and he had no trouble recognizing Alario as he descended wagon steps.

  “Ferize?”

  He sensed her amusement. “I’m here. I’m up a tree. I’ll come down when it’s needful.”

  “And when might that be? When I am nearly unmade?”

  “He won’t unmake either of us, Darmuth. Not for this. Alario has always gone his own way, but in this the other primaries would not forgive him.”

  “You mean if he unmade us beyond the borders of Alisanos.”

  “Exactly. And since you and I are tied to our dioscuri while they walk among humans, he knows very well he can’t unmake us here. It provides a measure of protection.”

  “I do hope so.” Darmuth stood up from the tree and intentionally stepped into Alario’s way.

  BETHID ROUSED. SHE knew Timmon and Alorn had returned earlier because she woke briefly as they came into the tent. But this was a single man whose entrance woke her, and she knew very well who it was.

  “Don’t forget to blow out the lamp,” she said sleepily. “How were the women tonight?”

  “I never forget to blow out the lamp, primarily because I am never the last one in.”

  Bethid snorted. “Tonight doesn’t count?”

  He ignored that. “As for the women you mention, I have no idea how or who they were. I wasn’t with Timmon or Alorn.”

  Bethid grinned into the darkness. “Oh Brodhi, don’t play the innocent with me. I daresay it’s the woman I saw you with once before.” A yawn captured her jaw. She waved a limp hand. “I don’t care, Brodhi. I don’t care if she’s your mother. I am not one to judge.” Nor was she, who preferred women to men in her bed.

  Brodhi blew out the lantern and walked unerringly to his pallet. It always annoyed her that he saw so well in the dark, even when there were no lamps, even during Em
pty Sky when there was no moon at all. But it was Maiden Moon, and Bethid could see, albeit not necessarily clearly.

  Bethid heard him slipping off his boots to set them neatly beside his pallet. Like her, he did not bother replacing day wear with nighttime apparel. He lay down, turned onto his side, pulled blankets up to his ear.

  Bethid’s smile was both slow and anticipatory. “So. How was she, then? Singular. As you mentioned yourself, it is not like you to come in after Timmon or Alorn.”

  Brodhi held his silence. It was palpable that he had no intention of answering.

  Bethid rested her chin on folded hands, elbows jutting from under the coverlet. “If she’s not one of the Sisters, who is she? One of the karavaners? Tent folk? Those are the only two possibilities, after all.”

  “Bethid—”

  “Oh, I forgot . . . you have alternatives. Is she from Alisanos?”

  His tone was forbidding. “Shall you tell the entire encampment, then?”

  That startled Bethid. She teased him, but hadn’t truly considered that the woman was from the deepwood. But it made sense. Brodhi and Rhuan were here, and they were from Alisanos. So could the woman be. “I’m not talking that loudly. Besides, Timmon and Alorn passed out the moment they hit their pallets. I suspect it will be the midday meal tomorrow—or, rather, today—before either is fit to do anything more than scowl.” She paused, then grinned. “Will you be in better humor, now that you’ve been with a woman?”

  He said nothing.

  “Sometimes that’s all a man needs, you know. One night with a woman, and the entire world becomes presentable. Or so I’ve heard.”

  “Bethid—why are you baiting me?”

  “Am I?”

  “And don’t be disingenuous.”

  She shrugged, though he couldn’t see it. Well, maybe he could, come to that. “I guess I’m just looking for amusement.”

  “There is nothing amusing about me.”

  Bethid had to muffle laughter behind one hand. “Well. This is true. Usually.”

  “Do you wish me to make you go to sleep?”