Deepwood: Karavans # 2 (40 page)

“I took it from my thigh,” Darmuth said casually. “It had to be living flesh, not from a corpse; and I know of no demon who would, while alive, give up his flesh to a human.”

Gillan’s eyes popped open. He took the stick from his mouth. “
You
did it.”

“You may thank Rhuan for that.” Darmuth’s hands, skilled and efficient, began wrapping the limb. “He cares about your family more than any other. And I suspect you
will
be able to thank him in person. In the flesh, as it were.” He displayed perfectly human teeth in a sardonic grin.

As the leg was covered, some of the pain diminished. Gillan still trembled, but speech was easier. “Rhuan’s here, too?”

“He was with your mother when the storm came down.” Darmuth applied a length of cloth stripped from Gillan’s tunic. “He will be making his way to the Kiba to address the primaries. We should be there.”

Now he was confused. “Be where?”

“At the Kiba.”

“But—”

“He has displayed an increasing tendency to protect and defend humans,” Darmuth continued, “which no doubt will infuriate Alario, but it will also please Karadath and those who oppose Alario. I suspect he will ask the primaries to let you and your mother, provided she still lives, be returned to the human world.”

Hope leaped painfully within his chest. “We can go back?”

“Pin no hopes on it,” Darmuth suggested. “It’s highly unlikely—and will you wish to go back, wearing demon skin?”

Gillan stared at the bandaging. His thoughts tumbled in his mind like creek water over stones. “I wear trews,” he said finally. “Who will know?”

Darmuth’s eyes were pale, pale gray. The pupils elongated. “Living skin grows.”

Gillan blinked. “What?”

“Eventually, no amount of clothing will hide your scales.”

His reaction was instantaneous. Gillan cried out,
pushed himself sideways off the tree, scrabbled away. The limb would not support him. Pain renewed itself. Eventually he fell backward, landing upon his elbows. He stared at Darmuth in almost paralyzing shock. “Take it off! Take it off!”

“The skin is living. Your blood runs in its tissues.”

“Take it off!
Cut
it off!”

Darmuth raised an eyebrow. “The leg?”

“Cut it
off!
”

“How will you survive Alisanos with only one leg?”

Gillan screamed.

Sighing, Darmuth picked up the forgotten stick. He rose, went to Gillan, and squatted down beside him. With no ceremony at all, he shoved the stick into his open mouth and held it there. “Your choice, boy. Be a man, or be a child.”

Sweating from pain, trembling in shock, Gillan stopped screaming. Tears coursed down his face.

“Better.” Darmuth removed the stick. “Weeping is quieter.”

ILONA SAT FOR a long time in the open door of her wagon. She watched the sun set. She watched twilight come. She watched the first stars appear in the sky, and Mother Moon brightening among them. She heard snatches of conversation from others carrying within the grove, karavaners sorting out cookfires and the evening meal. She wondered
why she wasn’t hungry. She wondered why she remained on the floor of her wagon when there were things to do.

Rhuan’s father wanted to sire a child on her.

It was a small sound at first, a brief, choppy exhalation coupled with something that was precursor to laughter. Ilona closed her eyes, leaned her head against the doorjamb behind her, and gave way to honest if quiet laughter shaped by a plethora of emotions, most of which she could not name. They passed through her mind too quickly. It was ridiculous. It was ludicrous. It was entirely, absolutely, incontrovertibly unbelieveable.

When the laughter stopped, leaving behind a grin, she brushed her hair back from her face and opened her eyes. And found a woman waiting at the bottom of her steps.

Ilona was instantly aware of the tableau she presented, slumped in the open doorway with one leg doubled under her, the other trailing down the steps, skirts tumbled awry. She saw doubt in the woman’s blue eyes as well as reticence.

Immediately her professionalism asserted itself. “May I help you?”

The woman had light brown hair, though much of it was hidden beneath an enveloping shawl. She was young, her face a lovely oval, but strain printed her face with an unattractive tautness. “You’re the handreader?”

“I am.” Ilona smiled crookedly. “Though at this particular
moment, that may strike you as unlikely.” And it bloomed again in her mind, in her heart: she was able to read hands again, when for a while she could not. “I’m afraid I haven’t had time to arrange my table and cushions outside; would you like to come in?”

The woman glanced past her, looking inside the wagon, though with the sun gone the interior was murky. She nodded.

Ilona got up, realized one leg was nearly asleep, and set about finding flint and steel, a lantern containing wick and oil, the means to illuminate her tall wagon with its new canopy. She jerked the rumpled cot coverlet into order, then turned and gestured for the woman to enter. And as Ilona waited for her to seat herself on the cot, she reflected that the time spent with this young woman would do more to restore her sense of self than anything else. Smiling, happy, she sat down beside the woman and took the work-roughened hand into her own.

T
HE HECARI WARLORD sent four of his warriors to accompany Brodhi back to the settlement. They were as all Hecari males: dark-skinned, black-eyed, skulls shorn save for a black scalplock, faces painted indigo from mid-face down. Heavy ear-spools stretched their lobes. They carried warclubs and blowpipes and poisoned darts.

He discovered within a matter of moments prior to departing the Guildhall that either they spoke almost no Sancorran, or spoke it well and hid it. Brodhi’s grasp of Hecari was quite good but he saw no reason to indicate that. He said only what was necessary; otherwise, he rode in silence.

In the evenings, over dinner, the warriors spoke quietly among themselves but without excessive conversation. At night, two were always on guard duty while the other two slept. Brodhi let them tend that duty; it gave him opportunity to sleep the nights through.

As at last they left the Cardatha road, cutting northward
across open grasslands, the warriors’ alertness level increased tenfold. They exchanged a few terse words concerning the new route, but did not question Brodhi. They watched him, fixing black, fathomless stares on him. Days had passed since Brodhi journeyed this way headed to Cardatha, but his horse’s hoofprints were still visible. No rain, no wind, no one else upon his tracks. The world felt immense, untenanted.

When the smudge upon the horizon formed itself into forest, Brodhi noted the warriors exchanging glances. In his company they were neither voluble nor expressive men, but he was well aware that the appearance of the forest where none had been before, and their awareness of it, suggested the warriors had at one time ridden this way. Possibly they had been part of the culling party that decimated the settlement. They knew very well that they followed no familiar track, that the forest now stood where none had stood before. All maps, all knowledge of routes, were suddenly obsolete. To a nomadic people whose overriding goal was to conquer provinces, such things as disappearing roads and unexpected forests was of great concern. Alteration of the land was potential alteration of their warlord’s plans.

Brodhi smiled. The four men made deft, quick gestures to one another that conveyed precisely how concerned they were. He saw it in their eyes, in their faces, in their postures. Now and again their black eyes flicked in his direction, searching his face for telltale
signs of fear or superstition. Brodhi maintained a bland quietude that little by little added to their concern.

He took them up to the narrow opening, to the gateway through the curving arms of Alisanos. There he reined in. He waited as they did, watching their eyes shift from his face to the opening, to the close-grown forest on either side. It was the beast’s maw, and they knew it. The warlord had obviously told them what Brodhi had told
him
, and these men knew enough to take Alisanos very seriously.

They were not, Brodhi knew, men who would willingly ride into the deepwood simply because he suggested it, ignorant of consequences. They reined their horses into a single line, pointedly placing him at the front. Each right hand now held a blowpipe.

Brodhi said, in Sancorran lacking intonation or emphasis, “Don’t go into the forest. Devils abide there, and they will behead, dismember, and eat you.”

There was no reaction from the men save continuing suspicious stares.

In fluent Hecari, he repeated the warning. As they exchanged startled, frowning glances, hands tightening on blowpipes, Brodhi calmly lifted the reins from his horse’s neck and led the warriors single-file through the opening.

A DAY OUT from the settlement, Davyn halted the team for the evening, pulling off to the side
of the nearly impassable shortcut. Chores took up the twilight, actions so familiar he need not think about what he was doing: placing wheel chocks; unhitching the borrowed team and hobbling them, freeing them of the harness, brushing them down; laying a modest fire so he might have tea. As night spread around him, cloaking the grasslands, he ate dried meat and fruit, smoked his pipe, drank tea. It was the first time he had undertaken ordinary tasks since his family had been taken; all of his mind had been utterly focused on his loss, on the absence of those he loved, on ideas for their recovery. Desperation now was banished because of the hand-reader’s description of what she saw in his hand. Worry remained, as did anxiousness and a sense of urgency, but there was room now to breathe, space within his mind to find a small release from the crazed fear and lack of self-control that had driven him to the settlement, to accuse the Shoia guide of intentionally sending his family to the deepwood.

Ashamed, Davyn looked up at Mother Moon, gravid in the heavens. He asked her forgiveness for behaving so poorly, for making assumptions about a man’s character. He vowed to her that he would apologize to the guide, once his family was safe from Alisanos.

Nightsingers filled the evening with continuous sound. A breeze ruffled the grass. He heard the horses snorting as they grazed, blowing dirt out of nostrils. Fireflies flickered near the ground. With his spine against a wagon wheel, the hub softened by a folded
blanket, Davyn felt a measure of relief trickle into his soul. The world smelled of grass, of woodsmoke, of horses and tea and seasoned meat. The blanket behind him carried the scent of his children. Time, only time, and patience, were needed. Brodhi would find Torvic and Megritte, and then they would search for the others. And Rhuan, Rhuan was with Audrun. He would see her safe.

On the journey to the settlement, Davyn had slept out of doors with Audrun, leaving the wagon to the children. But this night he craved company as best he could get it. Instead of a sleeping mat spread upon the ground and absent of Audrun, he climbed into the wagon, found the family bedding, and settled down for the night upon the floorboards. In his mind, he could hear his children, recalling snatches of conversation, glimpses of their faces. For the first time since the storm, he went to sleep smiling.