Deepwood: Karavans # 2 (7 page)

For a moment he watched, smiling, relieved beyond measure, until he became aware of a hard, fixed stare, the glare Audrun bestowed upon him over the head of the nursing infant.

Still short of breath, it took him a moment to sort out her expression. But he arrived at laggard realization, nodded understanding and waved an apology, then fell over onto his back as he continued to suck in air, staring fixedly overhead at the silvery canopy of interlocked branches. It was all the privacy he could give her, in the aftermath of their flight.

G
ILLAN ROUSED TO crushing heat. A miasma of dampness, of clammy sulfur stench, bathed his body, filled his nose. He found himself on his back. He lifted a hand to cover his mouth and nose, and coughed. His lungs felt thick, laden with weight. Now that he had begun, he could not stop coughing.

He rolled onto his left side, levering himself up onto an elbow as his lungs continued to spasm violently. His world was filled with heat, humidity, steam, and clinging sulfur. His eyes, even closed, ran with tears. His skin itched. His chest ached. He began to bring up a sticky substance, and spat it out twice, thrice, until a steady, heavy coughing once again overtook him.

From close by, something exploded with a wet, phlegmy sound. A spattering of burning liquid rained onto Gillan, spotting his flesh. He cried out, lurched to his hands and knees, and tried to see through eyes awash with stinging tears. His skin was freckled with pain, with droplets that burned worse than the hot
rain that had swept over him in the grasslands of Sancorra. With the pain came a rolling wave of sulfur, a thick stench that threatened to choke off his lungs entirely.

Desperate, Gillan thrust himself upward, into a staggering, lurching run. He rubbed tears from his eyes, caught a glimpse of steam cloaking the ground, rising in plumes from blackened mounds. The ground beneath his boots felt crusty, hot, frighteningly fragile. It trembled as he ran, as he wiped at his eyes, waved at steam, coughed unremittingly.

And then his right foot broke through the crust. His leg plunged through into a liquid heat that swallowed him to the knee. In agony, Gillan screamed.

In reply came a howling.

THERE WASN’T ENOUGH room for two men as large as Jorda and Mikal in the hand-reader’s tall wagon. Mikal remained outside as Bethid, answering Jorda’s request, agreed to help him set Ilona’s arm. She could tell the karavan-master was worried about his hand-reader. She was neither unconscious nor awake, but caught somewhere in between, as if fevered. And yet there was no heat in her flesh. She was ashen beneath the smears of dust, dark circles beneath her eyes.

“She’ll choke if she drinks now,” Jorda muttered, setting aside the bottle of spirits Mikal had found
them. “Even though she’s not truly conscious, we need to tend this now. If she wakes up all the way, I’ll give her spirits then and hope she can sleep.”

Bethid knelt next to him. “What shall I do?”

What gusted from Jorda’s mouth was only half a laugh. “Odd as it sounds, I wish you to lie across her body. On the diagonal. Try to keep her legs and right shoulder pinned.”

“
Lie
on her? Why not just hold her legs down?”

“Because that leaves her torso free to move. I need her kept still, Beth. Can you do this?”

Bethid’s brows arched in speculation. “Well, I have ridden difficult horses. I suppose this is no different.”

“Have any of them thrown you?”

“Not since I was a child,” she replied tartly. “I’m a courier, remember?” She paused a moment, moderating her tone. “I have
fallen
off, but that’s not the same.”

Jorda grinned briefly, measuring the sticks Mikal had brought against the length of Ilona’s forearm. “So it is. Well, then, keep aboard however you may. But it should be done quickly; the Mother willing, the bone hasn’t broken the skin. If I can shift it back into alignment and bind it in place, she should heal well enough.” He nodded at Bethid. “Go ahead.”

Bethid crawled up over Ilona, then lowered herself across the hand-reader’s body. Most of her weight was distributed from knees to right shoulder. Bethid laughed softly.

“What is it?” Jorda asked, tearing strips of cloth for bandages.

“Well, perhaps we shouldn’t tell her precisely how this was accomplished. I’m not sure she would appreciate knowing I
enjoyed
it—or that you suggested it!”

His eyes flicked to hers, puzzled, then cleared as he recalled what was no secret among those who knew her: Bethid preferred women, not men. His teeth flashed briefly. “Better than Mikal or me, Beth. She’d smother.” He wrapped his big left hand around Ilona’s elbow, then closed the fingers of his right one over her wrist. “All right…” He pulled sharply, eliciting a cry of pain from Ilona. Bethid felt the lurch of the body beneath her, the reflexive attempt to escape. “There,” Jorda said. “Stay there, Beth. Let me splint this arm, and then you can get off.”

Bethid grinned, then sighed melodramatically as the body beneath her writhed. “I could but wish …”

“She’s a woman for men, you do realize.”

“That’s why I said
wish
,” Bethid retorted dryly. “She’s with Rhuan, isn’t she?”

“She says no …” With deft, practiced hands, Jorda cross-wrapped the splinted arm from wrist to elbow, tying off knots. “I thought so, too. But I don’t interfere in the personal lives of my diviners. All right—climb off.”

Bethid levered herself up and crawled backward, taking care not to plant a knee or elbow in flesh instead of cot bedding. “He’s a fool if he’s not interested.”

Jorda was cradling and lifting Ilona’s head again, holding the bottle of spirits to her lips. “Their business,”
he said briefly, “—and perhaps it’s her not interested in him.”

“
I
may not be interested in him, but from what I hear, they rather fall at his feet. One might think—”

“One might,” Jorda said repressively, closing the topic. Then, “There, ’Lona, drink, if you please. It will do you good.”

Bethid stood beside the cot, watching the diviner’s ineffective attempts to escape Jorda’s imprisoning palm and the trickle of spirits he poured into her mouth. As a courier, she spent more time on the road than in the settlements, but she had inhabited this one often enough to know those who came and went, those who visited Mikal’s ale-tent when they were present in the tent village. Ilona usually appeared there with Jorda, or with Branca and Melior, and now and then alone, when they returned from a journey. She and Ilona usually exchanged casual smiles of greeting, but that was the extent of their relationship. Ilona was a hand-reader; Bethid consulted rune-readers.

She glanced uneasily out the wagon door. Well, she would if any rune-readers had survived the storm.

That prompted memory, and a frown. “Brodhi said something …”

“The Shoia?”

“He found me as I was making the tea. He said Alisanos had moved. That it’s only a half-mile from here.” Now Jorda looked at her, green eyes startled. “I know,” she said grimly. “If that’s true, we may be in danger yet. What if it moves again?”

“Mother,” Jorda muttered, glancing down at Ilona. Then he met Bethid’s eyes once more. “I’ll stay with her for now. Go ahead and look for your friends.”

Bethid shot a glance at the hand-reader. The spirits had indeed brought sleep; her breathing was deep and slow. Bethid nodded and made her way out of the wagon.
Mother of Moons, let me find Timmon and Alorn
. She amended that immediately, fearing the Mother might take it literally.
Let me find them alive and well!

HE WALKED ON. And on. Davyn had no sense of how far he had initially gone in the midst of the storm, directed by the Shoia guide, and his return to the wagon had been so fraught with worry and fear that he had not marked the distance. Now every step seemed to carry him farther and farther, with no result.

Beneath the warmth of the sun, his clothing had dried. Mud-stained and sand-crusted homespun tunic and trews were stiff, rubbing against his flesh as he moved. Leather boots remained damp, but mud still clung because the ground beneath his feet was soaked, puddled in places. Beaten prairie grass created a carpet of sorts to keep him from sinking in, but the going remained difficult. The top of his head was heated by the sun, while the wet, squishy footing kept his feet cold.

The day now was fine. The clear, cloudless sky was a brilliant blue, and the sun turned a bright, benevolent
face to the world. But a look at the earth beneath told the tale: in addition to mud, puddles, and flattened grass, the prairie was pocked with lightning-dug divots like thousands of vermin holes, marked by the remains of explosions of earth, clods scattered in all directions. Some of the holes were as deep as Davyn’s forearms were long. But the lightning had been amazingly precise, like a thin and tensile knife blade. And despite the overriding scent of mud and torn grass, Davyn smelled the astringency of power, the aftermath of extreme heat. The world, the air, the earth, had been selectively burned by capricious, malevolent lightning.

Hunger nagged. Davyn had no idea how long it had been since he had last eaten. The storm had blotted out all sense of time as well as of direction, stealing the sun from its path across the sky. He could not say if was the same the day, or another. But he refused to stop walking. From a drawstring bag attached to his belt, he took dried, salted meat. It was tough enough to threaten the seating of his teeth in his jaw, but it gave him something to do, something to mitigate the fear, the anxiety, that underscored every moment. His heart was filled with both.

He was alone upon the earth. The world felt larger, impossibly endless, less like a home than a challenge, akin to an enemy. The world had stolen his family, scattered those he loved. Davyn knew very well that no matter his efforts, it was possible he would find none of them. His children. His wife. Taken from him.

“No.” He said it around the hard curl of dried meat
in his mouth. “The Mother of Moons is not so heartless.”

But Alisanos … Alisanos was. And the guide had warned him: a
sentient
world, he’d said; a world that moved, that took, that changed the humans it swallowed. There was guilt in Davyn’s soul, hag-riding him. But also an awareness that if Alisanos were truly so sentient, able to uproot itself and move at will, it was entirely possible nothing could have prevented the scattering, the loss, the winnowing of his family.

Except perhaps to have been in Atalanda province.

Davyn stopped dead. Around him spread the beaten grasslands, the lightning-scarred earth, the splattering of mud blasted up from the ground. Above him burned the sun. And within him, twisting like a knife, was the knowledge, the fear, that he was alone.

“Mother,” he begged, tears threatening, “I beg you, let me find them. All of them.” And he named them: the wife, and the children, each, so the Mother would know whom he sought.

THE INFANT, SATED, slept, cradled on her back in her mother’s cross-legged lap. Having removed her muslin underskirt, Audrun set about making the child a few clouts she could wear against the anticipated end result of nursing. Already the girl had dampened Rhuan’s donated leather tunic. Audrun untied it, shook it out one-handed, spread it across
the ground. She didn’t dare look at the guide. Next she tore her underskirt into several lengths of cloth that would approximate clouts. Her muslin smallclothes had taken as much of a beating as the homespun tunic and skirts, full of holes, rents, tatters, and snags. But it was better than carrying a naked baby in a man’s ornamented leather tunic.