Karavans (32 page)

In a swift, unthinking move he thrust himself upright, shifting the table as his thighs bumped the edge. Only the meager space of its surface divided them: providing a small but virulent battlefield.

Ordinarily he would have ignored all that she had said, but something welled up inside, something demanded to be said. To be
explained
.

“We are observers, Bethid. Oath-bound observers intended to witness incidents like this, and then to carry the news and messages unfettered by personal opinion.”

“Yes, but—”

“If we allow our own emotions to unseat the neutrality of our task, then we are useless. We become nothing more than gossip-mongers. And then what we say can never be trusted as impartial, and our offices will no longer be necessary …nor will they keep us safe from the Hecari.”

“Brodhi—”

“What would you have us be, Bethid? Couriers left alive to carry word—and survive to do so again—or bodies who may well be counted a portion of the one in ten during decimation?”

She flung out one hand, pale against the dimness. “Look outside, Brodhi! Men, women, and children—
children
— who were counted out like so many kernels of corn!”

“Yes,” he said sharply. “
Exactly
like kernels of corn … because when seed corn is planted, it is expected that some will be lost. Four kernels planted per hollow, Bethid. If only one of four kernels matures into a cornstalk, a farmsteader counts himself fortunate.”

She shook her head, tears of angry disappointment filling her eyes. “I don’t understand you. I’ve tried …I’ve excused your rudeness, forgiven your bad temper—”

He cut her off. “Excuse nothing of me. Forgive nothing
in
me. I am what I am, and it matters not at all what others may think of me.”

She opened her mouth, closed it. Studied his face a moment, then began again. Softly, at first. Slowly, at first. “You mean it doesn’t matter what
humans
think of you. Well, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that at all. I think you
do
care, but for some twisted reason you want to keep us—to keep humans—at a distance. To know nothing about you, to
care
nothing about you …I just don’t know why.” She shook her head. “And maybe I never will.”

“It isn’t for you
to
know—”

Bethid raised her voice over his. “Maybe it’s just that you’re Shoia. Maybe it’s that you have only one life left, and you fear to lose it, to risk yourself. Maybe it’s that you can’t bear to see humans die because it reminds you that you’ve only
got
that one death left …only one, the way all of
us
have only one.” Her chin rose. “Rhuan was at the karavan. Had he not been, had another Shoia not been there, would you have warned them at all?”

Brodhi, startled, laughed. “If you think I predicate decisions on what becomes of Rhuan because he’s another Shoia—”

“He’s your kinsman.”

“—
or
that he’s my kinsman, then you’re quite correct: You don’t understand me. Not in the least.”

She looked exhausted in the lantern light, worn by the events of the day and the requirements of the aftermath. But he thought perhaps something he had said, something he had said or done—or something
not
done—now deepened the shadows beneath her eyes.

Bethid picked up her bucket. He watched her turn away, watched her walk out of the tent with a spine so stiff it verged on fracturing. She was a small, slight woman, almost delicate in the way she was made, but he had on many occasions seen her display a wiry strength and enviable stamina, as well as a stubborn will to see through to completion what she set out to do.

Tonight she would put out fires and bury the dead.

Rhuan would do it
.

Brodhi knew it in an unexpected flash of insight, an unanticipated thought that annoyed him: Rhuan, who in-
explicably cared about humans, would work side by side with Bethid, or Mikal, or even a stranger. He wouldn’t care about the oath a courier swore when he joined the service. He wouldn’t care about whatever tests lay before him, what traps he might discover along the road. To Rhuan, it was the
journey
, not the destination, not the end result, that was most important.

Brodhi sat down. He picked up the tankard and lifted it to his lips. “He’ll fail,” he said aloud into the lantern light.

And again, “He’ll fail.”

He drank. But the ale tasted bitter.

RHUAN SAW ILONA recoil and realized she’d seen the red flicker in his eyes. He damned himself for losing self-control, for betraying how quickly his anger, a cold and dangerous anger, could rise. It was something he and Brodhi fought, each day, apart from one another and with differing methods—and vastly different temperaments—but shared was one abiding element: they were cursed with the wilding blood of their sires.

With effort he buried that anger, plunged the kindling restlessness deep, and deeper yet; he would not become proxy for that which he detested in his father and in Brodhi’s, who were brothers. Kin-in-kind. A much closer bond, a far more demanding and difficult bond than the one humans called
family
.

He sat back and raised his hands, showing her his palms in a gesture of peace. To her it would mean more than to others; she might read those palms, albeit neither was close enough for her to see in detail, to touch. And in fact the gesture had the effect Rhuan desired. Ilona relaxed, tension leaving the rigid line of her shoulders. She found one of her carved hair sticks on the floorboards, then coiled a haphazard rope of hair onto the back of her head and anchored it with the stick. She
opened her mouth to say something, then recalled she had no voice.

Rhuan grinned at the expression of annoyance that crossed her face. “Oh, but we’ll have heretofore unknown peace for as long as this lasts.”

She scowled.

He kept his tone light, though the words were deadly serious. “Are you all right?”

The scowl didn’t dissipate, but she nodded. Then nodded again. She mouthed a word he thought was
bruises
.

“Are you sure?”

Ilona nodded again, more vehemently. Her expression made it clear she in no way wanted the subject to be debated. A sharp, curt hand gesture underscored it.

Rhuan put all of the light-heartedness he could muster into his voice; he wanted nothing in his eyes to startle her again. “Well, you do know he’ll have to be killed.”

She went still. Immeasurably still. Then shook her head.

Rhuan found and picked up the other hair stick shed during the struggle. “Oh, I do think so—here, bow your head.”

Instead, Ilona snatched the stick from him and drove it through the wiry coil of hair so hard he winced. Once more she shook her head. A gesture indicated her torn skirt, followed by a hands-up motion coupled with a shrug that suggested nothing so serious had happened that should dictate death as a means of revenge or reparation.

He grinned at her. “I rather approve of your current predicament. It means I’ll win all the arguments.”

She reached out and caught his wrist. Her grip was firm. With the other hand she mimed a knife being drawn across her throat, then shook her head vehemently. She mouthed a word he interpreted as
promise
.

“I don’t believe I can make that promise.” He lifted her hand from his wrist. “You’ll have to excuse me. I have business to attend to.”

As he rose, she slapped the flat of her hand against the
plank floor to gain his attention once more. Again she shook her head.

“Oh, not now,” he assured her. “I mean I’m going to repair your steps.”

And without using any of them, he leaped lightly down from the wagon.

GILLAN AND ELLICA, as told, walked up the low, rumpled rise to the grove of trees crowning the hilltop along the horizon. Before them, silhouetted against the sunset, ran Torvic and Megritte, playing some sort of game wherein Torvic was a hero rescuing a maiden— Megritte, of course—from the horrible Hecari. Gillan reflected that while their mam might well suggest another game entirely, he found it normal that the youngest could so quickly forget the brutal and sudden deaths they all of them had witnessed. He wished
he
could. But the images were jumbled, broken into innumerable fragments so diffuse that he couldn’t possibly reassemble them in the proper order. The guide had been so fast, so quick with his throwing knives …and the fact that one of the blades had ended up in his father’s shoulder, though an undesirable result, did not in the least lessen Gillan’s admiration for the guide’s prowess. Five Hecari killed within a matter of moments.

Well, and the guide himself. But he hadn’t
remained
dead.

“Mam said he wasn’t breathing,” Gillan commented as they topped the hill. The grove of trees formed a spreading canopy over them, muffling the cries of Torvic and Megritte.

“Who wasn’t breathing?” Ellica asked.

“The guide. He said he was going to die, but it wouldn’t be for good. And Mam said he wasn’t breathing, that his heart didn’t beat.”

Ellica stooped to pick up a forked branch from the ground beneath the nearest tree; her donation toward fuel
for the cookfire. Pale strands of hair, coming loose from their ties, fell forward over her shoulders to mask her face. “You know what Da will say.”

That puzzled him. “About the guide?”

“No, not about the guide.” She bent to gather up another tree branch. “He will say we should go on. That we can’t go back to the settlement.” She straightened. “You saw the look on Mam’s face when the karavan-master said he was turning back.”

Gillan scooped up a heavier branch and whacked it against the nearest tree, knocking dry, curling bark off the smooth inner wood of the deadfall, the bone of the branch. He was aware of an uncomfortable fluttering of apprehension in his belly.

“We’ll go on by ourselves,” Ellica continued. She didn’t look at him, but her profile, silhouetted against the setting sun, seemed sharp as cut tin. “It doesn’t matter to Da what the guide said about Alisanos. Mam just wants to be in Atalanda when the baby comes.”

Two trees away, Torvic mimed slashing the throat of an invisible Hecari warrior. Megritte shrilly crowed her approval.

“Because of what all the diviners told her,” Gillan said, studying the branch in his hands.

“And so we’ll go on by ourselves, and there won’t be anyone there to save us if
more
Hecari show up.” She turned her strained face to him, blue eyes shadowed with worry. “We should go back. Like all the others. Go back to that settlement, and wait. But we won’t.”

Gillan was certain his sister was correct. It wasn’t that Da was stubborn, not stubborn for no reason; who could argue with fourteen—no, fifteen diviners; his da and mam had visited the karavan hand-reader—when
all of them
said the baby had to be born in Atalanda?

Then inspiration lurched out of the burgeoning twilight and into his mouth. “What if he came with us?” When he saw Ellica’s blank look, he clarified. “The guide. Everyone’s going back to the settlement. There will be no karavans to guide.”

She shrugged.

“Don’t you see?” Gillan continued. “There won’t be any guiding jobs.”

Ellica’s attention sharpened as her mind jumped ahead to what he meant. “Unless he guided us.”

“Yes!” He nodded enthusiastically. “He can guide us to Atalanda, and protect us from Hecari. Or anything else.”

“He did die,” Ellica reminded him, collecting more deadfall branches. “It just didn’t happen until all the Hecari were dead. If they’d killed him sooner, we might be dead.”

It was not, Gillan felt, a convincing argument. Not when the guide had already demonstrated in a most dramatic way that he didn’t remain dead. “Given a choice between going on alone, or going in the company of a Shoia who can not only kill five Hecari warriors in less than the count of ten, but come back to life if he himself is killed, which would you pick?”

Ellica grimaced. Her expression was solemn as she nodded slow agreement.

“Say after dinner that you want to go for a walk,” Gillan suggested. “And I’ll come with you to make sure you’ll be safe. We’ll go find the guide. Da and Mam don’t even have to know.”