Karavans (18 page)

Rhuan gritted his teeth against a wave of dizziness. “I intend to walk. To the karavan. And do my duty by Jorda, and by all the families—the
human
families—whose lives are mine to guard.” He took a breath. “And so long as Alisanos stays put a day or two longer—or goes active in a direction other than this one—I will be fine.”

“In the meantime,” Brodi moved swiftly as Rhuan wobbled and closed a hand firmly around his upper arm, “I will see to it that you retain
some
measure of decorum before the humans you are to protect, or all your fine posturing will be for naught.”

Rhuan considered protesting that he could walk perfectly well without Brodhi’s help, except that it was becoming increasingly clear that pride was not enough to keep him on his feet.

Ferize came up on his other side. She was far shorter and slighter than he, but stronger than either of them. And so he was propped upon trembling legs and escorted through the trees toward the firelight beyond.

“When does Jorda’s karavan leave?” Brodhi asked.

“Just after first light.”

Brodhi said a single markedly obscene word in the language of their home, weighted with a contempt long familiar
to Rhuan. He and his kin-in-kind had been no friendlier in childhood.

“I choose it,” Rhuan said in the same language. “
I
choose it. Not you.”

“Rhuan—” But Brodhi cut it off, shaking his head. “Jorda knows nothing?”

Rhuan squinted; even the distant light of dying coals hurt his eyes. “Of what we are? No, only what he should know of Shoia, with one as his guide.” Fingertips itched. He curled them tightly into his palms and swore. “Stop.
Stop
, Brodhi—”

“He’s ill,” Ferize said sharply, even as Brodhi began to speak.

With his last measure of strength, Rhuan managed to rid himself of Brodhi’s grip and turned away, to drop hastily to hands and knees as the meal he’d eaten earlier exited his belly. Decidedly
not
what he wished to do before Brodhi, but his body left him no choice.

When he had cleaned himself and found his feet again, Rhuan declared, “This is not fair.”

It startled a blurt of disbelieving laughter out of Brodhi even as he again steered Rhuan toward the karavan grounds. “Whenever has Alisanos
been
‘fair,’ that you could say it is not now?”

Rhuan decided to let the question be rhetorical, as he had no answer. He gestured awkwardly with the arm Ferize held. “The supply wagon is that way.”

“I’m not taking you to the supply wagon,” Brodhi said. “I’m taking you to the woman.”

“What woman?”

“The hand-reader.”

Rhuan nearly tripped. “Why?”

“Because you would do better to rest where someone may be certain you don’t choke to death in your sleep, and I have no intention of being that person.”

“Oh, of course not.” Rhuan attempted to pull his arms away from Brodhi and Ferize, and failed. “She may have someone with her.” Someone such as the woman named
Audrun, or worse: Audrun’s husband. Neither of them would place their trust in a guide who couldn’t walk without aid.
He
wouldn’t. “Brodhi, don’t.”

But Brodhi did. And as Ilona opened her wagon door at his call, dark curls falling to her waist, Rhuan saw in her face sudden startlement and concern.

“He’s drunk,” Brodhi declared, with an undertone of satisfaction apparent only to Rhuan and Ferize.

Rhuan opened his mouth to emphatically disagree, except that Ilona’s surprise and worry had already turned to wry resignation. Brodhi had purposely chosen the one explanation anyone would accept the night before departure. Anyone except Jorda, who might very well dismiss him on the spot, guide or no guide. Possibly
because
he was a guide.

“Put him on my cot,” Ilona directed. “I’ll bed down on the floor beside it.”

Brodhi pushed Rhuan up the steps; Ferize, who would not wish the hand-reader to see her clearly with the breath of Alisanos still upon her, remained at the bottom of the folding steps.

Ilona added, “Darmuth is with Jorda.”

No more explanation was required. It would be a bad idea to summon Darmuth in front of Jorda to tend his fellow guide if the karavan-master was to be kept ignorant of Rhuan’s state.

Brodhi dumped him unceremoniously onto Ilona’s cot and departed without a word. The only portion of relief Rhuan could find in the moment was that neither the farmsteader nor his wife was present to see it.

But Ilona was. Hitched up on a single elbow, he became aware of her standing next to the cot, examining him critically. “I’m not drunk.” He attempted casual confidence, but managed only childish defensiveness.

Ilona leaned over and placed a hand against his forehead, checking the heat of his body. Hair fell against his neck. “I know that.” She pushed him down against the bedclothes with a marked lack of consideration. “Did someone kill you again?”

“No!”

“Good. Then you still have several deaths left.” She took his beaded bag and set it aside, dropped a blanket over him. “Unless Jorda decides to levy one when he sees you tomorrow.”

D
ESPITE RHUAN’S PROTESTS that he was perfectly capable of sleeping safely in his own bed with no supervision, Ilona did not allow him to rise from the cot. She knew enough of Brodhi—
and
the arrogant Shoia’s low opinion of his friendlier kinsman—to realize that if he felt Rhuan should have an eye kept on him, an eye should be kept. It had briefly occurred to her to ask Brodhi why his eye couldn’t do the keeping, but the question died unasked when she saw the woman shrouded in the darkness at the bottom of the wagon steps.

Brodhi. With a woman.

But the courier was an intensely private man, and Ilona supposed he might well have a woman at every stop along his route with no one the wiser. She had simply never seen him with a woman here in the tent settlement, other than his fellow courier, Bethid. And Bethid, Ilona knew, preferred women in her bed.

Of the woman with Brodhi she caught a glimpse only, before she turned her attention to Rhuan. But that glimpse, with thanks to the tin lantern hanging over the door, had briefly shown Ilona black, nondescript clothing, black hair, eyes shielded by shadowed sockets. And a face so pale as to approach transluscence. When Ilona had looked for the woman again as Brodhi went down the
steps, she saw nothing at all but the man exiting, walking out into darkness.

And then she turned her attention back to her “patient.” Who did not in the least evoke patience in her, but rather resignation.

He wasn’t drunk, no matter what Brodhi said. She smelled no spirits on him. The salty tang of male sweat, yes; also an acrid trace of several substances she did not recognize, and the faintest whisper of scented oil.

She offered to brew him tea, but he was fading before she started the question and asleep before she finished. So Ilona brewed no tea. Instead, she pulled out her extra sleeping mat, cushion, and blankets, and prepared herself a bed on the floorboards. But she did not lie down at once, nor did she extinguish the lantern. She sat down upon her bedding, settled split skirts, and contemplated the man in her bed.

Rhuan
in her bed. Which, she reflected with no little measure of irony, was unmapped territory for them both.

She had met the Shoia while she grieved for a dead lover, a guide killed by a Hecari patrol as he rode ahead of the karavan. With Tansit’s death rites on her mind and his ruined body in Jorda’s wagon, nothing in her answered to the Shoia’s charm and immense appeal as it might have otherwise, another time, another place.

And then he had been murdered within half an hour of meeting her. For his bones, he told her later, when he was alive again; Kantic diviners paid very well for Shoia bones. But though Rhuan’s bones were whole, the heart warded within them had been stopped.

If temporarily.

By the time Ilona had settled her grief—Tansit, unlike the Shoia, remained dead—Rhuan had insinuated himself deeply into the workings of the karavan. Her awareness and body woke to him—Ilona thought it likely every woman’s body eventually woke to Rhuan—but he himself had never indicated any interest of a sexual nature in
her
. They were friends. It was a relationship in which she found great comfort and contentment, and she would not risk that by looking for more.

Ilona studied the nearest hand showing from under the blanket. Once, she had taken that hand in her own, intending to read it as the dead flesh cooled so she might learn what final rite would be appropriate for a man she didn’t know. She had nearly lost herself in that moment, in him, transfixed by something she could only describe in a single word:
maelstrom
. He was unknown, unnamed, utterly untamed.

And alive, after all.

And she never again, until now, had the opportunity to read his hand.

The Shoia slept deeply, even breaths lifting the light blanket in an unceasing, steady rhythm. Without the animation evident when awake, his face nonetheless retained the appeal of the exotic: narrow, straight nose; high, oblique cheekbones; clean arches of bone over the eyes; hollows beneath the cheeks—no incongruous dimples appearing as he slept; a well-defined jawline; and a flexible mouth that, even in repose, retained the promise of laughter.

Rhuan and Brodhi resembled one another in many ways, from a similarity of symmetry in the arrangement of their features to a shared height and weight to coppery hair worn long in ornate braids. But Brodhi never even smiled that Ilona had witnessed, let alone succumbed to the laughter that ran so freely in Rhuan.

She asked Rhuan once why Brodhi was so austere, avoiding a cruder term, but Rhuan merely shrugged and said his older kinsman had always lacked a sense of humor.

Yet Brodhi had brought Rhuan here to her wagon because of concern for his kinsman’s welfare.

Rhuan was patently not drunk, no matter what Brodhi said. Ill? Perhaps. But his color was good, his lungs were clear, and his brow lacked the heat of fever. A Shoia thing, perhaps, and thus kept private from everyone. But if that, why would Brodhi not tend him? Or Brodhi’s woman?

Meanwhile, Rhuan slept deeply enough that Ilona knew she probably could read his hand without his awareness, but to do so challenged the friendship, risked the trust
based on mutual respect and an acceptance uncomplicated by conditions and excuses.

Ilona sighed, smiled a wry smile, and began tugging a boot from her foot. Her senses were such, even in sleep, that she would wake if Rhuan’s breathing altered; there was no sense in staying up with him. She as much as he needed a good night’s sleep before departure.

BRODHI, SILENT AS always, slipped into the wheat-colored couriers’ common tent, lighted from within by a hanging pierced-tin lantern. Timmon and Alorn remained absent, but Bethid was present and in the midst of changing into a sleeping garment. With annoyance Brodhi recalled human courtesy required—or at least strongly suggested—that he call out before entering, but Ferize’s presence and dealing with Rhuan had put the memory out of his head.

He stopped short just inside, summoning gruff words of apology; but Bethid’s grin and beckoning gesture reminded him before he spoke that she didn’t worry about such transgressions.

Her boots stood neatly at the foot of her pallet, along with her gaiters, scroll-case, and personal items. Trousers, tunic, belt, and cloak dangled from a roof hook. Bethid herself sat cross-legged on the pallet, half-nude as she wriggled arms and stuck her head through respective openings in her baggy sleep tunic. She tugged it down, still grinning at him. He caught a glimpse of lean, sinewy torso and small, darknippled breasts in the dappled glow of the lantern.

“Do I care?” Bethid asked archly. Short-cropped fair hair stood up in a tousled thicket. “No. Neither should you. Though I’m not sure you
do
care to start with—you personally, that is, since I’ve never seen you show the slightest interest in women
or
men—in which case it really doesn’t matter, does it, what you see? Of me, that is. And I don’t care.”

Brodhi elected not to decipher that. He knelt and began rolling up his bedding.

Bethid tugged the tunic into place around slim hips, watching his actions with dawning surprise. “You’re leaving?”

Brodhi tied bedroll thongs, caught up his courier’s accoutrements and a beaded leather bag similar to Rhuan’s, then lifted down the blue mantle from its hook. The change of weight distribution upon the main pole set the lantern to swinging. Candlelight guttered. “I’m leaving.”

She blinked disbelief. “But why? You’re not heading out, are you? At night? I mean, leaving the settlement?”

He paused, genuinely curious, absently noting the speckled play of lantern light, shaped by piercings, swaying back and forth across her face. “Why should it matter to you?”

Her mouth jerked sideways. “I suppose it doesn’t. I just meant that it’s not exactly safe to travel at night, with Hecari patrols around. Even if what Mikal said is true and they haven’t been here for weeks. We may be sanctioned couriers, but that never stopped the Hecari from doing whatever they like.”