Karavans Read Online Free PDF Page B

that answerherself in childhood. “Because we know nothing of this place, or the people in it.”
    “Bad people?” Megritte asked.
    Torvic, being Torvic, brightened perceptibly. “Is there danger?”
    “Might be,” Gillan observed, affecting his father’s drawl.
    Audrun smiled at him, marking how he grew more like Davyn each day, gaining height and width of shoulders even as his voice broke. But she directed her words to Torvic, offering a lesson, though she doubted he would learn it. Not today, not here and now. “But there is also the chance of getting lost. Can you count all those tents? Can you see from one end to the other? Could you find your way along all the twisted pathways? Would you know how to find the wagon if you got lost?”
    “I’d ask,” Torvic answered promptly.
    “Ask who?” Ellica was definitely peevish. “We’re strangers here, Torvic. No one knows us. They don’t even know Da or Mam. Who could you ask that would know?”
    Torvic put his chin up. “Diviners,” he declared. “They know everything.”
    Audrun touched her belly, glancing at the nearest roof-rib with its dangling thong of colored beads and bone-carved charms. They had not seen a diviner in all the weeks on the road. Davyn would make sure the spells were renewed for the wagon and oxen before they left, and the omens read, but she would like to find a moonmother who could tell her whether the child was healthy and whole.
    And whether it would live. Whether all or any of them would live, on the road winding along the dangerous edges of the deepwood.
    Audrun shivered again. They were near the borderlands, Davyn said. Alisanos. Too near, she believed. She felt it in her bones.
    “Diviners know everything,” Megritte echoed.
    “Then
I
want to know,” Ellica challenged, “who I’m going to marry.”
    Torvic made a sound of desperate derision. In that, Gillan joined him.
    Audrun blessed their innocence, that the most important thing in their lives just now had nothing whatsoever to do with a journey along a road so close to Alisanos, where devils and demons lived.
    IN HIS VIOLATED tent, the Kantic priest and his female client gaped at the disheveled man standing before them whose trembling, outthrust arms so clearly beseeched their aid. Lavetta, swearing by a god she supposedly no longer worshipped with her conversion to the Kantica, leaped up clumsily, overturning Dardannus’ table in her attempt to escape. The diviner heard the faint clang of copper bowl against upended table leg and the anguished protest rising from his own throat as the bone fragments tumbled in an ivory shower to the carpeted floor. He rolled from his bench, wincing as a knee pressed against a knucklebone; he found it, gathered it up, began collecting the others with immense care, as if they were precious gems.
    For the Kantica, they
were.
    “Please—send me home!” The stranger’s voice, issuing from blackened lips and a spittle-fouled beard, was a harsh, rasping wail.
    With more agility than Dardannus expected of her, heavyset Lavetta bent, ripped one sidewall from the ground, wholly heedless of the damage she did to hangings, spell-charms, and artifacts—many of which came down in a tangled disarray of string and beads, cascades of mirrors, wood, and wire—and ducked under it, shrieking about Shoia bones and moonsick men.
    Furious, Dardannus glared up from his costly fragments long enough to mark the stranger’s greasy, matted hair and beard, the blood-rimmed eyes, the soiled clothing. The man
reeked
of ordure. And of something else, something more … alien.
    Anxious to recapture his priestly dignity and aplomb, Dardannus summoned his most deep and dramatic tones.“Would that I could, I’d send you this moment to Alisanos itself!”
    With a garbled outcry the stranger stumbled forward, fell to his knees before the overturned table. He was shuddering as if beset by palsy, hands reaching out again toward Dardannus in supplication.