Luck Of The Wheels

'Muffled, perhaps, is a better word. It is a thing we Jore can do for Humans. A kind of healing, for those whose emotions threaten to overwhelm them. Sometimes a Human feels so intensely that he retreats too far from himself, and ca

Ki shook her head. She lifted her eyes to Dellin. 'What will you do now?'

'Take the boy to Villena with me. Start the training that should have begun when he was a baby. I will have to keep him insulated from others at first, until he learns to shield himself, but after that, he will be fine. I hope.' His strange eyes seemed to pin her confusion down like it was a wriggling insect. 'What will you do?'

'I don't know.' Ki cleared her throat, made a firm decision not to sound so feeble. 'Find my wagon and team and reclaim it. I can't make a living without it. Go back north, I suppose, where I understand the folk and know the roads. Start again.'

'You're lying to yourself. You have no desire to do that.'

She felt her eyes go flat, knew their green had gone grey. 'Nevertheless,' she said quietly.

'What about the man? This Vandien?' She stared at him, feeling plundered. He read her again. 'What I know comes from Gotheris; the poisons I had to bleed from him before I could induce him to sleep. He was full of your images of this man, of your sharings. You have a bond to Vandien, one not easily severed. If he bleeds, you feel the pain, and he takes joy in your triumphs. You will abandon him?'

She touched her tongue to the laceration inside her cheek. Pain. When she spoke, she formed the words carefully. 'He has abandoned me. He's dead.'

Dellin stared at her long. She felt him probing her feelings. I should feel invaded, she thought to herself. I should probably feel outraged and angry. But she could not summon the energy to feel anything. So she stood quietly before his penetrating gaze, which fixed not on her, but on somewhere infinitely beyond her. His touch on her mind was light and oddly soothing, reminding her of Vandien stroking her hair. Vandien. For a second she felt her grief, vibrating like the plucked wire of a harp. Vandien. Echoing off into the distance.

'No.' Dellin spoke conversationally. 'He's not dead.'

Ki felt no patience with his attempt to falsely comfort her. 'I saw the body,' she said in a cold voice. 'Look. This was his.' And from her pocket she drew the singed cuff with the familiar button.

Stepping to her, he took it lightly from her hand. She felt a part of herself go with it. 'Yes. Yes, this was his, his imprint is upon it. But why do you say he is dead?' Dellin fixed her with one of his odd stares. Abruptly his eyes narrowed. 'I suppose it can be so, then.' He spoke softly to himself, almost meditatively. 'It is a thing I have never completely believed before, but now I must. As intensely as you Humans feel, as strongly as you bond, out of sight is still out of awareness. This, then, is what his mother feared. This ... severance from her child. This gap.'

His eyes left Ki, strayed to Gotheris sleeping still. Dellin lifted his head, stared across the plains. Moments dripped away. Ki was still, content to watch him stare. She felt heavy, filled with the weariness that usually came only from hours of physical labor. Too tired to sleep, she told herself, but needing the stillness to let the body slowly relax. She leaned against the spindly tree that sheltered Goat, her eyes starting to droop. And jerked alert as she felt Dellin's mind brush hers.

'Not even Brin,' he said aloud, sadly. 'For all his Jore blood, Brin has no more awareness of his child than the mother does. I can find no thread between them. To them, Gotheris is as absent as the dead.' He met her eyes again. The smile that touched his face now was pitying.

'He's alive,' he told her. When Ki only stared, he repeated himself. 'He's alive. Vandien. Tired and ill and anxious, but alive. I tested the bond that links you. He's alive.'

Ki sat down. For a long time she said and thought nothing. Her mouth was slightly ajar, and as she breathed she tasted the day upon her tongue. So. Another breath. And so. Vandien was alive. Did she dare to believe it? Something surged within her, and she knew she didn't dare to disbelieve it. He was alive. 'And so am I,' she said, and felt the wonder of it. A desire to continue being alive reawakened and jolted through her.

'We have to get out of here,' she told Dellin suddenly. 'Goat... felt... that the people holding us were going to kill us. How did he put it? That they thought of us as soon-to-be-dead people.'

There was a slight smile on Dellin's face. 'Isn't that how you were thinking of yourself?' Ki shrugged. 'Perhaps. But not anymore. And I don't want to stay around here to find how they feel about it. We have to get Goat out of here, especially. He seemed to be the main object of their hate.' She narrowed her eyes at Dellin, considering him. 'Can you use this bond I have with Vandien to help me find him?'

Dellin laughed softly. 'It is not like a piece of string stretched between you, with him at the other end. It is more like a dream you share, and I can feel that he is still dreaming his part of it. More than that I ca

Ki shook her head slowly. 'Days?' she asked, seizing the only part she could grasp.

'By my estimate, about two.'

'How far is Tekum from here?'

He shrugged. 'For my mule and I, perhaps a day.'

Ki nodded. 'They'll have taken Vandien there. And maybe my team and wagon. You'll come with me?'

'Of course.' Dellin looked surprised that she would ask. 'You still owe the boy the rest of the trip to Villena.' His eyes grew troubled. And he must be shown what the wrong use of his Jore blood can lead to.'

FIFTEEN

Voices. Talking right by him, pushing their sounds up against him. Shouting in his ears. He tried to turn away from them, but found he couldn't move. He was bound. No. Not bound. But every part of his body was too heavy to move. Just keeping his eyelids up was difficult enough. He tried to find himself in space and time, could not. He caught at the tattered edges of memories that unraveled beneath his scrutiny. Kellich falling, the ring of Brurjans closing on him, Goat's yellow teeth bared in terror ... he could not put them into any sort of order, and the attempt to do so was making him dizzy and sick.

'You didn't give him enough,' someone whispered.

'Shut up. I know what I'm doing.' An angry woman.

'Do you? Or are you so hungry for revenge that you have lost sight of our true purpose?' This voice was older than the other two, mature and in command. Vandien instinctively turned his eyes toward it.

'He's awake.' The man had a beard that fringed his jaw, a nose like a hawk's beak and dark eyes. He moved, coming closer, and Vandien found it hard to keep his eyes focused on him. He crouched by Vandien, and he felt the man's dry hands touch his face. The world seemed to suddenly flop over as Vandien got his true bearings. He was lying on his belly, cheek to a coarse pillow. The man's fingers probed the back of Vandien's head, pressing as if to check for a weakness in his skull. Vandien winced,spun away from the world for a long moment, and then came back to it, feeling like a swimmer surfacing to air and light. They were talking again.

'... not enough time. It was a clear signal to the Duke that Tekum is not as quiet as he has been led to believe. Killing the Brurjans cost us three men and laid up five others. For what? For a half-dead stranger we can't put any trust in. It was a mistake.'