Read Deepwood: Karavans # 2 for Free Online

is
wrong
with you, Brodhi?”
     
    As the fire blazed up, Brodhi closed his bleeding hand. “What is wrong with me, you ask? I am
trapped
, that is what’s wrong with me! They have put me hereand refuse to listen to any arguments I may muster, even in the wake of Alisanos going active. Rhuan they allow home, but me they do not.” He turned away awkwardly, took two long steps, then wheeled back to face her, repeating his words in a ferocious, bitter resentment.
“Rhuan they allow home, but me they do not.”
     
    “Brodhi—”
     
    He gestured sharply, overriding her. “There is your fire, Bethid. I spilled my blood for it—let it not go to waste.”
     
    She sat upright, wiping muddy hands against her leggings. “Wait, Brodhi.”
     
    But he listened no more to her. He turned on his heel and strode away, taking long, ungraceful steps, steps that carried him from the grove, from the fire, from a young woman who could not possibly comprehend what manner of complexities, ambitions, and needs ruled his life.
     
    She was
human
. She was not of Alisanos, to know what he was.
     
    ELLICA, TUMBLED INTO the black floodtide of Alisanos as it consumed the Sancorran grasslands, roused to consciousness incrementally. But when at last she blinked the world into focus again, she discovered she lay sprawled on her back beneath a brown-tinted sky, bathed by the heat of two disparate suns. It was difficult to think, as if her mindwere bruised. Her body felt heavy, too heavy; various portions of it ached, or stung as if scratched. Her spine in particular burned, and now that she was nominally awake, she slipped a hand beneath her back to discover the cause of the pain. She felt thick, blade-edged grass. Exploring fingers found that the grass appeared to have
grown through her tunic and into her skin
.
     
    Panicking, Ellica heaved herself upward, fell sideways, landed on hands and knees. The grass beneath her body had not been crushed or flattened by her weight, but grew in perfect, rigid verticality, edges glinting like shards of ice. The webbing between her spread fingers, where she braced herself, bled from multiple hair-thin slices.
     
    “Mother—” She lunged to her feet, holding her splayed, bleeding hands out in front of her, nearly fell again as a root or vine wrapped itself around an ankle, and remained upright only by virtue of grabbing at the striated, knotted trunk of the tree closest to her. But as she clung there, gasping in shock, the lower branches drooped down, down, and lower yet; uncoiling, unfurling, reaching for her, touching her scalp, her tangled hair, her wet shoulders, even her breasts, with a languid caress she found terrifying in its intimacy.
     
    Crying out, Ellica tore herself free of the branches, twisting away to break their grip. Three more stumbling steps brought her to a large knobbed boulder half buried in the ground; she leaped onto its crown asif it were a savior. No more blades of cutting grass, no more seemingly sentient tree branches imposing themselves upon her. She stood there atop the boulder panting noisily as she tried to catch her breath, bleeding hands fisted. Her body tingled unpleasantly in the aftermath of sheer panic; perspiration stung her armpits. The edges of her vision frayed.
     
    “O Mother…”
Ellica shut her eyes tightly, willing her breathing to steady, her body to cease its obstinate trembling.
Mother Mother Mother
… She clenched her teeth so neither outcry nor sob would escape. A farmstead contained its own occasional dangers, and her parents had taught her as she grew up to think through her actions, to sort out the appropriate response in a given situation, even if she were frightened. It was that fear, they warned her, that was the true danger.
     
    But nothing they had told her spoke of
Alisanos
.
     
    She knew. Even without opening her eyes, she knew. The grass had proved it. The tree. She was not in the human world any longer. The deepwood had claimed