Karavans by Jennifer Roberson Page A

nor murderer, seemed to have important things to tell them. But Ellica had pitched her fit—yet another in a string of them since they’d left the farmstead—and now he was missing out on the interesting things.
    “Ellica.
Ell
ica.” He caught her sleeved arm and swung her around. “Will you
stop
? What is wrong with you?”
    Her blond hair had come loose from its binding, straggling down over narrow shoulders. She was not at that moment particularly attractive, with tear-streaked face and reddened eyes. He knew her courses had begun the year before, and her breasts had begun to grow a number of months earlier. She was, most days, inordinately proud of her burgeoning womanhood, but just now she lookedthin and blotched and wretched in her dull gray tunic and skirts.
    Gillan released her. “You’d best come back before Da himself comes after you.”
    She scrubbed tears away with both hands. “I can’t go back. I don’t
want
to go back. I don’t want to have anything to do with this going overmountain. I just want to go home!”
    “But there’s no home
there
,” Gillan declared in frustration; he had told her this more times than he could count. “They burned it down, Elli. You saw what was left, when we passed by on the road. The Hecari destroyed everything. Nothing’s left!”
    “We could rebuild.” Abruptly fresh tears welled up into astonishly blue eyes. “Adric is there.”
    “Adric!” It shocked him. “This is about
Adric?
” Gillan stared at her, suspicions forming. “Were you and he—”
    Tears spilled over.
    A chill descended upon him. “Elli—you’re not with child, are you?”
    Her mouth fell open. “No! We never did
that
. We just—we just …” She was clearly at a loss, twining fingers together nervously as color rose in her face. “We talked, mostly. Sometimes he kissed me. But we knew it was meant, Gillan. It was! Just as it was meant for Mam and Da.
She
was fifteen when she and Da got married.”
    It remained incomprehensible to Gillan. “Adric’s gone, Elli. He went to join the armies.”
    “But when he comes back,” she said in desperation, “
we’ll
be gone! How will he find me?”
    Gillan opened his mouth to tell her Adric might not be coming back at all; he had overhead Da telling Mam that most men who were not trained soldiers, for all they loved their land, didn’t have the same chances for survival as true soldiers did. It had shocked him to hear that, for he and Adric had pledged to meet under the oak tree on the border between their neighboring farms when the war was over; of
course
Adric would be there. But then the Hecari had overrun their lands, the oak tree had been choppeddown for wood, and the farmsteads burned. Gillan, seeing the devastation, realized Da was right: Adric indeed might not be coming home.
    But Gillan had told no one his fears. Not speaking them aloud meant they might not come true.
    He discovered now he could say none of them to Ellica, either. He was too stunned to learn his sister and best friend had become so close without his awareness.
    “If I go back,” she said, “Adric can find me.”
    “Nothing’s there, Elli.”
    “I would be there.”
    “But you can’t go back there, not by yourself! How would you live?”
    She opened her mouth to reply, but someone answered for her. “
I’ll
tell you how she can live. Just let me whisper it in your ear, sweetling!”
    Gillan spun around on the packed, narrow footpath between tents even as Ellica gasped and recoiled, catching herself against the guy ropes of the nearest tent. He was aware of the closeness of the man, his unsteadiness, and the reek of liquor. Behind him, Ellica was crying again.
    “Hassic!” A second voice, pitched to command, cut across the footpath. “Go on your way, Hassic. Sleep it off.”
    It was a woman, Gillan saw in his first startled glance. In fading light and little moon, the muted glow of tent lanterns, he had the impression of smallness, of wiriness, of