Read Online The Wild Road by Jennifer Roberson - Free Book Online

red-tinged dirt. Here were her children, trapped as she was, amid beings she had never imagined even in her dreams. Primaries. Firsts. Gods, they called themselves.
    Audrun called them captors.
    My poor children  . . . Yet looking at them one by one, making note of tattered and soiled clothing, fair hair tangled, and a gaunt tautness in their faces, she knew they mirrored her own appearance, her own unspoken desperation. She was exhausted, hungry, thirsty, and had given accelerated birth not long before. Her overused body was beset by trembling. Everything ached. Her skin, hosting uncounted scrapes and scratches, burned. She wanted to collapse into a bed and sleep for weeks. It was what her body needed, but her mind, she knew, would be too busy.
    Audrun’s mouth twisted as she recalled how she had stood before the primaries assembled in the Kiba and challenged them to act, to find her demon-abducted baby. They clearly held humans in disdain, and she had presented a most unprepossessing figure. But she would do it all again, in the name of the Mother; would do it daily, if necessary. And she would declare to them, repeatedly, that they were not gods at all.
    Rhuan’s people. The resemblence of one to another was striking, with identical dark-copper hair, clear brown eyes, the faintest ruddy sheen in skin. She wished he were present to guide her, to offer advice on how the primaries thought, on what mistakes she should not make. It was her task, she knew, to change their minds about humans. If she and her children were to be prisoners here—and she believed wholeheartedly that it was captivity, regardless of Ylarra’s claim—she would make certain the primaries came to understand how humans thought. To understand that difference need not be weakness.
    But Rhuan was gone.
    Desolation and despair. She thought she might choke on both as they swept into her chest, rose to fill her throat. Here was her childrens’ future, and her own.
    Audrun closed her eyes as tears threatened. She would not allow the children to see their mother weep. Regardless of how frightened she might be, how overwhelmed she felt, she dared not let the children see it, feel it, sense it.
    And then memory rose to banish those emotions. Her eyes snapped open. While lost in despair, overwhelmed by their circumstances, she had lost track of a most vital and valuable piece of information. It unfolded before her, and in that memory was strength.
    A road would be built. A road leading safely through Alisanos from the settlement to . . . elsewhere. Atalanda? She had seen Davyn’s crude map showing the shortcut edging around the borders of Alisanos. Atalanda province, on that map, lay due west, on the far side of the deepwood. If the road ran from the tent settlement in Sancorra to safety in Atalanda, it offered freedom to those in Sancorra province fleeing the depredations of the Hecari warlord and his people, just as her family had.
    A safe way through Alisanos . That, Rhuan had gained for them; because of her, because of her children, because of the husband who, undoubtedly, was now frantic with the need to find them.
    There was purpose in Rhuan’s challenge to the primaries, and she had not seen it. Purpose and solution.
    Acknowledgment replaced despair. Tension began to subside, replaced by fragile hope. A road meant she and her children could leave the deepwood, could find Davyn and put this nightmare to rest. . . . Rhuan had said he would bring Davyn to her, once the road was built
    And if there were a road through Alisanos, they could travel upon it to safety. Away from Alisanos, away from the Hecari. To security, to a new life. Perhaps once on the road any change begun by the deepwood would dissipate.
    Except . . . except there was the infant. She must be found. Before anything else.
    As she thought of the child, her breasts ached. A glance down showed damp patches where the milk-soaked breast