Passage The Sharing Knife 3
Lois MsMaster Bujold The Sharing Knife Volume Three Passage Lois McMaster Bujold Contents Map 1 Dag was riding up the lane thinking only of the… 2 In the pressure of a short-handed harvest and a run… 3 While Sorrel and Tril might have been dubious about letting… 4 Even in the late afternoon, the straight road approaching Glassforge… 5 Back aboard Copperhead, Dag rode close to the second wagon… 6 Fifty paces up the slope from the Pearl Bend wharf… 7 The afternoon was waning when Dag at last caught up… 8 Dag had the most unsettled look on his face, downright… 9 Fawn kept an eye out, but Dag did not return… 10 The oil lantern burning low on the kitchen table was…
11 The Fetch made thirty river miles before the dank autumn… 12 Despite the delay from Dag’s fruitless errand, the Fetch made… 13 To the excitement of everyone aboard—although Fawn thought that Dag… 14 To Fawn’s bemusem*nt, Remo tagged along on the trip to… 15 Dag was reassured early the next morning of the health… 16 Fawn watched in alarm as Remo took up the lantern… 17 Though the weather stayed cloudy and chilly, the Fetch made… 18 During an easy stretch of river in the morning, Berry… 19 Berry’s radiant joy seemed to light up the air around… 20 Dag braced one knee on a fallen log, checked the… 21 What Dag most wanted to do was question Crane: Fawn… 22 Flanked by Remo, Dag exited the cave and dragged his… 23 Her face carefully held stiff to hide how her stomach… 24 The next day the Fetch floated through yet more of… Author’s Note About the Author Other Books by Lois McMaster Bujold Credits Copyright About the Publisher
Map 1 Dag was riding up the lane thinking only of the chances of a Bluefield farm lunch, and his likelihood of needing a nap afterwards, when the arrow hissed past his face. Panic washing through him, he reached out his right arm and snatched his wife from her saddle. He fell left, dragging them both off and behind the shield of their horses, snapping his sputtering ground-sense open wide—range still barely a hundred paces, blight it—torn between thoughts of Fawn, of the knife at his belt, of the unstrung bow at his back, of how many, where? All of it was blotted out in the lightning flash of pain as he landed with both their weights on his healing left leg. His cry of “Spark, get behind me!” transmuted to “Agh! Blight it!” as his leg folded under him. Fawn’s mare bolted. His horse Copperhead shied and jerked at the reins still wrapped around the hook that served in place of Dag’s left hand; only that, and Fawn’s support under his arm as she found her feet, kept him upright. “Dag!” Fawn yelped as his weight bent her. Dag straightened, abandoning his twisting reach for his bow, as he at last identified the source of the attack—not with his groundsense, but with his eyes and ears. His brother-in-law Whit Bluefield came running across the yard below the old barn, waving a bow in the air and calling, “Oh, sorry! Sorry!” Only then did Dag’s eye take in the rag target tacked to a red oak tree on the other side of the lane. Well…he assumed it was a target, though the only arrow nearby was stuck in the bark about two feet below it. Other spent arrows lay loose on the ground well beyond. The one that had nearly clipped off his nose had plowed into the soil a good twenty paces downslope. Dag let out his pent breath in exasperation, then inhaled deeply, willing his hammering heart to slow. “Whit, you ham-fisted fool!” cried Fawn, rising on tiptoe to peer over her restive horse-fort. “You nearly shot my husband!” Whit arrived breathless, repeating, “Sorry! I was so surprised to see you, my hand slipped.” Fawn’s mare Grace, who had skittered only a few steps before getting over her alarm at this unusual dismount, put her head down and began tearing at the grass clumps. Whit, familiar with Copperhead’s unsociable character, made a wide circle around the horse to his sister’s side. Dag let the reins unwrap from his hook and allowed Copperhead to go join Grace, which the chestnut gelding did after a few desultory bucks and cow-kicks, just to register his opinion of the proceedings. Dag sympathized. “I wasn’t aiming at you!” Whit declared anxiously. “I’m right glad to hear that,” drawled Dag. “I know I annoyed a few people around here when I married your sister, but I didn’t think you were one of ’em.” His lips compressed in a grimmer line. Whit might well have hit Fawn. Whit flushed. A head shorter than Dag, he was still a head taller than Fawn, whom, after an awkward hesitation, he now embraced. Fawn grimaced, but hugged him back. Both Bluefield heads were crowned with loosely curling black hair, both faces fair-skinned, but while Fawn was nicely rounded, with a captivating sometimes-dimple when she smirked, Whit was skinny and angular, his hands and feet a trifle too big for his body. Still growing into himself even past age twenty, as the length of wrist sticking from the sleeve of his homespun shirt testified. Or perhaps, with no younger brother to hand them down to, he
was just condemned to wear out his older clothes. Dag took a step forward, then hissed, hook-hand clapping to his buckling left thigh. He straightened again with an effort. “Maybe I want my stick after all, Spark.” “Of course,” said Fawn, and darted across the lane to retrieve the hickory staff from under Copperhead’s saddle flap. “Are you all right? I know I didn’t hit you,” Whit protested. His mouth bent down. “I don’t hit anything, much.” Dag smiled tightly. “I’m fine. Don’t worry about it.” “He is not fine,” Fawn amended sternly, returning with the stick. “He got knocked around something fearsome last month when his company rode to put down that awful malice over in Raintree. He hasn’t nearly healed up yet.” “Oh, was that your folks, Dag? Was it really a blight bogle—malice,” Whit corrected himself to the Lakewalker term, with a duck of his head at Dag. “We heard some pretty wild rumors about a ruckus up by Farmer’s Flats—” Fawn overrode this in concern. “That scar didn’t break open when you landed so hard, did it, Dag?” Dag glanced down at the tan fabric of his riding trousers. No blood leaked through, and the flashes of pain were fading out. “No.” He took the stick and leaned on it gratefully. “It’ll be fine,” he added to allay Whit’s wide-eyed look. He squinted in new curiosity at the bow still clutched in Whit’s left hand. “What’s this? I didn’t think you were an archer.” Whit shrugged. “I’m not, yet. But you said you would teach me when—if—you came back. So I was getting ready, getting in some practice and all. Just in case.” He held out his bow as if in evidence. Dag blinked. He had quite forgotten that casual comment from his first visit to West Blue, and was astonished that the boy had apparently taken it so to heart. Dag stared closely, but not a trace of Whit’s usual annoying foolery appeared in his face. Huh. Guess I made more of an impression on him than I’d thought. Whit shook off his embarrassment over his straying shaft, and asked cheerfully, “So, why are you two back so soon? Is your patrol nearby? They could all come up too, you know. Papa wouldn’t mind. Or are you on a mission for your Lakewalkers, like that courier fellow who brought your letters and the horses and presents?” “My bride-gifts made it? Oh, good,” said Dag. “Yep, they sure did. Surprised us all. Mama wanted to write a letter back to you, but the courier had gone off already, and we didn’t know how to get in touch with your people to send it on.” “Ah,” said Dag. There’s a problem. There was the problem, or one aspect of it: farmers and Lakewalkers who couldn’t talk to each other. Like now? For all his mental rehearsal, Dag found it suddenly difficult to spit out the tale of his exile, just off the cuff like this. Fortunately, Fawn filled in. “We’re just visitin’. Dag’s sort of off-duty for a time, till his hurts heal up.” True in a sense—well, no, not really. But there would be time to explain further—maybe when everyone was together, so he wouldn’t have to repeat it all over and over, a prospect that made him wince even
more than the vision of explaining it to a crowd. They strolled to recapture the horses, and Whit waved toward the old barn. “The stalls you used before are empty. You still got that man-eating red nag, I see.” He skirted Copperhead to gather up Grace’s reins; from the way the bay mare resisted his tugging to snatch a few last mouthfuls of grass, one would take her for starved—clearly not the case. “Yep,” said Dag, stooping with a grunt to scoop up the gelding’s reins in turn. “I still haven’t met anyone I disliked enough to give him to.” “And he’s been ridin’ Copperhead for eight straight years. It’s a wonder, that.” Fawn dimpled. “Admit it, Dag, you like that dreadful horse.” She went on to her brother, in a tone of bright diversion, “So, what’s been happening here at West Blue since I left?” “Well, Fletch and Clover was married a good six weeks ago. Mama was sorry you two couldn’t be here for the wedding.” Whit cast a nod at the solid stone farmhouse, sited on the ridge overlooking the wooded valley of the rocky river. The newlyweds’ addition of two rooms off the near end, still in progress when Dag had last seen it, seemed entirely complete, with glass windows, a wood-shingle roof, and even some early-autumn flowers planted around the foundation, softening the fresh scars in the soil. “Clover’s all moved in, now. Ha! It didn’t take her long to shift the twins. They lit out about twenty miles west to break land with a friend of theirs, only last week. You just missed ’em.” Dag couldn’t help reflecting that of all his Bluefield in-laws, the inimical twins Reed and Rush were probably the ones he’d miss the least; judging from the sudden smile on Fawn’s face, she shared the sentiment. He said affably, “I know they’d been talking about it for a long time.” “Yeah, Papa and Mama wasn’t too pleased that they picked just before harvest to finally take themselves off, but everyone was so glad of it they didn’t hardly complain. Fletch came in on Clover’s side whenever they clashed, naturally, which was pretty much every day, and they didn’t take any better to him telling them what to do than to her. So it’s a lot more peaceable in the house, now.” He added after a reflective moment, “Dull, really.” Whit continued an amiable account of the small doings of various cousins, uncles, and aunts as they unsaddled the horses and turned them into the box stalls in the cool old barn. With a glance at Dag’s stick, Whit actually helped them put up their gear without being asked and hoisted Dag’s saddlebags over his shoulder. Feeling that such an apologetic impulse should be encouraged, Dag let him take them. As they made their way back out to climb the hill to the house, Fawn refused to give up her own bags to Dag, telling him to mind himself, and thumped along under the weight with her usual air of determination. Despite their late difficulties, she seemed far less troubled than at her previous homecoming, judging from the smile she cast over her shoulder at him, and he couldn’t help smiling back. Yeah, we’ll get through this somehow, Spark. Together.
The farmhouse kitchen was fragrant with cooking—ham and beans, cornbread, squash, biscuits, applesauce, pumpkin pie, and a dozen familiar go-withs—and the moist perfume of it all made Fawn weirdly homesick even though she was home. Mama and Clover, both be-aproned, were bustling around the kitchen as they stepped through the back door, and Mama, at least, fell on Fawn with shrieks of delighted surprise. Blind Aunt Nattie lumbered up from her spinning wheel just beyond the doorway to her weaving room, hugged Fawn hard, and spared an embrace for Dag as well. Her hand lingered a moment on the wedding cord circling Dag’s left arm, below his rolled-up shirt sleeve and above the arm harness for his hook, and her smile softened. “Glad to see this is still holdin’,” she murmured, and “Aye,”
Dag murmured back, giving her in return a squeeze that lifted her off her feet and made her grin outright. Papa and Fletch clumped in from wherever they’d been working—with the sheep, from the smell—when the greetings were all still at the babbling stage. Plump Clover, announcing that the food wouldn’t wait, sent Fawn and Dag off to put down their bags and wash up. She hurried to set extra places, and wouldn’t let Fawn help serve—“Sit, sit! You two must be tired from all that ridin’. You’re a guest now, Fawn!” Aren’t you? her worried eyes added silently. Fletch looked as if he were wondering the same thing, though he greeted his sister and her unlikely husband affably enough. They sat eight around the long kitchen table, filled with the variety and abundance of farm fare that Fawn had always taken for granted but that still seemed to take Dag aback; having seen the austerity of life in a Lakewalker camp, Fawn now understood why. Dag certainly did not disapprove, praising the cooks and filling his plate in a way that demonstrated the ultimate compliment of a good appetite. Fawn was glad for his returning appetite, worn thin as he’d been by this past summer’s gruesome campaign. And he’d been pretty lean to start with. With his height, coppery skin, striking bony face, tousled dark hair, and strange metallic-gold eyes, Dag looked as out of place at a table full of farmers as a heron chick set down in a hen’s nest, even without the faint air of menace and danger from his missing hand and the enigmatic fact of his being a Lakewalker sorcerer. Or Lakewalker necromancer as the bigoted—or frightened—would have it. Not without cause, she admitted to herself. Fletch, possibly in response to the penetrating looks he was getting from his bride, was the first to ask the question, “I’m surprised to see you two back so soon. You’re not, um…planning to stay, are you?” Fawn chose to ignore the wary tone. “Just a visit. We’re traveling through. Though I admit, it would be good to rest up for a few days.” “Oh, of course you can,” cried Clover, brightening with relief. “That’ll be a treat. I’d love to hear all about your new place.” She added in an arch voice, “So do you two have any good news yet?” “Beg pardon?” said Dag blankly. Fawn, who decoded this without effort as Aren’t you pregnant yet?, returned the correct response: “No, not yet. How about you and Fletch?” Clover smirked, touching her belly. “Well, it’s early days yet. But we’re sure tryin’. Our betrothal ran so long, what with one thing and another, there seemed no reason not to start a family right away.” Fletch gave his bride a fond, possessive smile, as a farmer might regard his prize broodmare, and Clover looked smug. Fawn didn’t always hit it off with Clover, but she had to admit that the girl was the perfect wife for stodgy Fletch, even without her dowry of a forty-acre field and large woodlot, linked to Bluefield land by a quite short footpath. Fletch put in, “We hope for news by winter, anyhow.” Fawn glanced at Dag. Despite the unhealed damage to his ground-sense, at this range he would surely know if Clover were pregnant already. He gave Fawn a wry smile and a short headshake. Fawn touched the malice scars on her neck, darkening now to carmine, and thought, Leave it be. Mama asked, in a more cautious tone, “So…how did things go with your new people at Hickory Lake, Fawn? With your new family?” Dag’s family. After a perhaps too-revealing hesitation, Fawn chose, “Mixed.”
Dag glanced down at her and swallowed, not only to clear his mouth of his last bite, but said plainly enough: “Truth to tell, not well, ma’am. But that’s not why we’re on this road.” Nattie said anxiously, “Those Lakewalker wedding cords we made up—didn’t they work?” “They worked just fine, Aunt Nattie,” Dag assured her. He glanced up and down the table. “I should likely explain to the rest of you something that only Nattie knew when Fawn and I were wed here. Our binding strings”—he touched the dark braid above his left elbow and nodded to Fawn’s, wrapping her left wrist—“aren’t just fancy cords. Lakewalkers weave our grounds into them.” Five blank stares greeted this statement, and Fawn wondered how he was going to explain ground and groundsense in a way that would make them all understand when they hadn’t seen what she’d seen. When he also had to overcome a lifetime of deep reserve and the habit—no, imperative—of secrecy. It seemed by his long intake of breath that he was about to try. “Only you farmers use the term magic. Lakewalkers just call it groundwork. Or making. We don’t think it’s any more magic than, than planting seed to get pumpkins or spinning thread to get shirts. Ground is…it’s in everything, underlies everything. Live or un-live, but live ground is brightest, all knotty and shifting. Un-live sits and hums, mainly. You all have ground in you, but you don’t sense it. Lakewalkers perceive it direct. You can think of groundsense as like seeing double, except that seeing doesn’t quite cover—no.” He muttered to his lap, “Keep it simple, Dag.” His eyes and voice rose again. “Just think of it as like seeing double, all right?” He stared hopefully around. Taking the uncharacteristic quiet that had fallen for encouragement, he went on, “So, just as we can sense ground in things, we can, most of us—sometimes—move things through their grounds. Change them, augment them. That’s groundwork.” Mama wet her lips. “So…when you mended that glass bowl the twins broke, whistled it back together, was that what you’d call groundwork?” Stunning the entire Bluefield clan to silence at that time, too, as Fawn vividly recalled—now that had been magic. Dag, beaming, shot Mama a look of gratitude. “Yes, ma’am. Exactly! Well, it wasn’t the whistling that—well, close enough. That was probably the best groundwork I’d ever done.” Second best, now, thought Fawn, remembering Raintree. But Raintree had come later, and cost more: very nearly Dag’s life. Did they understand that this wasn’t trivial trickery? “Lakewalkers like to think that only we have groundsense, but I’ve met a lot of farmers with a trace. Sometimes more than a trace. Nattie’s one.” Dag nodded across the table at Nattie, who grinned in his general direction, though her pearl-colored eyes could not see him. Fletch and Clover and Whit looked startled; Mama, less so. “I don’t know if her blindness sharpened it, or what. But with Nattie’s helping, Fawn and I wove our grounds into our wedding cords as sound as any Lakewalker’s.” He left out the alarming part about the blood, Fawn noted. He was picking his way through the truth as cautiously as a blindfolded man crossing a floor studded with knives. Dag went on, “So when we got up to camp, every Lakewalker there could see that they were valid cords. Which threw everyone into a puzzle. Folks had been relying on the cord-weaving to make Lakewalker marriages to farmers impossible, d’you see. To keep bloodlines pure and our groundsense strong. They were still arguin’ about what it meant when we left.”
Papa had been staring at Nattie, but this last drew his frown back to Dag. “Then did your people throw you out for marrying Fawn, patroller?” “Not exactly, sir.” “So…what? Exactly?” Dag hesitated. “I hardly know where to start.” A longer pause. “What all have you folks here in Oleana heard about the malice that emerged over in Raintree?” Papa said, “There was supposed to have been a blight bogle pop up somewheres north of Farmer’s Flats, that killed a lot of folks, or drove them mad.” Whit put in, “Or that it was a nerve-ague or brain-worms, that made folks there run around attacking one another. It’s bog country up that way, they say, bad for strange fevers.” Fletch added, “Down at Millerson’s alehouse, I heard someone say it was an excuse got up by the Lakewalkers to drive farmers back south out of their hunting country. That there never was any blight bogle, and it wasn’t bogle-maddened farmers attacking Lakewalkers, but the other way around.” Dag squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his mouth. “No,” he said into his hand, and lowered it. Clover sat back with a sort of flounce; she didn’t voice it, but her face said it for her: Well, you’d naturally say that, wouldn’t you? Mama and Nattie said nothing, but they seemed to be listening hard. Dag said, “There was a real malice. We first heard about it when the Raintree Lakewalkers, who were being overwhelmed, sent a courier to Hickory Lake Camp for help. My company was dispatched. We circled, managed to come up on the malice from behind while it was driving its mind-slaves and mud-men south to attack Farmer’s Flats. One of my patrol got a sharing knife into it—killed it. I saw it”—he held out his left arm—“that close. It was very advanced, very, um…advanced.” He paused, glanced around, and tried, “Strong, smart. Almost human-looking.” Leaving out how the malice had nearly slain him, or that he’d been captain of that company and source of its successful plan…Fawn bit her lip in impatience. “Here’s the thing, the important thing. No…back up a step, Dag.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry. There’s too much all at once, and I’m explaining this all backwards, I’m sorry. Try this. Malices have groundsense too, only very much stronger than any human’s. They’re made of ground. They consume ground, to live, to make their—their magery, their mud-men, their own bodies, everything they do. They’re quite mad, in their way.” His face looked suddenly drawn in some memory Fawn did not share and could not guess at. “But that’s what blight is. It’s where some emergent malice has drawn all the ground out of the world, leaving, well, blight. It’s very distinctive.” “Well, what does it look like?” asked Whit reasonably. “It doesn’t look like anything else,” said Dag, which netted him some pretty dry looks from around the table. Fawn pitched in: “It’s not like burnt fields, or rust, or rot, or a killing frost, though it reminds you of all those things. It has a funny gray tinge, like all the color has been sucked out of things. First things die, if they’re alive, and then they fall apart at the seams, and then they dissolve all through. Once you’ve seen that drained-out gray, you can’t ever mistake it. It looks even worse to someone with groundsense, I gather.”
“Yes,” said Dag gratefully. Mama said faintly, “You’ve seen it, then, Fawn?” “Yes, twice. Once at that malice’s lair near Glassforge, when Dag and I first met, and once in Raintree. I rode over, after. Dag was hurt on his patrol, which part he didn’t tell you, I notice.” She glowered at him in reproof. “He’d still be on sick leave if we were back at Hickory Lake.” “You got to go to Raintree?” said Whit, sounding indignantly envious. Fawn tossed her head. “I saw all that country the malice had torn through. I saw where it got started.” She glanced back to Dag, to check if he was ready to go on. He nodded at her and picked up his tangled thread again. “Here’s the thing. For the past twenty or thirty years, farmers have been breaking land in Raintree north of the old cleared line—that is, north of where the local Lakewalkers had deemed it safe. Or less unsafe, leastways. Lakewalker patrol records show malice emergences get thicker—more frequent—north toward the Dead Lake, see, and thinner south and away. South of the Grace River, they’re very rare. Although unfortunately not all gone, so we can’t stop patrolling those regions. It was at a north Raintree squatter town named Greenspring that this latest malice emerged. Practically under it.” Fawn nodded. “It hatched out down in a ravine in the town woodlot, by the signs.” Dag went on, “See, there was a lot of bad blood between the local Lakewalkers and the Greenspring settlers, on account of the arguments about the old cleared line. So when the malice started, none of the squatters knew how to recognize the early signs, or to pick up and run, or how or where to ride for help. Or they’d been told but didn’t believe. Not that they wouldn’t have needed to be lucky as well, because by the time a farmer can see the blight near a lair, there’s a good chance he’s just about to be ground-ripped or mind-slaved anyway. Like stumbling into a spider web. But with that many folks, if they’d all known, someone might have got out to spread the warning. Instead, the malice pretty much ate them. And grew strong way too fast. I think that a whole lot more people died in north Raintree than needed to this summer just because Lakewalkers and farmers weren’t talking to each other.” “I hadn’t ever seen a mass grave before,” said Fawn quietly. “I don’t ever want to again.” Papa gave her a sharp glance from under his gray brows. “I did, once, long time ago,” he said unexpectedly. “It was after a flood.” Fawn looked at him in surprise. “I never knew that.” “I never talked about it.” “Hm,” said Aunt Nattie. Papa sat back and looked at Dag. “Your people aren’t exactly forthcomin’ about these things, you know. In Raintree or Oleana.” “I know.” Dag ducked his head. “Back when there were few farmers north of the Grace, it scarcely mattered. To the Lakewalkers in the hinterlands north of the Dead Lake—I’ve walked up that way, twice—there’s still no need to do anything differently, because there are no farmers there. Where it matters is in the border country, where things are changing out from under us—like Greenspring. And like West Blue.” He glanced around the table. The food on his plate had all gone cold, Fawn noticed. Fletch said, “I never got the sense Lakewalkers wanted farmer help.”
“They don’t, mostly,” Dag admitted. “No farmer can fight a malice directly. You can’t close your grounds in defense, for one, you can’t make…certain tools.” He blinked, frowned, seemed to take aim like a rider trying to clear a fence on a balky horse, and blurted out, “Sharing knives. You can’t make sharing knives to kill malices.” Swallowing, he went on, “But even if you can’t be fighters, you might find better ways to avoid being fodder. Everyone alive should be taught how to recognize blight-sign, for one—as routinely as how to identify poison ivy or rattlesnakes or, or how not to stand on the wrong side of the tree you’re felling.” “How would you go about teaching everyone alive, patroller?” asked Aunt Nattie, in a curious voice. “I don’t know,” sighed Dag. “Laid out like that, it sounds pretty crazy. We came upon the Glassforge malice early, this past spring, only because of the chance of Chato’s patrol stopping there and gossiping with the local folks about their bandit problem enough for Chato to realize there was something strange going on. If I could only show folks, somehow…I wouldn’t have to talk.” Dag smiled wanly. “I never was much of a talkin’ man.” “Eat, Dag,” Fawn put in, and pointed to his plate. Everyone else’s was empty. He took an obedient bite. “Folks could show off that patch of blight you say is by Glassforge,” Whit suggested. “Then they’d all know what it looks like.” Clover eyed him. “Why would anybody want to go look at a thing like that? It just sounds ugly.” Whit sat back and rubbed his nose, then brightened. “Then you should charge ’em money.” Dag stopped chewing and stared. “What?” “Sure!” Whit sat up. “If they had to pay, they’d think it was something special. You could get up wagon excursions from Glassforge. Charge five copper crays for the ride, and ten for the box lunch. And the lecture for free. It would get folks talking when they got home, too—What did you see in Glassforge, dear? It could be a nice little business, driving the wagon, making the lunches—it would sure beat pulling stumps, anyways. If I had the cash I’d buy that blight, I would. It’d be better ’n a forty-acre field.” Fawn didn’t think she’d ever seen Dag look so flummoxed. It was all she could do not to giggle, though she mainly wanted to hit Whit. “Well, you don’t have any cash,” Fletch pointed out dauntingly. “Thank the stars,” added Clover, fanning herself with her hand. “You’d likely throw it down a well.” “Quit your fooling, Whit,” said Papa impatiently. “Nobody thinks it’s amusin’.” Whit shrugged, kicked back his chair, and rose to carry off his plate to the sink. Dag, slowly, started chewing again. His eyes, following Whit, had an odd look in them—not angry, though, which surprised Fawn, knowing how seriously Dag took all this. With afternoon chores looming, lunch broke up.
Later, putting their things away in the twins’ old bedroom upstairs, Dag folded Fawn to him and sighed. “Well, I sure made a hash of that. Absent gods. If I can’t talk to my own tent-family and make them understand, how am I ever going to talk to strangers?”
“I didn’t think you did so badly. It was a lot for them to get around, all at once like that.” “It was all out of order, I never explained sharing knives, they didn’t half believe me—or else half of ’em didn’t believe me, I wasn’t sure which—it was all—oh, Spark, I don’t know what I’m doing on this road. I’m just an old patroller. I’m surely not the man for this.” “It was your first try. Who gets everything right the first try?” “Anyone who wants to live for a second try.” “That’s for things that’ll kill you if you miss, like…like slaying malices, I suppose. People don’t die of stumbling over a few words.” “I thought I was going to strangle on my tongue.” About to hug him around the waist, she pushed off and looked up instead. She said shrewdly, “This isn’t just hard because it’s complicated, or new, is it? Lakewalkers aren’t supposed to talk about these secrets to farmers—are they?” “Indeed, we are not.” “How much trouble would you be in with your own folks, if they knew?” He shrugged. “Hard to say.” That wasn’t too helpful. Fawn narrowed her eyes in worry, but then just gave up and hugged him tight, because he’d never looked like he needed it more. The breath of his laugh stirred her curls as he dropped a kiss atop her head.
2 In the pressure of a short-handed harvest and a run of dry weather, Fawn and Dag lost their sitting-guest status almost immediately. Dag didn’t seem to mind, showing both willing and a keen and practical interest in the farm and all its doings. It was all as strange and new to him, Fawn realized, as the very different rhythms of a Lakewalker camp had been to her. She wondered if he was homesick yet. As usual, the Bluefields combined forces for the ingathering with the Ropers, Aunt Roper being Papa’s sister. The Ropers’ place lay just northwest of their own. Two of their sons and Fawn’s closest cousin, Ginger, were still at home to help out, and amongst them all, they cleared Uncle Roper’s big cornfield in three days. Next was the Bluefield late wheat. Dag proved unexpectedly adept with the long scythe. His arm harness held a wooden wrist-cap over his stump, and besides the hook he possessed an array of clever tools on bolts that he swapped in and out of it, including his specially adapted bow. The tool he usually used for clasping the paddle of a narrow boat on the lake also served to aid his grip on the scythe, and after a little experimentation he seemed to find his way into the swing of the task quite contentedly, so Papa left him to it. Gleaning had been one of the first chores little hands had been put to, back when Fawn and Ginger and Whit had been only hip-high. They were all bigger now, but the gleaning still had to be done. Fawn crouched and shuffled her way across the bright gold stubble, and thought Clover and Fletch could well stand to be prompt in producing the next generation of shorter harvesters. Along the split-rail fence of the pasture, the farm’s horses lined up in mild-eyed curiosity to watch the strange behavior of their people. At the end of her row, Fawn stood up to stretch her back and check on Dag, working at the far end of
the field with Papa, Uncle Roper and his boys, and Fletch to scythe and bundle sheaves and load them into a waiting cart. Dag looked very tall beside the others, though the sleeves of his homespun shirt were rolled up over a coppery suntan not that much deeper than the men’s, and the hat shading his head, woven of lake reeds, was fringed around the rim just like their straw ones. Whit rose beside her, adjusted the strap of the cloth bag across his shoulder, and followed her gaze. “I must warn Papa to watch and not let Dag overdo,” said Fawn in worry. “He won’t stop on his own.” “Just exactly how was he hurt, again?” said Whit. “’Cause when we went down to wash up in the river last night, all I saw new was that little bitty cut on his left thigh.” “It’s not long, but it’s deep,” said Fawn. “The knife blade that did it went straight to the bone and shattered. The Lakewalker medicine maker had an awful time getting all the pieces fished back out. But that’s not what’s dragging him down so.” Taking her lead from Dag, Fawn decided to stick with a much-simplified version of the truth. “The Raintree malice halfway ground-ripped him in the fight, tore up his ground all down his left arm and side. It nearly killed him. It’s like he’s walking around recovering from his own personal blight.” “Well, how long does that take?” “I’m not sure. I’m not sure he’s sure. Most folks who get ground-ripped just die on the spot. But Dag says when the Glassforge malice put these marks on my neck”—she rubbed at the ugly red dimples, one on the right side, four on the left—“it injured both flesh and ground. If the bruises had been just from a man’s hand, they’d have cleared up two or three months back, with nothing to show. Ground damage is nasty stuff.” Her hand crept to rub her belly as well, but she halted it, burying it in her skirt instead. Dag wasn’t the only one to carry the worst damage hidden inside. “Huh,” said Whit, squinting at her neck. “I guess so!” “The weakness and pain in his body don’t bother him near as much as the harm the ripping did to his groundsense, though.” “That seeing-double thing he talks about?” “Yes. Usually he can sense things out for near a mile away, which I gather is pretty amazing even for a Lakewalker. He says it’s down to less ’n a hundred paces right now. The medicine maker said that’s how he’ll know when his ground is better, when he can sense out far again.” Whit blinked. “So…can he still do his groundwork? Like that bowl?” Whit had been impressed by the bowl. Rightfully, Fawn thought. “Not yet. Not real well.” She thought of some of Dag’s other marvelous ground-tricks, still not regained, and sighed. When Lakewalkers made love they did it body and ground, with an ingenuity farmers never dreamed of, but she wasn’t about to explain that part to Whit. Whit shook his head, frowning again at the reapers. “He looks so wrong.” Fawn shaded her eyes with the edge of her hand. “Why? I think he’s doing pretty good with that scythe.” “There’s that hat, for one.” “I wove him that hat! Same as yours.” “Ah, that explains why he won’t be parted from it. What that man does for you…! But—” Whit gestured
inarticulately. “Dag looks all right up on his evil horse. He looks right with that bow of his, anyone can see—you’d think it grew there on his arm, even without how his arrows fly just where he wants. I’ve never seen him draw that big knife of his, but I sure wouldn’t want to be on the other side when he does.” “No. You wouldn’t,” Fawn agreed. “But stick him with a scythe or a pitchfork or a bucket, he looks as out of place as—as if you’d hitched that leggy silver mare to a plow.” He jerked his head toward the pasture fence. Swallow, the dappled gray mare Dag had sent to West Blue as his Lakewalker-style bride-gift, pricked her curving ears alertly. She looked as elegant as moonlight on water, and as swift as a rippling stream even when she was standing still. Beyond, her black colt Darkling, as if proudly aware of collecting his due-share of admiration, kicked up his heels and danced past, tail flicking. Grace was standing hipshot and bored along the fence line, dark bay coat looking warm and shiny in the sun. Copperhead of the uncertain temper had been left in exile in the small paddock below the old barn, but the two young plow horses Whit was bringing along, and known therefore as Whit’s team, cropped grass placidly a few paces off. Warp and Weft were nice, sturdy, useful-looking beasts, but…you would never imagine them with wings. “Swallow was supposed to be a gift to Mama.” Fawn sighed. “I don’t suppose Mama rides her.” Whit snorted. “Not hardly! She’s too terrified. Me, I’ve only taken that mare a few turns around the pasture, but the way she moves sure does make it look a long way to the ground.” “Dag didn’t mean her to be idle. I thought you might train her to the cart.” “Well, maybe. Papa means to breed her again, for sure. If we can find a stud around here worthy of her. He was talkin’ about Uncle Hawk’s Trustful, or maybe that flashy stallion of Sunny Sawman’s.” Fawn said neutrally, “Trustful would be good.” She added, “Papa and Mama aren’t planning to cut Darkling, are they? Dag’s tent-sister Omba was worried about that.” “Geld that colt? You’d have to be mad!” said Whit. “Just think of the stud fees, in a couple of years! He’ll support his mama in her old age, sure enough—and our mama, too.” Fawn nodded in satisfaction on Omba’s behalf. “That’s all right, then.” She added, “Grace was bred to a real fine Lakewalker stallion named Shadow before we left.” Somewhat by accident, but that was another tale. “Dag expects her to throw a right lovely foal next spring, with his lines and her temper.” Whit grinned. “As long as it’s not the other way around.” “Hey! Grace is a very pretty horse, too, in her own way!” “If you like ’em short and plump, which I admit is a popular style around here.” Fawn gave him a suspicious scowl, but deciding he was referring to Clover and not herself, let the dig pass. Whit lifted his brows and snigg*red. “We’ll have to tell Clover your mare is going to beat her to the finish line in the baby race. I want to see the look on her face.” I’m not in any baby race! Fawn was about to snap, but a loud, sharp whistle from the other end of the
wheat field interrupted her. Papa took his hand from his mouth and jerked his thumb firmly toward the ground. His children, interpreting this without difficulty, shrugged in reply and crouched to their gleaning again.
When Mama, Clover, and Aunt Roper lugged lunch up to the wheat field, everyone took a break under the nearby apple trees. Fawn collected a skirt-load of the wormier groundfalls and carried them across to the pasture fence as a treat for the horses. They all clustered up, making the fence creak as they leaned over it, and nuzzled the aromatic fruit out of her hands, their thick, mobile lips tickling her palms. She liked watching the happy way their jaws moved beneath their sliding skins as they munched and crunched and sighed in appreciation, and how they rounded their big nostrils and blinked their deep brown eyes. She wiped the mess of apple bits and horse slobber from her hands onto her skirt, and started back toward the orchard. Dag was sitting with Uncle and Aunt Roper and Fawn’s cousins, talking and gesturing. Trying to explain ground and groundsense to them, she guessed, partly from the way his hand touched the cord circling his left arm, and waved and closed and opened, but mostly by the way his desperately smiling listeners leaned back as if wishful to edge away, even while sitting cross-legged. Aunt Roper spotted Fawn, waved, and patted the ground beside her invitingly—come protect us from your wild patroller! Fawn sighed and trudged toward them.
The planned few days of rest in West Blue had slid instead into a few weeks of hard work, but Dag found himself oddly at ease despite the delay. The long days outdoors with the harvest-patrol had been laborious—that bean field, for one, had turned out to be much bigger than it looked, and before it was cleared Dag had started seeing cascades of beans in his sleep—but he was sleeping, and well, too. Indoors, every night, in a real bed, wrapped around Fawn. The food was not all dried-out to carry light, painstakingly rationed to the length of a pattern-walk, but gloriously, weightily abundant. There was no worse source of tension than an occasional clash of tempers, no deeper fear than of a splash of untimely rain. This break in their journey had been good for him. The dark, sick pain in his bones from the blight was giving way to mere clean fatigue from well-used muscles. His left leg was not as weak—he hadn’t needed his stick for days. He felt less…unbalanced. He had not, admittedly, attempted to stray off the Bluefield acres to the village, where he might risk encountering certain young men who had reason to remember his last visit with disfavor. But however Dag was now discussed in village gossip, the bad boys dared not stray up here, either, and Dag was content to be surrounded wholly by farmers who wished him well for Fawn’s sake. “So, patroller.” Sorrel’s voice broke into Dag’s drift of thought, and he tilted his head forward, closed his mouth, and opened his eyes, hoping he hadn’t started to snore in his chair. As was their custom, the Bluefield clan had gathered in the parlor after dinner to share the working lights. Clover and Fletch had gone off to her folks this evening, but Tril sat in her usual place sewing; Nattie, though not needing the oil lamp, kept company plying her drop spindle; and Fawn and Whit had set up a table to make arrows, a skill Fawn had mastered this past summer. Whit’s awful marksmanship had turned out not to be merely from his complete lack of training; his little hoard of arrows, picked up for free somewhere, was ill-made and ill-balanced. When Whit had asked plaintively if Dag couldn’t fix them the way a Lakewalker would, Dag had thought about it, nodded, and,
to Whit’s temporary horror, broken them over his knee. He’d then donated Fawn and a dozen old flint points to their replacement, being wishful to conserve his best steel-tipped shafts for more urgent uses than target practice. Besides, it was good for Whit to suffer some instruction from his younger sister. He was still, in Dag’s view, too inclined to discount Fawn. Now Dag raised his brows, tried to look awake, and answered Fawn’s papa—my tent-father?—“Sir?” Sorrel was studying him. “I don’t believe I’ve said thank you for staying on through the harvest. You do more work with one hand than most men do with two.” Fawn, squinting to wrap a carefully cut trio of feathers to a shaft with fine thread, dimpled in an I-told-you-so sort of way. Sorrel continued, “I never thought much before about what Lakewalker patrollers do, but I suppose it is hard work, in its way. Harder than I rightly imagined, maybe, and not much comfort in it.” Dag tilted his head in acknowledgment. Sorrel seemed clumsy but sincere, sorting through these new notions. “But the thing is…I can’t help but wonder…have you ever worked for a living?” Fawn sat up indignantly, but Dag waved her back down. “It’s not an insult, love. I know what he means. Because in a sense, the answer’s no. Out on patrol, we might hunt, cure skins, collect medicines, trade a little, keep the trails clear, but that’s all second place to hunting malice. Patrollers don’t make and save like farmers do. My camp kin did that part. At home, my bed was always made for me. Not that I ever spent long in it.” Sorrel nodded. “But you don’t have your camp anymore.” “…No.” “So…how are you and Fawn planning to go on, then? Do you think to farm? Or something else?” “I’m not sure,” said Dag slowly—honestly. “I figured I was too old to learn a whole new way of life, but I will say, these past weeks have given me more to chew on than Tril’s good cooking. I guess I never pictured having friendly folks to show me the trail.” “A farmer Lakewalker?” murmured Tril, raising her brows. Whit made a face, though Dag was not sure why. “By myself, no, but Fawn knows her part. Maybe together, it wouldn’t be so unlikely as it once seemed.” His other potential skill, medicine maker, was far too dangerous to attempt in farmer country, he’d been told. Repeatedly. In any case, his weakened ground made the notion futile, for now. Sorrel said cautiously, “Would you be thinking to take up land here in West Blue?” Dag glanced at Fawn, who gave him a slight, urgent headshake. No, she had no desire to settle a mere three miles up the road from her disastrous first love, and first hate. Dag wasn’t the only one of them who had been avoiding the village. “It’s too early to say.” Tril looked up from her sewing, and said, “So what do you plan to do when a child comes along? They don’t keep to schedule, in my experience.” Her penetrating maternal look plainly wondered if he was simply being a male idiot, or if there was something he wasn’t saying.
He wasn’t about to go into the variety of methods available to Lakewalkers for not having children till wanted, some of which he was fairly sure—make that, entirely certain—Fawn’s parents would not approve of. The secret of the malice-damage to Fawn’s womb, as slowly healing as his own inner blight, she had elected to keep to herself, a choice he respected, and—what was that farmer phrase for letting go of a regretted past? Water over the dam. He offered instead, weakly, “Lakewalker women have children on the move.” Tril gave that the fishy stare it deserved. “But it seems Fawn is not to be a Lakewalker woman, after all. And from what you say, Lakewalker mamas have kin and clan and camp to back ’em, in their need, even if their men are off chasing bogles.” He wanted to declaim indignantly, I will take care of her! But even he wasn’t that much of a fool. His eyelids lowered, opened; he said instead, merely, “That’s so, ma’am.” “We plan to travel, before we decide where to settle,” Fawn put in firmly. “Dag promised to show me the sea, and I mean to hold him to his word.” “The sea!” said Tril, sounding shocked. “You didn’t say you were fixing to go all that way! I thought you were just going to the Grace Valley. Lovie, it’s dangerous!” “The sea?” said Whit in an equally shocked but very different tone. “Fawn gets to go to the sea? And Raintree? I’ve never been past Lumpton Market!” Dag regarded him, trying to imagine a whole life confined to a space scarcely larger than a single day’s patrol-pattern. “By your age, I’d quartered two hinterlands, killed my first malice, and been down the Grace and the Gray both.” He added after a moment, “Didn’t see the sea for the first time till a couple years later, though.” Whit said eagerly, “Can I go with you?” “Certainly not!” Fawn cried. Whit looked taken aback. Dag muffled a heartless smile. In a lifetime of relentlessly heckling his sister, Whit had clearly never once imagined needing her goodwill for any aim of his own. So do our sins bite us, boy. “We’re not done harvest,” said Sorrel sternly. “You have work here, Whit.” “Yes, but they’re not leaving tomorrow. Are you?” He looked wildly at Dag. Dag did some rapid mental calculating. Fawn’s monthly would be coming on shortly, bloodily debilitating since her injuries, though slowly improving as she healed inside. They must certainly wait that out in the most comfortable refuge possible. “We’ll linger and help out for another week, maybe. But we can’t stay much longer. It’ll be near a week’s ride down to the Grace. If we want any choice of boats we have to get there in time to catch the fall rise, and not so late as to be caught by the winter freeze-up. Or just by the cold and wet and misery.” A daunted silence fell, for a while. Nattie’s spindle whirred, Whit went back to sanding a shaft smooth, and Dag considered the attractions of his bed upstairs, compared to dozing off and falling out of his chair onto his chin. Whit said suddenly, “What are you planning to do with your horses?”
“Take ’em along,” said Dag. “On a keelboat? There’s hardly room.” “No, on a flatboat.” “Oh.” More busy silence. Whit set down the shaft with a click, and Dag opened one wary eye. Whit said, “But Fawn’s mare’s in foal. You wouldn’t want her to drop her foal along the trail somewheres. I mean…wolves. Catamounts. Delay. Wouldn’t it be better to leave her here all comfy at West Blue and pick her up when you got back?” “And what am I supposed to do, walk?” said Fawn in scorn. “No, but see…suppose you left her here for Mama to ride, since she can’t ride Swallow. And suppose we each rode one of my team, instead. I’d been meaning to sell them in Lumpton next spring, but I bet down by those rivertowns I’d get a better price. Also Papa and Fletch wouldn’t be put to the trouble of feedin’ them all winter. And you’d save the cost of taking your pregnant horse on a boat ride she wouldn’t hardly appreciate anyhow.” “How would I get back? Copper can’t carry us double, and my bags!” “You could pick up another horse when you get down there to Graymouth.” “Oh, so Dag’s supposed to pay for this, is he?” “You could sell it again when you got back. That, plus the savings for not shipping your mare, you’d likely come out pretty near even. Or even ahead!” Fawn huffed in exasperation. “Whit, you can’t come with us.” “Only as far as the river!” His voice went wheedling. “And see, Mama, I wouldn’t be going off by myself—I’d be with Dag and all. Going out, anyhow, and coming back I’d know how to find my way home again.” “With money burning a hole in your pocket till it dropped through onto the road, I suppose,” said Sorrel. “Unless you met up with bandits like Fawn did,” said Tril. “Then you’d lose your money and your life.” “Fawn’s going. No, worse—Fawn’s going again.” Sorrel looked as if he wanted to say something like Fawn’s her husband’s business, now, but in light of his prior prying, couldn’t quite work up to it. His drowsy brain forced into motion, Dag found himself considering not money matters, but safety. A Lakewalker husband and his farmer wife, alone in farmer country, made an odd couple indeed, and they’d already met more than one offended observer who might, had there been time, have taken stronger exception to the pairing. But suppose it were a Lakewalker husband, a farmer wife, and her farmer brother? Might Whit be a buffer for Dag, as well as another pair of eyes to watch out for Fawn? Because absent gods knew Dag couldn’t stay awake all the time. Or even another half-hour. He swallowed a yawn. “You could fall into bad company, down on that big river,” Tril worried.
“Worse ’n Dag?” Whit inquired brightly. Tactless, but telling. Sorrel and Tril gave Dag an appraising look; Dag shifted uncomfortably. He had been brooding about the problems of Lakewalker-farmer divisions for months, without results that he could see, and here was Whit practically volunteering to be a patrol partner and tent-brother. If Dag turned the boy down, would he ever get another such offer? Whit hasn’t the first idea what it would entail. Of course, neither do I. “Dag…” said Fawn uneasily. “Fawn and I will talk about it. As you say, we’re not leaving tomorrow.” “Dag could show me his blight patch, on the way past Glassforge,” Whit offered eagerly. “I could be—” Dag raised and firmed his voice. “Fawn and I will talk it over. We’ll talk to you after.” Whit subsided, with difficulty. Fawn eyed Dag in deepening curiosity. When he rose to go upstairs, she set aside her arrow-making and followed. She closed the door of their room behind her, and he took her hand and swung her to a seat on the edge of the twins’ beds, now pushed together. There was still a sort of padded ridge down the middle, but on the soft, clean linens, it wasn’t at all hard to slide over in the night. Rather like a miniature snowbank, but warmer. Much warmer. “Dag,” Fawn began in dismay, “what in the world were you thinking? You give Whit the least encouragement, and he’ll be badgering us to death to be let tail along.” He put his arm around her and hugged her up close to his right side. “I’m thinking…I took this road to learn how to talk to farmers. To try some other way of being than lords and servants—or malices and slaves—or kept apart. Tent-brother is sure another way.” Her fair brow furrowed. “You’re doing that Lakewalker thing again. Trying to join your bride’s tent, be a new brother to her kin.” He tilted his head. “I suppose I am. You know I mean to style myself Dag Bluefield.” She nodded. “Your family at Hickory Lake—what’s left of ’em—I didn’t get the sense they exactly nourished your heart even before you sprung me on ’em. Your brother acted like giving you one good word would cost him cash money. And you acted like it was normal.” “Hm.” He half-lidded his eyes and lowered his head to nibble at her hair. He pressed a stray strand between his lips, rubbing its fine grain. “Are you that family-hungry, Dag? ’Cause I admit I’m close to full-up, just now.” He pulled her down so that they lay face-to-face, smiling seriously. “Then you shouldn’t mind sharing.” “Oh, many’s the time I wished I could give Half-Whit away!” His lips twitched. He brushed the dark curls from her forehead and kissed along her eyebrows.
“And there’s another thing,” she added severely, although her hand strayed to map his jaw. “Camping in the evening, have you thought how fast it would blight the mood to have him sitting there on the other side of the fire, leering and cracking jokes?” Dag shrugged. “Camp privacy’s not a new problem for patrollers.” “Collecting firewood, bathing in the river, scouting for squirrels? So you told me. There’s a whole code, but Whit doesn’t know it.” “Then I’ll just have to teach him Lakewalker.” “Yeah? Best bring your hickory stick, for rapping on his skull.” “I’ve trained denser young patrollers.” “There are denser young patrollers?” She leaned back, so her eyes would bring his face into focus, likely. “How do they walk upright?” He snigg*red, but answered, “Their partners help ’em along. Feels sort of like a three-legged race some days, I admit. The idea is to keep ’em alive long enough to learn better. It works.” His smile faded a little. “Mostly.” Her slim fingers combed back his hair, side and side, and pressed his head between them in a little shake. “You’re still thinking Lakewalker. Not farmer.” “This walk we’re on is for changing that, though. I figure if I can practice on Whit…I might have more margin for mistakes.” “We say two’s company, three’s a crowd. I swear with you it’s two’s partners, three’s a patrol.” The fingers moved down to his shirt buttons; he aimed kisses at them in passing, and said, “I’ve been watching and listening, these past weeks, and not just all about how to herd beans. There’s no more head-space for Whit in this house than there was for you. It’s all for Fletch and Clover, and their children. Maybe if he was let out under a higher ceiling, he could straighten up a bit. With help, even grow—less wrenchingly than you had to.” She shivered. “I wouldn’t wish that even on Whit.” Her smile crept back. “So are you picturing yourself as a tent-brother—or a tent-father? Old patroller.” “Behave, child,” he returned, mock-sternly. He tried to pay back the favor with the buttons, one-handed, and, benefiting from much recent practice, succeeded. “With your hand there?” His only hand was gifting him the most lovely sensations, as his fingers slid and stretched. Silk was a poor weak comparison, for skin so breathing-soft. “I didn’t say what…” He groped for some wordplay on behave, but he was losing language as their bodies warmed each other. The scent of her hair filled his mouth as she shook her head, and he breathed her in. She murmured muzzily, “Trust me. He will be the most awful pain.” He drew his head back a little, to be sure of her expression. “Will be? Not would be? Was that a decision, slipped past there?” She sighed. “I suppose so.”
“Well, he’ll not pain you, or he’ll be answering to me.” Her eyebrows drew in. “He sneaks it in as jokes. Makes it hard to fight. Especially infuriating when he makes you laugh.” “If I can run a company of pig-headed patrollers, I can run your brother. Trust me, too.” “I’d pay money to watch that.” “For you, the show is free.” Her lips curved; her great brown eyes were dark and wide. The little hands descended to the next set of buttons. All farmers but one faded from his concern. At this range, opening his ground to her ground was no effort at all. It was like nocking star fire in the bow of his body. She whispered, “Show me…everything.” Igniting, he rolled her over him, and did.
3 While Sorrel and Tril might have been dubious about letting their youngest son out on the roads of Oleana even under the escort of their alarming Lakewalker son-in-law, Fletch and Clover, once the idea was broached, were very amenable. Sorrel and Fletch did unite in extracting the most possible labor from Whit during the next week. With his precious permission hanging in the balance, Whit worked if not willingly then without audible protest. In any remaining spare moments, his bow lessons with Dag were set aside in favor of chopping cordwood for winter, a chore normally not due for another month. Though not discussed, the permission became tacit in the face of the mounting woodpile, as, Dag thought, not even Fletch would be capable of such a cruel betrayal. Fawn’s parents were unexpectedly favorable to the idea of housing Grace. Dag eventually realized it wasn’t just because the mare was a sweet-tempered mount that not only Tril but even Nattie might ride—though Nattie, when this was pointed out, snorted and muttered something about The cart will do for me, thanks—but because she was a sort of equine hostage. That Fawn would need to return to collect her horse—or, by that time, possibly horses—seemed to give Tril some comfort. Though over the next several evening meals Tril did recall and recount every drowning accident that had occurred within a hundred miles of West Blue within living memory. Recognizing maternal nerves, Dag nonetheless quietly resolved to take Whit aside at some less ruffled moment and find out if he could swim any less like a rock than Fawn had, before Dag had done his best to drown-proof her. Even if it was growing a bit chilly for swimming lessons. A light rain the night before their departure turned the dawn air gray and cool, muting the blush of autumn colors. As the three rode down the farm lane a few damp yellow leaves eddied past, along with farewells, blessings, and a deal of unsolicited advice ignored by both Bluefield siblings with much the same shoulder hunchings. Dag found it pleasant enough to be back aboard Copperhead and moving once more. Along the river road south, Dag tested his groundsense range and fancied it improved. A hundred and fifty paces now, maybe? Whit was temporarily too exhausted to squabble with his sister, so the day’s ride was largely peaceful. And Dag would have his wife to himself tonight, in a cozy inn chamber in Lumpton Market; a touch, an exchange of smiles, a promissory gleam, that furtive dimple, left him riding in a warm glow of expectation as the afternoon drew to a close. At the shabby little inn off the old straight road north of town, these comfortable plans received an unexpected check. A chance crowd of drivers, drovers, and traveling farm families had nearly filled the
place, and Dag’s party was lucky to secure a single small chamber up under the eaves. Looking it over with disfavor, Dag was inclined to think a bedroll in the stable loft would be better, except that the loft had been let out already. But the falling dark, the threat of renewed rain, the fatigue of a twenty-mile ride, and the smells of good cooking from the inn’s kitchen cured them all of ambition to seek farther tonight, and the debate devolved merely as to who was going to get the bed and who was going to put their bedrolls on the floor. It ended with Fawn in the bed, which was too short for Dag as well as too narrow for a couple, Dag down beside it, and Whit crosswise beyond the foot. Even a chaste cuddle was denied, though Fawn did hang her arm over the side and interlace her fingers with Dag’s for a while after she’d turned down the bedside lamp. Peace did not descend. Before they’d gone down to supper Whit had forced open the window to combat the room’s mustiness; unfortunately, he had thus admitted a patrol of late mosquitoes, roused by the afternoon’s unseasonably warm damp. Every time anyone began to doze off, the thin, threatening whines induced more arm-waving, blanket-ducking, and irate mutters from one of the others, thwarting sleep for all. Dag instinctively bounced the pests away from himself and Fawn through their tiny grounds. Unfortunately, that concentrated the attack on Whit. Some more rustling, scratching, and swearing, and Whit rose in the dark to try to hunt the bloodthirsty marauders by sound. After he bumped into the bed frame twice and stepped on Dag, Fawn sat up, turned up the oil lamp, and snapped, “Whit, will you settle? You’re worse ’n they are!” “The buggers have bit me three times already. Wait, there—” Whit’s eyes narrowed to a gray gleam, and his hands rose in an attempt to cup a flying speck. Two quick claps missed, and he lurched over Dag again in pursuit, peering and trying to corner the insect against the whitewashed walls. His hands rose again, wavering with the target’s erratic flight. Muzzy with annoyance and the first confusion of dream sleep, Dag sat up, reached out his left arm, extended his ghost hand like a strand of smoke, and ripped the ground from the mosquito. The whine abruptly stopped. A puff of gray powder sifted down into Whit’s outstretched palm. His eyes widened as he stared down at Dag. He gulped. “Did you just do that?” Dag supposed he should say something useful like, Yes, and if you don’t go lie down and hush, you’re next, but he had shocked himself rather worse than he’d shocked Whit. It’s coming back, like my groundsense range! And—gone again. He folded his left arm, freed of the hook harness for the night, protectively against his chest, and twitched the blanket over his stump, for all that Whit had seen it several times before. And tried to breathe normally. Dag’s ghost hand had first appeared to him back when he’d mended that glass bowl so spectacularly last summer, and had been intermittently useful thereafter. It was just a ground projection, the medicine maker had assured him, if an unusually strong and erratic one. Not some uncanny blessing or curse. A ground projection such as powerful makers sometimes used, but haunting his wrist in that unsettling form like a memory of pain and loss, hence the name he’d given it back when he hadn’t yet understood what it was. Invisible to ordinary eyes, dense and palpable to groundsense. And then it had been destroyed, he’d thought—sacrificed in the complex aftermath of the fight with the malice in Raintree. Where, in an utter extremity of panic and need, he’d ground-ripped the malice, and nearly killed himself doing so. “Whit, just go lie down.” Fawn’s voice had an edge distinct enough from her earlier grumbling that even Whit heard it.
“Um, yeah. Sure.” He picked his way much more carefully back over Dag, and grunted down to his bedroll once more. Dag looked up to find Fawn propped on her elbow, frowning over the side of the bed at him. She lowered her voice. “Are you all right, Dag?” He opened his mouth, paused, and settled on, “Yeah.” Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “You have a funny look on your face.” He didn’t doubt it. He tried to substitute a smile, which didn’t seem to reassure her much. He felt a peculiar sharp throbbing in the ground of his left arm, as if a campfire spark had landed on his skin, or under it—a spark he could not brush away, though his fleshly fingers made a futile effort to, rubbing under his blanket. She started to settle back, but added, “What did you do to that poor mosquito?” “Ground-ripped it. I guess.” Except it was no guess. He could feel the creature’s lost ground stuck in his own, as those deadly malice-spatters had once been. Tinier, less toxic, not blighted, not a spreading death—but also not anything like a medicine maker’s gift of ground reinforcement, warm and welcome and healing. This felt uncomfortable and sticky, like a spot of hot tar. Painful. Wrong? Fawn rolled up on her elbow again. She knew, if Whit clearly did not, just how far outside the usual range of Dag-doings this was. “Really?” “I probably shouldn’t have,” he muttered. Her eyes pinched in doubt. “But—it was only a mosquito. You must have killed hundreds by hand, in your time.” “Thousands, likely,” he agreed. “But…it itches. In my ground.” He rubbed again. Her brows flew up; her face relaxed in amused relief. “Oh, dear.” He made no attempt to correct that relief. He captured her trailing hand, kissed it, and nodded to the oil lamp; she stretched up and doused it once again. As the bed creaked, he murmured, “Good night, Spark.” “G’night, Dag,” she returned, already muffled by her pillow. “Try’n sleep.” A slight snicker. “Don’t scratch.” He listened to her breathing till it slowed and eased, then, his arms crossed on his chest, turned his groundsense in upon himself. The tiny coal of alien ground still throbbed within his own. He tried to divest it, to lay it as a ground reinforcement in the floor, or his sheet, or even his own hair. It remained stubbornly stuck. Neither did it seem to be starting to melt into his own ground, converted from mosquito-ground to Dag-ground as a man might digest food—or at least, not yet. He wondered if he had, in that moment of sleepy irritation, planted a permanent infliction upon himself. Careless irritation. Not mortal panic. Not an overstretched, once-in-a-lifetime heroic reach, out of a heart, body, and ground pushed for an instant beyond human limits. Ground-ripping a mosquito was hardly a great act, nor of grave moral weight.
Except that ground-ripping anything wasn’t a human act at all. It was malice magic, the very heart of malice magic. Wasn’t it? Lakewalker makers used two kinds of groundwork, in a thousand variations. They might persuade, push, or reorder ground within an object, to subtly alter or augment its nature. And so produce cloth that scarcely frayed, or steel that did not rust, or rope that was nearly impossible to break, or leather that repelled rain—or turned arrows. Or they might gift ground out of their own bodies; most commonly, into their wedding cords, but also as shaped or unshaped reinforcements laid in the matching region of another person’s ground, to speed healing, slow blood loss, fight shock or infection. But always, the limits of the groundwork were in the limits of the maker doing it. A malice stole ground from the world around it—limited, Dag swore, by nothing but its attention. And its attention ranged somewhere well beyond human, too. But while a person altered gifted ground into their own as slowly as a healing wound, malices seemed to do so almost instantaneously, not by persuasion but by simple, brute, and overwhelming force. Powered by yet more ground-ripping, in a widening spiral. Perhaps such transformative power was not a human capacity. Even from the malice, Dag had only snatched deadly fragments. Anyone trying to ground-rip something whole the way a malice did might simply burst, like a man trying to drink a lake. But a man might drink a cup of lake water… Was a mosquito like a cup of water? Dag considered the question, and then considered, more dubiously, the sanity of the mind that could even frame it. Or maybe he was coming down with brain-worms, like Whit’s fabulous rumor. Maybe he simply needed to sleep it off. Surely the splotch would go down overnight like any other mosquito bite, absorbed by Dag’s ground just as his body healed more purely physical welts. He snorted and rolled over, firmly shutting his eyes. It still itched, though.
By the next morning Dag’s whole left arm was so swollen he couldn’t get his arm harness on. Fawn was inclined to declare a day of rest in Lumpton Market, but Dag insisted he could ride one-handed, and Whit, anxious to pass at last beyond the places he knew, was not much help on the side of reason. By mid-afternoon Fawn was not happy to have her judgment confirmed when Dag fell into a fever. As if she needed any more evidence, he settled on a blanket and watched without protest as she and Whit set up their camp just off the old straight road south. A chill mist rose from the damp ground in the gathering dusk, but at least no more rain threatened. “All this from a mosquito bite?” she murmured, sliding in beside him as he drew up his knees and hunched around the swollen arm. He shrugged. “I don’t think it’s going to kill me. That spot in my ground is already starting to feel less hot.” She felt his forehead in doubt. But his skin was merely over-warm, not burning-dry, and he ate and drank, if with an indifferent appetite. When they rolled up to sleep she filched her brother’s spare blanket away from him to drape on Dag, ruthlessly ignoring Whit’s yelp of protest. But by the following day, the swelling had gone down, and Dag claimed the ground-welt was being
absorbed much like a normal ground reinforcement, if more slowly. He nevertheless grew flushed and silent in the afternoon; by his pinched brows and glazed eyes Fawn suspected a thumping headache. As unshakable as Fawn felt in the lee-side of Dag’s full strength, she hated her sense of helplessness when he was laid up. He had a store of uncanny Lakewalker healing knowledge in his head and a host of patroller tricks at his fingertips, impressive enough that Hickory Lake’s chief medicine maker had tried to recruit him into her craft. But who cured the medicine maker? A farmer midwife or bonesetter would not be much help in some strange ground-illness, and Fawn realized that despite all this summer’s experiences, she didn’t actually know how to find a Lakewalker at need. It was too far back to Hickory Lake, and still several days ride to the Lakewalker ferry camp on the Grace River. Patrols or couriers did stop now and then at the inn at Lumpton Market or that hotel in Glassforge, but it could be days or even weeks till any chanced along. The camp that Chato’s patrol had hailed from was closer, she was fairly sure, but she didn’t even know how to find that. That at least had a cure; she asked Dag that night where it was to be found, and he described it to her. For the first time, she began to see the point of their little patrol of three: not only because it would take two Bluefields to even lift Dag, but because one of them could stay with him while the other rode for help. If strange Lakewalkers would even give help to Dag, half-exiled as he was. Which was a new and ugly thought. But by the next day, Dag seemed much recovered. At noon they stopped at the roadside farm with the public well where they had first encountered each other, and reminisced happily over small details of shared memory while stocking up on the farmwife’s good provender. That evening found them quite near to Glassforge. Dag opined they could detour off the straight road tomorrow to show Whit the blight and still make town before dark.
They could not have chanced on a prettier day for a ride up into the unpeopled hills east of the old straight road. The sky was the dry deep blue that only the northwest winds brought to Oleana, the air as cool and tangy as apple cider. The trees here were mostly holding their leaves, and the brilliant sun turned their colors blinding: bright crimson edged with blood maroon, yellow gold, a startling flash of nightshade-purple here and there in the drying weeds. Dag’s eyes grew coin-gold in this light, like autumn distilled. Fawn was glad it was Dag leading them up into these game-tracked humps and hollows, because she’d have lost her way as soon as their turn-off was out of sight. If not really been lost; she’d only to strike west to find the road again. But the blight was a smaller target—thankfully—some ten or twelve miles in. The sun was climbing toward noon when Dag halted Copperhead on the beaten trail they’d been following. A frown tensed his mouth. Fawn kicked her mount Weft alongside, though Copperhead laid his ears back for show. “Are we close?” “Yes.” Her own recall of the place was too dizzied to permit recognition. She’d been carried in head-down and ears ringing, a prisoner, retching from blows and terror. And carried out…her memory shied from that. Dag pointed up the trail. “This path goes to the ravine on the same side I came down. The visible blight should start about two hundred paces along.”
“And the blight you can’t see?” He shrugged, though his face stayed strained. “I’ve been feeling the outer shadow for the past half-mile.” “Healing as you still are, should you go any closer?” He grimaced. “Likely not.” “Suppose you wait here, then. Or better, back down the trail a ways. And I’ll just take Whit in for a quick peek.” He couldn’t argue with the logic of that. A hesitation, a short nod. “Don’t linger, Spark.” She nodded and waved Whit on in her wake. He looked a trifle confused as he pressed his sturdy horse up next to hers. As Warp and Weft fell into a well-matched pace, he asked, “What was that all about?” “Being on blight makes Lakewalkers sick. Well, it makes anybody sick, but I was afraid it would send Dag into an awful relapse like after Greenspring. Glory be that he saw the sense of waiting for us.” Whit glanced around. “But everything is drying up and dying back right now. How do you spot blight in winter? How is it that you’re supposed to tell this here blight from…oh.” They reined in at the lip of the ravine. They must be very near to what had been Dag’s vantage, that day. The cave was a deep hollow halfway up the ravine’s far side, with a long outcrop of rock shielding the opening almost like a wall. The ravine itself was a dusty gray, devoid of vegetation but for a few skeletal tree trunks. The glimmering creek flowing through in an S-curve was the only movement, the only source of sound. No birds, no insects, no small rustles in the dead weeds. Even the breeze seemed stilled. The peculiar dry cellar-odor of malice habitation wafted faintly up to Fawn, and she swallowed, feeling sickened despite the sun on her back. “That is the weirdest color I ever did see,” Whit allowed slowly. “It’s not hardly a color at all. Dag was right. It doesn’t look like…anything.” Fawn nodded, glad Whit seemed to have his wits with him today, because she didn’t think she could have borne stupid jokes right now. “Dag thinks that malice came up from the ground and hatched out right here. Malices all seem to start out pretty much the same, but then they change depending on what they eat. Ground-snatch, that is. If they catch a lot of people, they get to looking more human, but there was one up in Luthlia that mostly ate wolves, that they say grew pretty strange. Dag thinks the first human this one caught must have been a road bandit, hiding out up here, because after it grew its mud-men and caught more folks, it made them all be its bandit gang, at first.” Though some of the men might not have been as mind-slaved as all that, which was in its way an even more disturbing notion. “The bandits who kidnapped me off the road brought me here. Dag was tracking them, and saw.” From here, Dag would certainly have had a clear view of the mud-men carting her in like a sack of stolen grain. “He went in after them—after me—all by himself. No time to wait for his patrol. It wasn’t good odds. But he tossed me his sharing knife, and I managed to get it in the malice. And the malice…” She swallowed again. “Melted. I guess you could say. Malices are immortal, the Lakewalkers claim, but the sharing knives kill them. Kill them in their ground.” “What are sharing knives, anyhow? Dag keeps mentioning them and then stopping.” “Yes, well. There are reasons. Lakewalkers make them. Out of Lakewalker bones.” “So it’s true they rob graves!”
“No! They’re not stolen. Dag—any Lakewalker would get mighty offended to hear you say that. People will their thighbones to their kin to be, be, like, harvested after they die. It’s part of the funeral. Then a Lakewalker knife maker—Dag’s brother Dar is one—cleans and carves and shapes the bone into a knife. They don’t use sharing knives for any other purpose than killing malices.” “So that’s what you stuck in the malice? Whose thighbone was it, d’you know? Does Dag?” Fawn supposed gruesome interest was better than none. “Yes, but it’s more complicated than that. Carving the bone itself is only the first step. Then the knife has to be primed. With…with a heart’s death.” She took a breath, not looking at Whit. “That’s the hardest part. Each knife, when it’s made, is bonded to its Lakewalker owner. Someone who has volunteered to share—to donate his or her own death to the knife. When such Lakewalkers think they’re dying, either old and sick or hurt mortal bad, they, they put the knife through their own hearts and capture their deaths. Which are trapped in the knives. So every primed knife costs two Lakewalker lives, one for the bone and the other for the heart’s priming. Ownership is…you can’t buy such a knife. It can only be given to you.” She glanced up to see Whit squinting and frowning. He said slowly, “So, it’s sort of like…a human sacrifice stuck in a canning jar and preserved, to take out and use later?” Fawn thought of the long rows of wax-sealed glass jars she and Mama had filled and sealed and set in the pantry only last week. The domestic comparison was apt, but, oh dear. “Pretty much. But I’m not sure you should say that to Dag. Lakewalkers keep their knives private and treat ’em as sacred. It’s their kin, you see. And their grief. But that’s what sharing knives share. Deaths.” Whit blinked some more, then frowned across the ravine and said, “How far back does that cave go?” “It’s not deep.” “Can we go in?” Fawn wrinkled her nose. “I guess so, if we don’t stay long.” Whit glanced down the steep drop, nodded, and slid off and tied his horse to a tree. Fawn did the same and followed him in a scramble down the slope. Black shale cracked and slid under her feet. Even the clay dirt in the gully-washes, which should have been dull brown, had that same drained gray tinge. Whit picked his way across the stream on stones, not looking back till he reached the cave mouth, when he turned around to watch her puffing and lagging after him. “Keep up, Runt.” She was shivering inside too much to growl at the old taunt. She labored up beside him, and the dry, sour malice-smell of the cave hit her full-face. How long till the rains and snows wash this clean? Horridly blithe, he strolled into the shadow of the overhang. “What a great place to camp this would be! It really looks like it should be a bandit hideout.” He kicked at a broken old keg, part of a scattering of trash no one had bothered to cart away. “So where were you two, exactly? Where was this malice? How far did Dag have to throw his knife? He must not have known you then. It was a wonder you caught it.” “Here…” Simplify. “The malice picked me up by my neck.” She fingered the dented scars. Here. Here, right here, the malice ripped the ground from my unborn child, poor half-wanted waif, here she died, here Dag was nearly torn apart by howling man-beasts, here I struck, right here the malice screamed and stank and shattered, here sacrifice tangled with sacrifice, here I miscarried, here I hurt, here I started bleeding… “I have to get out of here,” Fawn said aloud. She could not see clearly. She was shaking so badly she could scarcely breathe. There is no simple to be had, here.
“Hey, are you all right?” Whit called as she stumbled out into the air again. There wasn’t enough light in the wide green world to make that cave anything but a pit of darkness, to make her anything but stupid, stupid, stupid… She became aware she was weeping, not sobs, but weird dry gulps. Whit, trotting after her, said, “Is the blight making you sick? Here, maybe I…I better take you back to Dag, all right?” She nodded, trying and failing to steady her breathing, which seemed to stagger and stick. She tried to swallow between gulps of air, but her throat was too tight. Whit put a tentative, anxious arm around her waist and half-supported, half-hustled her back down and across the creek. She slipped and put one foot ankle-deep in the stream, gasping at the chill wet, which at least got some more air into her. By the time they reached the ravine’s top and Whit boosted her back up into her saddle, she was only wheezing. Her cheeks were wet, her nose beslimed; she dragged an arm fiercely across her face, and coughed. When they reached the place where they’d sent Dag back, she looked up through the silver blur to see Copperhead cantering up the trail toward them. Dag pulled up with a jerk that made the gelding shake his head and snort. A black scowl, a brutal voice the like of which she’d never heard before from Dag’s mouth, demanded of Whit, “What did you do to her?” “Nothing!” said Whit, alarmed. “I didn’t do nothing! She was nattering on about, about this and that, and then all of a sudden she took a fit o’ the vapors! I thought it might be the blight, though I didn’t feel anything like. Here, you take her!” Dag discarded his menace as he turned a keen look on Fawn; searching her body and her ground both, she thought. He dropped his reins on Copperhead’s neck and leaned over to pull her from her saddle into his lap. She clutched him hard around the chest, burying her face in his shirt, inhaling the scents of linen and warm Dag-sweat to drive the deathly cellar-smell away. Arm and strong spread hand, his beautiful hand, clutched her in return. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled into his shirt. “I didn’t think it would all pile back into my head like that. It was the smell of the cave. All of a sudden I couldn’t breathe. Stupid…” “Shh, no,” he said into her hair. His understanding seemed to wrap her more warmly than his arms. He raised his chin, jerked it at Whit. “Bring her horse. We need to get away from this bad ground. Maybe get everyone something to eat.” Copperhead turned obediently at the pressure of Dag’s leg, or perhaps ground; in any case, the gelding seemed to grasp that this was no time for tricks. They all rode a good two miles back down the trail before Dag turned off. He led down over a bank and up to a little clearing with a spring seeping out of a rock overhang. A pretty picnic spot. Patroller groundsense at work? In any case, Dag said merely, “This’ll do.” He murmured in her ear, “Can you get down all right?” “Yes. I’m better now.” Not all better, no, but at least she’d stopped sniveling. He let her slide off Copperhead’s shoulder, and he and Whit bustled about pulling food packets from the saddlebags, finding the tin cups, loosening girths, and permitting the horses to browse. Dag kept a close eye on Fawn till she’d settled on a rock, drunk spring water, and taken a few bites of the rather dry cheese wrapped in bread left from yesterday’s supply. He finally sat down cross-legged beside her. Whit perched on a nearby fallen log that was not too damp with moss and rot. “Sorry,” Fawn repeated, swallowing and straightening up. “Stupid.”
“Shh,” Dag repeated, gripping her calf in a reproving, heartening little shake. “None o’ that.” Whit cleared his throat. “I guess that malice was pretty scary.” “Yeah,” said Fawn. The spring water was welcomingly cool; why did her throat feel so hot? She scrubbed at her scars. Whit added magnanimously, “Well, you’re just a girl, after all.” Fawn merely grimaced. In his own way, she supposed Whit was trying. Very trying. Dag’s brows drew in, as if he were struggling to parse what Whit meant; he clearly didn’t see the connection between the two statements. And then he did, and got a pretty odd look. He said, “I’ve seen the first encounter with a malice devastate fully trained patrollers. I was on sick leave for weeks after my first, though the thing never touched me.” Whit cleared his throat, made a wise decision not to try to retrieve his remark, and asked instead, “How many have you seen? Altogether?” “I’ve lost count,” said Dag. “That I’ve slain by my hand with a knife of my own, twenty-six.” “Twenty-seven,” Fawn corrected. He smiled at her. “Twenty-six and a half, then. My knife, your hand.” Fawn watched Whit’s lips move, counting up kills. No—knives. Lakewalker lives, and deaths. His brow wrinkled. Fawn put in hastily, “I told Whit about sharing knives. Tried to, anyhow. I’m not sure if he has it all straight.” Her anxious eyes quizzed Dag: Is that all right? He ducked his head, answering her look as well as her words. “Oh. Good. Thank you.” Whit scraped his boot toe across the moss. “Is that a lot of those knives to have had?” “Yes, actually.” “Did you…er…have a big family?” Fawn resisted the urge to knock her head—or maybe Whit’s—into a tree. He was trying. Dag was trying, too. He replied straightforwardly, “No. Folks—friends, kin of friends, other patrollers—gave them to me, because I seemed to have a knack for getting them used. A patroller can carry a primed knife for a long time and never encounter a malice, which makes the sacrifice seem—well, not vain. But folks like knowing when it all comes to something.” “That makes sense, I guess,” Whit allowed. He remembered to take a bite of bread and cheese. “You don’t have—do you have—one of those, um. Suicide knives?” “Unprimed knife, bonded to me?” Dag hazarded. Whit said, “Well, it would have to be unprimed, wouldn’t it? Stands to reason. Because if it was primed you’d be, um.” “I did have. Carried it with me for twenty years, in case. A lot of patrollers do.”
“Can I see—no, um. Did, right. What happened to it?” Dag glanced at Fawn; she gave a small headshake, No, we didn’t get to that part. “It met with an accident.” “Oh.” Whit blinked—daunted, Fawn prayed. But not quite enough, for he added curiously, “Whose bone was it?” “Kauneo’s. She willed one bone to me and the other to one of her surviving brothers. My tent-brother up in Luthlia.” Whit gave Dag a look partway between earnestly inquiring and leery. “Um?” He was already starting to learn caution about these sorts of questions, Fawn thought. And their answers. Dag took a drink of spring water and managed to reply with tolerable composure, “My first wife.” Fawn gave him a worried look, Are you all right with this? He returned her a fractional nod. Yes, he could talk about Kauneo now; they had come so far. Dag cleared his throat and added kindly, for even Whit’s f*ckless curiosity was faltering in the face of all this, “She was a patroller, too. She died in a malice war in Luthlia. She left me her own heart’s knife as well as a bone to make one for me. We think she rolled over on her knife in the field after she fell. Her brother said”—he drew air in through his nostrils—“she must have moved quick. Because she could not have been conscious for very long after…after she received her wounds.” “Is that where you—” Whit’s gaze moved to Dag’s left arm. Another short nod. “Same fight. I went down before she did, so I only have guesses. She was…just a girl, then. Five years younger than me.” Just a girl, thought Fawn, and Dag didn’t repeat those words by accident. “Oh,” said Whit. And, tentatively, “I’m, um, sorry.” Dag gave him another reassuring nod, and repeated his stock phrase, “It was a long time ago.” In your head, it sometimes turns into just yesterday, doesn’t it? thought Fawn curiously. Like me and the malice, back in the cave just now. Yes. Now I see how you knew. She bent over and took another bite of bread to quell the renewed flutter in her belly. Whit’s brows knit. “Were you really going to stick that bone knife in your own heart?” “Yes, if it chanced so.” It took Whit a little while to remember to chew and swallow after that one. He finally scratched his ear, and said, “Can’t you get another?” “Whit!” said Fawn indignantly. Dag made a little gesture with his fingers, It’s all right. “It’s not quite up to me. I’d need someone to give me a bone. Or an unprimed knife that didn’t get used that could be rededicated. I want one. I’d be bitterly ashamed to waste my death just for lack of a knife.” Fawn realized she hadn’t quite known that, for all she knew of Dag. Whit was reduced to blinking. Silently, praise be.
Whit inhaled. “Folks don’t know this. They say Lakewalkers are cannibals. That you rob graves. Eat your dead to make magic.” Dag said gently, “But now you know better.” “Um. Yeah.” Whit brightened. “So, that’s one farmer boy who’s learned something, huh?” “One down.” Dag sighed. “Thousands to go. It’s a start.” “Sure enough,” said Whit valiantly. Actually, he looked as if he were afraid Dag was about to put his head down and cry. Fawn was a little afraid of that as well, but Dag just smiled crookedly and creaked to his feet. “Let’s go see Glassforge, ducklings.”
4 Even in the late afternoon, the straight road approaching Glassforge was busy with traffic. Fawn watched Whit’s head turn as he took in the sight of strings of pack mules, goods-wagons gaily painted with the names of their businesses and their owners, and a big brick dray, returning empty from somewhere. The team of eight huge dun horses thundered past at a lumbering trot, hopeful for home, the bells on their harness shaking out bright sounds like salt along their path. The teamster and his brakeman, too, were impressive in fringed leather jackets decorated with tiny mirrors that flashed in the westering sun, red scarves knotted around their necks. Fawn thought the couple of burly loaders who rode with their legs dangling over the wagon’s tail might have been inclined to whoop at her, had she been a girl riding alone, but the presence of her escort turned their lewd stares into self-conscious nods, cheerily returned by Whit. Copperhead pretended to shy at this noisy vision, checked by a growl from his tired rider, and even gentle Warp and Weft swiveled their ears and looked faintly astonished. Whit patted his mount’s neck. “There, there, Warp. Don’t let those big bruisers discourage you. Nobody’s going to make you pull a ton of bricks.” His face rose to stare after the receding wagon. “That’d be a life, though, wouldn’t it, Fawn? I bet some of those wagons go as far as Tripoint or Silver Shoals or, or who knows where? Think of it! You’d get to see everywhere, talk to the whole world, and get paid for it. Sleep in a different place every night, I bet.” “The novelty of that wears off,” Dag advised, sounding amused. Scorning this with a look that said Old-people talk!, Whit went on, “I never thought of it, but I bet a town like Glassforge needs lots of horses, too. And drivers. I know how to drive a team. I wonder if I could get me one of those fancy jackets in town? I wonder if…” He trailed off, but Fawn had a clear sense of the mill wheels continuing to turn in his head, even if he’d temporarily disconnected them from his mouth. I bet you’re never going back to West Blue, Fawn thought. Any more ’n I am. She grinned in anticipation of showing off Glassforge to Whit, as pleased as if she’d invented the place herself, and wondered if this was anything like the pleasure Dag took in her. Dag never seemed to tire of showing her new things…no. It was a little more complicated than that. In her open delight, she made the world new to him again, and so drove his weariness away. It seemed a fair trade. Whit was gratifyingly amazed by the hotel in Glassforge, three stories high, built of local brick softened by trails of ivy, “bigger,” as he cried, “than Uncle Hawk’s new barn!” The corners of Dag’s mouth tucked up as Fawn earnestly explained to Whit how it was that patrols and couriers were always allowed to stay there for free, on account of some old malice the Lakewalkers had put down in these parts in the time of the present owner’s papa, which Whit thought a very good deal.
Fawn was secretly uncertain if the deal would extend to an ex-patroller of dodgy status traveling privately with a tail of farmer relatives, but when they dismounted in the hotel’s stable yard, she found she was still remembered from the past summer as the farmer heroine who’d slain the malice. She was welcomed by name by the excited horse boys and made much of by the owner’s wife when they went inside. Even more agreeable than having the best available rooms instantly offered up to them was the way Whit’s eyes grew wide as he took in her local fame. He didn’t even crack a joke about it. They hauled their bags upstairs to their chambers. By request, Fawn and Dag’s room was the same they had slept in before, full of happy memories. Better, it had a nice thick plank door between it and Whit’s room, with an oak bar that promised a night free of brothers, mosquitoes, or any other interruptions. Fawn was left with an hour before supper to run around and say hello to all the friends she’d made here in the summer: seamstresses, chambermaids, the cook and scullions. Whit trailed amiably. Fawn wasn’t quite sure who she was showing off to which, as several of the younger girls perked up no end at Whit, alarming him enough to make him very polite. The charm he unleashed upon Sal the cook was pure stomach-interest, though, as she was both married and motherly. “Sal let me do sitting-down chores while I was getting better and waiting for Dag to finish some patroller duties,” Fawn explained, inhaling deeply of the mouthwatering aromas of the hotel’s kitchen. Pots bubbled, a roast turned on a spit, pies cooled; a scullion ran a hopeful horse boy back outside to wait for scraps till after the patrons were fed. “I must have shelled ten thousand peas, but it kept me from going stir-crazy.” “You were so pale, at first!” agreed Sal. “I think my cookin’ helped put those roses back in your cheeks.” She patted one, leaving a smudge of flour. “I think it did, too,” said Fawn, brushing at the flour and smiling. “That ’n Dag.” Sal’s smile thinned a bit, and she glanced appraisingly at Whit. “So that patroller fellow with the missin’ hand must have got you home all right, after all.” Fawn nodded. “We weren’t too sure on him,” Sal admitted. “Some of us was afraid he’d gone and beguiled you, like they say Lakewalkers can. Though it’s true the ones we get here are usually pretty well-behaved. How they carry on with each other being not our business.” Fawn raised her chin. “If there was any beguiling going on, I’d say it was mutual. We married each other.” “He never!” said Sal in astonishment. Fawn gestured at her brother. “Whit stood witness.” “Yep,” said Whit. “They said their promises in the parlor in West Blue in front of the whole family, and signed the family book, and everything.” “Oh, honey…” Sal hesitated, looking troubled. “He was a right disturbin’ fellow, the way all patrollers are, though it was plain he’d took a shine to you, but…I thought better o’ him than that. Don’t you two know that Lakewalkers don’t recognize marriages to us folks? I’m afraid he was pulling the wool over your eyes, and your family’s, too.”
“No, he didn’t,” said Fawn. “We were married Lakewalker-style at the same time—we wove and swapped our binding strings as sound as any Lakewalker couple ever did. See?” She held out her left wrist, wrapped in the dark braid, and wriggled it to let the gold beads on the cord-ends bounce and glimmer, showing it off for the third or fourth time in this evening’s rounds. “Is that what those are?” said Sal doubtfully. “I’ve seen them hair bracelets on some of the patrollers here, time and time.” “Wedding cords, yes.” Whit said, “It’s like they got married twice over. I don’t think Dag was taking any chances by that time. I will say, when he ties a knot, it stays tied.” Sal’s eyes grew as round as her mouth. “And his people accepted it?” Fawn tossed her head. “I won’t claim his kin were all happy, but they didn’t say we weren’t married.” “Well, I never!” The serving boys bounced in, the scullions called, and Sal had to set aside her fascinated pursuit of this gossip in favor of getting supper ready. She shooed her guests out of her kitchen with visible regret. In the corridor to the dining room, Whit paused in puzzlement. “Fawn…” “Hm?” “Dag’s kin did accept those cords of yours, right? They didn’t claim you were just, um…running around together, right?” Fawn lowered her voice. “In truth, there were four or five opinions on that. Some took ’em for true, some accused us of trickery, and some didn’t care nohow about the cords, they wanted to deny us any-road. They weren’t just arguing with Dag, mind; they were arguing with each other as well. We kind of set the cat amongst the pigeons with those cords. When we left, I expect it took the urgency out of the debate.” Truly, Dag hadn’t wanted to force a decision, lest it become a quick and simplifying no. “These rules of theirs—do they make them camp by camp, or everywhere at once?” “Camp by camp, but the camps stay in touch with one another. Couriers carry patrol reports, plus letters between the camp councils. And folks’ personal letters. And lots of gossip, Dag says. Young patrollers exchange between camps to train up, and parties travel with trade goods. And folks go on visits to kin, sometimes. So news has ways of getting around. Lakewalkers don’t let themselves get cut off from each other.” She frowned. “I do wonder how Dag will go on, away from his people. That’s not natural, for a Lakewalker. They made us both plenty mad, but…I do wonder.” “Huh,” said Whit. Whit must have made a good impression on Sal, because the portions soon set before the three of them at the dinner table were generous. After they had all pretty much foundered on the glut, Whit went off to the kitchen to compliment her. He came back full of a scheme to go reconnoiter Glassforge after dark, which Dag—Fawn was grateful to see—had the sense to discourage. “It’s been a long day,” Fawn seconded. “Dag’s still recovering, you know.” Dag smiled at her from lidded eyes that looked anything but sleepy, dark and a bit glittery, and she dimpled back at him.
“Oh, yeah,” said Whit vaguely. “And you weren’t doing too well yourself, earlier. Tomorrow, then.” He contented himself with going off to visit the horses and maybe chat with the hotel stable’s horse boys. Fawn and Dag went straight to bed, but not to sleep. Where Fawn made the astonishing and delightful discovery that Dag’s ghost hand was starting to come back, at least enough to do a few blissful, blushful things with. Fawn’s opinion of the medicine maker who had predicted such a recovery went up several notches. They did hear Whit come in, mainly because he knocked on the wall and bade them good night. Fawn smothered a giggle as Dag raised his head and drawled back similar good wishes—very blandly, considering his position just then.
The next morning after breakfast the three of them strolled to the town center, where a street off the market square led down to the little river that flowed past Glassforge toward the Grace. Tributary creeks behind dams fed several mill wheels, though at the moment the dry weather, a boon to harvesters and road travelers all over Oleana, had left the water so low in the main stream that only lightly loaded skiffs and narrow boats could take away the handiwork of the town’s artisans. The autumn air was acrid from the wood smoke and coal smoke rising from a forge, a couple of iron furnaces, a wagon-wright’s, a big smithy, a pottery yard, and, of course, the town’s celebrated glass-makers. At one of these, as Fawn had hoped, they found Sassa Clay, one of her best friends from the summer’s misadventures with the malice. Red-haired Sassa seemed equally delighted to see them, and pleased to meet Whit. He had a refreshing masculine disinterest in marriage customs of any kind, but was very keen on glass and local trade, proudly leading a tour of his glassworks for the new audience. Sassa was not much older than Whit, and the two young men hit it off so well Fawn had no guilt about leaving them to each other’s company after lunch and retiring with Dag back to the hotel for—he said—a nap. It wasn’t a lie; she was sure a nap would ensue eventually. She became concerned when Whit did not show up at the hotel for dinner, but Dag sensibly pointed out that Sassa knew perfectly well how to find them here if there were any emergencies to report, and Fawn relaxed. She wondered if she might parlay their two planned nights of rest here into three, but Dag was of the opinion that the dry spell couldn’t last much longer, and truly, the night’s chill breathed of the coming change. Whit returned so late, they were actually sleeping. Fawn woke muzzily in the dark to hear him clumping around on attempted tiptoe, and the creak of his bed as he climbed into it. She cuddled back into the warmth of Dag’s grip, reassured.
She was less reassured when she went out to the stable in the frosty dawn to tell the horse boys to have Warp and Weft ready after breakfast—Dag would saddle Copperhead himself—only to find the team gone. And so, she discovered when she checked his room, was Whit. She muffled her panic when she spotted his saddlebags still in a heap by his bed. Descending the staircase wondering whether to drag out Dag and his groundsense for a search, she met Whit breezing back in through the hotel’s stable-yard door. “Where have you been?” demanded Fawn in some exasperation. “Where are the horses?” “Sold ’em,” said Whit smugly.
“What? We still have two days of riding ahead of us!” “I know that. I’ve made arrangements.” At her look of disbelief, he added in a stung tone, “I sold Warp and Weft to Sassa’s boss. He gave me a fair price.” “I thought you said you were going to try that coal hauler. On your way back,” she added pointedly. “Yeah, well…I liked the glassworks’ stable better. Smelled cleaner, y’know? Plus, you have to figure—a glass wagon isn’t going to race their horses, or overload them. They’re pretty much bound to travel slow and careful.” He nodded in satisfaction, apparently picturing his team in this gentle labor. This appeal could not fail to reach Fawn, but she raked her fingers through her hair nonetheless. “Yes, but—how are we supposed to get to the river? Load all the bags on Copperhead and lead him?” “No! Don’t be stupid. I made a deal. Sassa’s boss is sending two wagonloads of glass goods down to the river crossing for the Silver Shoals trade. I get to help drive, and load and unload, and you get to ride for free. Dag can tag alongside on Copperhead.” Fawn hesitated in new confusion. “So…are you going to come back and work as a teamster for the glassworks, or what?” Whit shrugged. “They have fellows for that. I don’t know. But anyway, you and Dag have to hurry up. The wagons are all loaded and about ready to leave. They want to catch the light, with the days shortening.” And so Fawn found herself hustled through what she’d planned as a leisurely breakfast, and forced to make hasty farewells to all the folks at the hotel. Dag, old patroller that he was, adjusted to the surprise departure without effort, though he did refuse to be hurried shaving. The extra bags were only piled across Copperhead’s saddle long enough to lead him down into town. The well-sprung freight wagon, with Fawn clinging atop a pile of straw-stuffed slat boxes, headed south out of Glassforge before the morning sun had melted last night’s frost from the weeds lining the ditches. They passed the sand-pit where men were digging the fine white sand that was the basis of the town’s famous industry. From the loads being hauled away, Fawn guessed Warp and Weft might have some heavier work to do than delivering finished glass, though for the moment they were hitched on as wheelers to this very wagon—on trial, she suspected. Was Whit on trial for future employment, too? The lead wagon of their little train was being driven by a grizzled fellow named Mape, setting as decorous a pace as Whit had envisioned, but which made her wonder just how long it was going to take them to reach the ferry. He had a skinny youth up beside him, Hod, who seemed to be there to help with the horses and load and unload, like Whit. Their own team of four was handled by a comfortably middle-aged man named Tanner, who, Fawn soon learned, was a something-cousin of the owners of the glassworks, and who had a wife and children back in Glassforge. Whit’s questions about the glass business got them over any mutual shyness pretty quick. Fawn edged forward to listen; Dag rode nearby, so quiet and self-contained you might not notice he was listening, too. When Whit paused, Tanner, with a glance over his shoulder at her, took a little breath and asked her about the malice she and Dag had slain this summer. Fawn blinked, first at the realization that his question had been hovering on his tongue for a while, and had taken him some effort to spit out, and then at the oddity of anyone having to work up courage to talk to her. But she answered him steadily, giving him the simplified version, including, after a brief look to Dag, an equally simplified version of how sharing knives worked. This parted Tanner’s lips and sent his brows halfway to his hairline; he glanced aside at Dag but shied from speaking to him directly. Whit chimed in with a vivid description of the blight and a recommendation amounting to a sales pitch to visit it.
“I guess I should,” said Tanner, shaking his head in wonder. “I didn’t have family directly involved with that mess, the way poor Sassa was caught up, but I’d heard a lot about it—except the very center. It all makes more sense, now. Hope you don’t mind. I didn’t like to ask you about it in front of Mape up there”—he nodded toward the back of the grizzled teamster, safely out of earshot through both distance and the wagons’ rumbling—“on account of he lost his wife’s nephew in the ruckus, and has feelin’s.” “I’m sorry,” said Fawn. “Was he ground-ripped, like?” inquired Whit, morbidly curious. Tanner looked grim. “I think that would have been easier, all told. He was one of the ones took up by the bandits and pressed into their gang. It was a bad time, after, sorting out who was really a bandit and who was tranced by the blight bogle. In the end it was locals got pardoned and strangers got hanged, mostly, which I don’t think was always right. But Mape’s nephew was killed outright by the Lakewalker patrollers, in the fight when they caught up with the bandits. Which maybe saved the family a hangin’, but I’m not sure Mape’s wife sees it that way.” “Oh,” said Whit. Fawn swallowed. “Was he a sort of dun-blond boy?” “No, dark-haired.” Fawn let out her breath in secret relief. Not the one Dag had shot in front of her, then, saving him from a hanging for sure. Dag, riding alongside, had gone quiet—quieter—and expressionless, and it occurred to her that maybe her assailant wasn’t the only one whose evil career Dag had personally ended on that patrol. He had been in on the attack on the bandit camp the night before, she knew, which was how he’d happened to be trailing her kidnappers in the first place. He’d run low on arrows. Some must have found targets… “Thanks for the warning,” she said to Tanner. “I shouldn’t like to step on anyone’s feelings.” He nodded cordially enough. Glancing at the skinny youth beside Mape, riding along with his back rounded and his hands dangling between his knees, she added, “So what about Hod? Was he caught up in it all?” “No, he was way too much of a homebody.” After a long pause, Tanner added, “Hod’s a bit of a sad sack, if you want my opinion. He was an orphan, living with his older sister, till her husband threw him out not long back for laziness and—he said—thievin’. Sassa Clay took a pity on him and let him put up in the glassworks’ stable to look after the hosses. Which he does do middlin’-well, I admit, despite us finding him sleeping in the straw half the time.” “Will he work up to driver?” asked Fawn, wondering if this was Whit’s competition for the coveted job. “Hard to say. He’s not real bright. Mape wouldn’t let him touch the reins of his team, for sure.” Tanner lowered his voice. “I’m not sayin’ the boy’s vicious, mind, but it’s true about the thievin’. I’ve seen him sneaking. Only food, so far. Missus Clay slips him extra scraps, now and then, but it doesn’t seem to have stopped him. I’m afraid he’s gonna work up to something bigger someday soon and get into real trouble. So, um…watch your bags.” Did Tanner mean for their sakes, or for Hod’s? It was hard to tell. Truly, when they all stopped for lunch and to water and bait the horses, it seemed to Fawn that the lanky youth had little going for him. Hod’s dishwater hair was dull and limp and in need of a cut, his skin was bad, his teeth doubtful, and he moved in a habitual slouch. He was inarticulate to the point of muteness;
her couple of attempts to say a friendly word to him threw him into complete confusion. He seemed outright afraid of Dag, and went wide around him. Fawn wasn’t even sure if Hod was his real name. Whit was taken aback when he made the discovery that grub was not provided for the drivers and loaders, but that they were expected to bring their own, a little detail of planning that had evidently escaped his notice—and Fawn’s too, in the morning’s hustle. Dag let them both flounder and recriminate for a bit before blandly fetching the provisions from his saddlebags that he’d had Sal pack up while he was shaving. He wasn’t too dry about it, but he did wait and make Whit ask, humbly, for a share before portioning it out. Just enough of a dig, Fawn thought, to make certain that neither of them were like to make a similar mistake again.
Dag enjoyed watching Fawn and Whit take in the scenes south of Glassforge, on a road new to them both, if old to Dag. He hadn’t ridden this particular stretch for several years, though. Whit kept asking if the craggy little hills cloaked in color that now rose on both sides of them were mountains yet, and Dag had to keep disillusioning him. Although Dag’s personal definition of a mountain was anything high enough to kill you if you fell off it, and thus covered any precipice from ten to a thousand feet high, so he supposed these rucked-up slopes aspired to the name. The land grew less settled as it pinched more sharply, and the hamlets clinging to the straight road fell farther apart. Darkness overtook them several miles short of the village that was the teamsters’ usual stopping point on this route, a mishap that the one called Mape blamed, grumblingly, on their late start, but which the more tolerant Tanner chalked up to the shortening of the daylight. Everyone pulled out their dinner packets and drank from the roadside spring that had prompted the halt while the two men debated whether to rest the horses and continue on slowly—more slowly—by lantern light, or stop here and sleep under the wagons. No rain threatened, but the chill creeping from the hollows pushed consensus toward the lantern scheme; Whit blithely volunteered Dag to ride ahead with a lantern suspended from his hook, a suggestion that made Fawn grimace. The prospect of combining a burning and maybe drippy oil lantern with a cranky Copperhead, tired and bored from the day’s plod, made Dag say merely, “I’ll think about it.” Dag walked around the spring, stretched his back, and sat down against a buckeye tree, extending both his legs and his groundsense. He’d kept closed all day in the presence of strangers and their chaotic farmer grounds. His reach was out to two hundred paces tonight, maybe? He still felt half-blinded. After pulling off Copper’s bridle and loosening the girth, Dag had turned him loose to browse under light ground contact. In the deepening shadows, Dag could better hear the ripping and munching than see with his eyes, but in his groundsense the gelding was an old familiar brightness, almost brighter than the boy Hod. Hod had gone to relieve himself up in the bushes and was now circling back. Keeping to the shadows, easing up toward Copperhead… Dag came alert, though he did not open his eyes. Was the dimwitted boy contemplating a little attempted filching? Dag considered his responsibilities. Hod was no young patroller of Dag’s; still, if the boy was to learn a sharp lesson not to go riffling in a Lakewalker’s saddlebags, it might be better all around to be sooner than later, with Dag and not with another. It would doubtless be an embarrassing scene, but it might save Hod much worse later on. Dag withdrew his ground contact from Copperhead and settled back to let nature take its course. Dag was expecting Copperhead’s angry squeal, head-snake, and cow-kick. He wasn’t expecting the ugly thunk or a scream of pain so loud, sharp, and prolonged. Blight it, what—? He yanked his ground-sense wide, then recoiled as the hot flush of injury swamped back in on him. Drawing breath, he wallowed to his feet.
The two teamsters pelted past him, with Whit on their heels crying warning for them to swing wide around the horse, who was snorting and backing. Fawn followed, having had the sense to pause and grab a lantern. Trying not to limp on his right leg, Dag stumbled after. Hod was lying on the ground on his back, writhing from side to side, clutching and clawing at his leg and openly bawling. His face was screwed up in pain, mottled red and pale and popping out cold sweat. And no wonder. By whatever evil chance, Copperhead’s shod hoof had scored a direct hit on the boy’s right kneecap, shattering the bone and pulping the flesh behind it. Blight it, blight it, blight it…! Tanner gasped. “What happened?” Dag said, “Horse kicked him when he went to poke in my bags for grub.” Which won him a sharp look upwards from Fawn—You knew? They would deal with that aspect later. Dag surged forward. To find himself blocked by the gray-haired and very solid Mape. “Don’t you touch him, Lakewalker!” Whit and Tanner knelt by Hod, trying unsuccessfully to soothe and still him as he beat his fists on the ground and howled. Dag unclenched his jaw and said to Mape, “I have some skills in field aid.” “Let him through,” cried Fawn, at the same moment as Whit called, “Dag, help!” Reluctantly, Mape gave way. “Fawn, get a fire going, for heat and light,” Dag instructed tersely. “We’ll need both.” She skittered off wordlessly. Dag knelt by Hod’s right knee, and let both hands, real and sputtering-ghostly, hover over it. Absent gods, I shouldn’t be attempting this. A quick ground match, to slow the internal bleeding—the joint was already swollen tight against the fabric of Hod’s trousers—to dull the blazing nerves…Dag’s right knee screamed in sympathy. He gritted his teeth and ignored the ground-echo. Hod stopped howling and just gasped, staring up wild-eyed at Dag. In a few minutes that seemed much longer, the men had Hod laid out on a blanket and his trousers off, an operation he tried to resist and that made him cry some more, though whether from pain or shame Dag was not sure. He apparently owned no underdrawers; Tanner dropped a blanket over his nether parts. All four wagon-lanterns and the new fire, bless Fawn, laid golden light on the unpleasant sight of the ruined joint, bulging, mottled, and already dark with blood beneath the shiny skin. Shards of bone pressed against the skin from the inside, and each of Hod’s shudders threatened to push one through. “Can you do anything, Lakewalker?” asked Tanner. “’Course he can!” asserted Whit valiantly. “I’ve seen him mend broken glass!” “This is bad,” said Dag. “The kneecap’s floating in about six pieces, and one tendon is nearly torn through. This needs a lot more than splinting and rest.” I shouldn’t even be thinking about this without another medicine maker to guard me from groundlock, or worse. There’s good reasons they work in pairs. Forty miles to the closest other Lakewalkers tonight, down the road to the ferry camp at Pearl Riffle. Eighty miles round-trip. Not even Copperhead could do it, even if a real medicine maker would come out for an injured farmer, an event so unlikely that it would make some kind of history. “Is he gonna cut off my leg?” sobbed Hod. “Don’ let him go cuttin’ on me! Can’t work, nobody’ll give me money, can’t go back, Hopper’ll beat me again if I go back…”
Hopper? Oh, Hod’s tent-brother—brother-in-law, Dag corrected himself. Some tent-brother. “Hurts,” wept Hod. No one doubted him. “Dag…?” said Fawn in a small, uncertain voice. “Can you…do anything?” She made a little gesture toward his left arm. “Any groundwork?” A simple ground reinforcement was not going to be enough here, and Dag had, absent gods knew, no prior affinity with this boy the way he did with Fawn to give him subtle routes into his body and ground. He looked into Fawn’s huge, dark, scared, trusting eyes. Swallowed. And said, “I can try.” He settled down cross-legged by Hod’s right knee, stretched his back, which popped, and bent again. Tanner and Mape, kneeling on either side of the boy, looked at him fearfully. “How hard should we hold him down?” asked Tanner, and “Should he have a leather strap to bite?” asked Mape. This isn’t some farmer bonesetter’s bloody amputation, blight it! Dag shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that.” If it was going to work at all, that is. He brought his right hand and left…the sight of his useless hook suddenly irritated him immensely, and he undid the straps of its harness and cast it aside. Try again. Right hand hovering over left…stump. Come on, come on you blighted ghost thing, come out, get in there. Hod was whimpering, staring up at him in overwhelming horror. His terror beat on Dag in hot waves. I have to open to this ungodly mess of a child. One breath, two, three—Hod’s breath slowed and Dag’s sped, until their chests rose and fell in synchrony. Right hand over left, stroking, coaxing…and then it was there, invisible ground projection, sinking down slowly past Hod’s skin into the broken flesh and its swirling, agitated ground. Dag grasped the ground of the shattered bone fragments. His fleshly hand darted to the uninjured knee, to test and trace the song of its wholeness. Like that. Just like that. Sing it so. Dag began a low humming under his breath, far from musical, but he could feel the power in it. Fragments shifted, moved beneath the tight skin… This was nothing like so simple as welding a glass bowl back together, amorphous and uniform; these structures hid more structures inside them, going down and down and in and in. But this little edge might hook again to that, that to the other, this torn blood vessel find its mated end, and gently, so delicately, kiss and make up. Minute after minute, fragment after fragment. His groundsense was wholly concentrated on the puzzle before him; the world outside both their skins could have cracked open wide with the roar of a thousand thunders and Dag would not have noticed. This vessel and that splinter and that one and that one…This was why medicine makers worked with partners for deep healing. Somebody anchored outside had to be able to break into the fascination. Lest you keep spiraling down and in and down and in and not ever come up and out again. I can’t do it all. I have to stop before I spend myself broke. Patch and tie, and let it heal the rest of the way itself—even real medicine makers do it that way. Get out, old patroller, while you still can. He’d thought nothing could be harder than matching his ground with Hod’s, until he came to unmatch it again. He sensed Hod’s chest rise, and deliberately broke the rhythm of his breath with the boy’s. Let go, old patroller. Get out of here before you hurt your fool self. Let go. He blinked his eyes open on firelight and lantern light, and knew himself sinfully lucky not to be groundlocked. I overdid it, oh, I sure did. Dag drew a long, long breath, and awareness of his own body returned to him at last. Unfortunately. Except that Fawn had three blankets wrapped around his shoulders before the second shuddering shiver
shook him, and a basin thrust in his lap before his stomach heaved, and a cup of hot water held steadily to lips like cold clay. He took several grateful gulps, only spilling a little in his ague-like shakes. The hot liquid met his ascending dinner and forced it back down, and his stomach didn’t try again. “Guh,” said Dag. “Don’t try to talk,” said Fawn, and explained over her shoulder to someone, “This happened the last time. He goes all cold and sick for a while, but then he comes out of it.” Her worried eyes added to him, I hope. Dag found his voice at last, and mumbled, “Fawn, Whit, find two strong slats and some ties of some kind, cloth strips or whatever. Make Hod splints down each side of his leg like a bonesetter’s. Tie above and below the knee, firm but not tight. Keep it straight and still. It’s still going to be swollen up, and it has a lot of mending yet to do on its own. Blankets, something, get him warm, keep him warm. He can’t walk on it yet.” “He’s going to walk?” said someone, in a voice caught between awe and disbelief. “Not tonight, he’s not. And he’d better be carried to the wagon in the morning. He can use my stick later on, I guess.” But not tomorrow, because Dag was going to need it himself…He leaned toward the blurred, flickering orange light, and added plaintively, “More heat?” Logs dropped onto the flames, which spewed sparks and danced higher, so some delinquent god had heard his prayer, apparently. It was about ten minutes before he stopped shivering. “Should you lie down?” asked Fawn anxiously, kneeling beside him. “Eat a bite more?” Dag shook his head. “Not yet. Not done. There’s something else wrong. I felt it, when I was in there.” Her brows drew in, but she said nothing as Dag leaned forward and pulled the blanket a little down from Hod’s belly. The boy’s eyes widened, and he made a slight whimpering noise, but kept his hands clenched to his sides. Dag let his stump circle above the taut skin, just…there. “Did Copper kick him in the belly, too?” asked Fawn. “I don’t see any mark…” Dag gave another brief headshake. “No. Older trouble. The boy’s carrying a nasty monster of a tapeworm, inside him there.” Fawn recoiled, making an appalled face. “Eew!” Dag had dealt with mosquitoes, bedbugs, and lice, but the closest thing to an internal parasite he’d routed routinely was chiggers. All could be repelled with mere persuasion, or an even simpler bounce. They were nothing like this. “It’s got quite a grip in there.” He eyed Hod. “You, boy, have you been having crampy bellyaches?” Hod nodded fearfully, then looked around as if afraid to have admitted anything. Tanner and Mape had wandered near and stood watching and listening. “Yeah?” said Dag. “And bleeding? You bleed when you crap, sometimes?” Another reluctant nod. “Ever tell anyone?” Hod shook his head more vigorously.
“Why not?” A long silence. “Dunno.” “Scared?” Dag asked more gently. Reluctant pause. Nod. And a whisper, “Who’d I tell, anyways?” Dag’s brows twitched up. “Hungry all the time even with plenty of food to eat, weak and tired, bleeding…y’know, it doesn’t take a Lakewalker medicine maker to diagnose a tapeworm. It just takes someone noticin’.” “Not shiftless,” said Fawn. “Starving.” Tanner looked a bit sick, and Mape, curiously, looked even sicker. Dag’s arm circled again. “From the signs, I’d guess he’s been feeding this pet for a year or more. How long have you been feeling poorly, Hod?” Hod shrugged. “I always feel poorly, but usually it’s my nose. Belly’s been aching off and on since this time last year, I guess.” “Uh-huh,” said Dag. “Can you get rid of it?” asked Fawn. “Oh, please! It’s so horrid!” “Maybe. Give me a minute to think.” Ground-ripping the vile thing was right out. It was much larger than any mosquito, and besides just the idea of taking in tapeworm-ground was revolting, even if his own ground would convert it eventually. Dag essayed a trifle of persuasion, to no effect; the worm was not normally mobile. Besides, you wouldn’t just want it out; you’d want it safely dead, to keep it from spreading. So if smoothing and reinforcing disrupted ground caused flesh to heal, disrupting ground might…? The blighted thing was large compared to its constricted intestinal world, but in absolute terms, small. Just a tiny ground disruption. Squeeze it, roll it, twist it—turn it inside out—there. He felt the head of the creature pop, and a spurt of blood from its anchorage as it tore away. He pinched off the little vessels in Hod’s gut, aiding the wound to clot. Then recaptured the thin worm-body and went right down the line to destroy each segment. In a weird way, it felt a bit like spinning thread. With his ground-hand, inside someone else’s body…I don’t think I want to think about what I’m doing, here. But the worm was dying, and he managed to keep its roiling, writhing ground from sticking to his own. Hod made a wary noise, and his hands twitched; Fawn caught one, to keep it at his side, and gave him a big happy reassuring smile. Whit bit his lip, possibly on a bark of laughter, but Hod offered a confused half-smile to Fawn in return, as who could help doing so? And made no further move to fight off Dag. “Done,” Dag whispered at last, and sat up, folding his left arm inside his right. His exhausted ground projection petered out, as if his ghost hand were evaporating into mist, into nothing. Absent gods, I feel sick. His groundsense range seemed down to ten paces, or maybe ten inches. But at least he hadn’t groundlocked himself to the blighted worm. Count your blessings. One… Next time, he would hold out for a medicine shop and some simple dose of vermifuge, a course of treatment he suspected even a Lakewalker medicine maker would prefer. Dag had a vague notion that senior makers saved their costly groundsetting skills for serious dangers, like tumors. More than ever, he
regretted turning down Hoharie’s offer of real maker’s training; then he’d know what to do, instead of having to blunder around by guess. But Hoharie’d had no use for his farmer bride. Blood over the dam. Tanner and Whit settled Hod for the night. Dag dragged his bedroll around to the other side of the fire, away from the sight of his unappetizing patient. Victim. Whatever. He would’ve liked to retreat farther than that, but hated to give up the heat. Hod, exhausted by the shock and limp from the passing of his pain, dropped to sleep fairly soon. Dag, equally exhausted, did not. While Fawn, Tanner, and Whit went off to see to the horses, Mape came and squatted on his haunches beside Dag’s bedroll. After a while, he said, “I never guessed he was sick. Just thought he was lazy.” “I didn’t catch on either, at first.” Dag had been led down a false trail by Tanner’s talk, yes, but he’d only to open his groundsense to learn better. “I beat him, couple o’ times, when I caught him sleeping on the job,” Mape added. His voice was low, flat, expressionless. Suited for things confided in the dark, where no one could see. “I’m just sayin’. Thankee, Lakewalker.” “The knee should be good with a couple of weeks of rest. The other, you’ll start to see a difference in a couple of days, I’m guessing.” Dag could leave it at that. It was tempting. Oh, blight it. “I was cleaning up my own mess. I saw him sneak out to my bags. Thought I’d just let Copperhead teach him a lesson. Instead, I got taught. Can’t say as I enjoyed it.” “No,” agreed Mape. “Me neither.” He nodded, rose. Not friendly, exactly, but…acknowledging. That at least. He trod away into the dark. When Fawn finally came to lie down, Dag tucked her into the curl of his body like one of the cloth-wrapped hot stones she sometimes used for pain. He held her hard. It helped.
In the morning, Hod was laid in his bedroll in the back of Mape’s wagon, and Whit took Hod’s place as brakeman. Fawn sat up beside Tanner. Dag, too, moved his bedroll, saddle, and bags to the back of the second wagon and continued his lie-down. Copperhead, unnaturally subdued, clopped loose behind, but Fawn supposed Dag had the gelding back under his mysterious groundsense-tie. Dag appeared to doze in the sun, but he was not asleep. It reminded Fawn uncomfortably of that deep, drained fatigue that had overcome him after Greenspring. The Glassforge teamsters seemed to think little of it, but Whit, familiar with Dag’s usual restless energy, cast more than a few concerned looks over his shoulder as they rumbled down the road. Whit took over helping with Hod during their stops, at least. Hod still didn’t say much, but his gaze followed Dag around in something between worry and fascination. Tanner and Mape were kinder to him, which served only to confuse him, as though kindness were a baited trap into which he feared to fall. Dag was quiet all day. They put up for the night in a barn let by a roadside farm to travelers and their beasts—no hotel, but warmer and more sheltered than last night’s uncomfortable sleep on the ground. The next morning, Fawn was relieved when Dag seemed enough himself to climb back up on Copperhead for the last leg of the journey. Noon found the teams plodding up a long slope along a wooded ridge. Dag edged Copperhead alongside the wagon, and said to Fawn, “Climb on.” He had that elusive smile he wore when he looked forward to surprising her, so she stood up, balanced herself, and swung her leg over behind Dag. When she’d adjusted to a secure perch, he let Copperhead roll out in his long patrol walk, and they pulled
ahead as though the wagons had parked. At the top of the ridge, he let her slide down, and swung after her. Walking backward, he took her by the hand and brought her to the lip of the road. The valley of the Grace spread out below them in the gold-blue autumn light. The river seemed to have put on her party dress, her banks and bending hillsides a swirl of color: scarlet and purple-red, glowing yellow, bright brown. The water reflected the azure of the sky, save where it broke into a sparkling shoal, necklace to the dress. Brooches of boats slid upon the water—a distant keel, a broad, blunt ferry—with a girdle of flatboats pulled up along the farther shore. Fawn was dimly aware of Whit, trotting up panting to see whatever there was to see. She was more aware of Dag, watching her face. She wasn’t sure if he was seeing just the river valley reflected there, or something more, but his mouth softened in an ease that handed her joy back to her, to be passed back to him again, redoubled. “Oh,” said Whit, in a voice the like of which she’d never heard come out of him before. She glanced up, startled, to watch his lips part, his mouth grow round. Wonder, she thought, though you could well mistake it for a man punched in the stomach. “Lookit those boats. Lookit…” he went on, though she was fairly sure he’d forgotten there was anyone listening. “That’s one big river. Even half dry, it’s bigger than any river I ever seen. It’s like a road. A great grand road, running from mystery above”—he turned with the river’s curve, like a man dancing, twirling with his lady—“into mystery below. It’s like, it’s like…it’s like the best road ever.” He blinked rapidly. His eyes were shining. No, not shining. Wet.
5 Back aboard Copperhead, Dag rode close to the second wagon as they made the turn at the top of the ridge and started down the road into the valley. Fawn, beside Tanner, sat bolt upright and earnestly alert, ready to work the wheel-brake at the teamster’s word. In the front wagon, Whit had his head cranked sideways, goggling at the river. Dag’s eye followed his gaze. Half a mile upstream on this side, Pearl Riffle Camp was just visible amongst the thinning leaves, a scattering of tent-roofs—Fawn would have called them cabins, Dag supposed—along the wooded hillside. Opposite the Lakewalker camp, below the mouth of a creek, lay Possum Landing, the level stretch of shore where the ferry put in and where cargoes were traditionally transferred from the old straight road to the river, or vice versa. There were more farmer houses clustered upslope from the landing than the last time Dag had ridden through here, and more sheds for storing goods. Eight flatboats and a keel were presently tied to the trees along the muddy bank on that side, waiting for a rise in the water level to dare the shoals below; a good selection, though if the water rose suddenly from some big storm upriver, they could all be underway in an hour. But the water was still falling, judging from both the width of the mud margin and the fact that a couple of the flatboats, tied imprudently too close to the bank, now had their bows stuck in the drying mire. Even the wharf boat was half-grounded. Dag turned in his saddle to look over his shoulder. Half a mile below the glittering shoals on this side, where the river again curved out of sight, was the farmer hamlet of Pearl Bend, which also boasted a wharf boat serving the crossing, as it made sense to offload heavy cargo before hauling a boat up over the Riffle, or wait to load on till after successfully negotiating the hazard coming down. The Glassforge men would take the bulk of their goods there. Pearl Bend, too, boasted more roofs than Dag remembered; practically a village, now. Dag turned back to find the cautious glass-men pulling their wagons to a halt at a wide space in the road,
huddling toward the hillside. A troop of riders was coming up the slope, double file—a Lakewalker patrol, outbound from Pearl Riffle Camp, likely. A dozen and some men, maybe half that many women, a normal complement. Dag drew Copperhead in behind Tanner’s wagon and squinted down the track. He fought an impulse to open his crippled groundsense wide, closing it down instead. He could look with his eyes well enough. Outbound for certain, Dag decided, as first patrollers drew level with the wagons and fell into single file to pass. They appeared far too rested and tidy to be anything else. He suppressed a company captain’s inventory of the condition of every horse, rider, and weapon approaching. Not his job, anymore. The patrol leader, who had barely glanced at the wagons, looked up as he spotted Dag and urged his mount forward. Dag opened his groundsense just enough to keep Copperhead polite as the strange horse loomed near. “Courier?” demanded the patrol leader, a spare, middle-aged fellow with a shrewd eye. Because why else would a Lakewalker be riding alone, and if the news Dag bore was bad, perhaps this patrol was about to acquire a more urgent task than their routine search patterns. His mind would not connect Dag, in Lakewalker gear on what was obviously a patrol horse, with the party of farmers that his patrol was rounding. Dag touched his hand to his temple in a courteous salute, but said, “No, sir. Just travelin’ through.” The patrol leader’s shoulders eased in relief. “Any news from the north?” He meant patrol news, Lakewalker news. “All was quiet when I passed through Glassforge, three days back.” The leader nodded. He looked as if he’d like to pause for fuller gossip, but the last rider cleared the obstructing wagons and kicked her horse into a trot to take up her place in the re-forming double file. He contented himself with a return salute and a “Travel safely, then.” “You, too. Good hunting.” An acknowledging grimace, and he trotted after the others. Dag took back his place as Fawn’s outrider as the two wagons creaked into motion again. Fawn twisted around in her seat to watch the departing patrol, turned back, and glanced across at Dag. Concern shone in her big brown eyes, though for what cause Dag was uncertain. Tanner, too, cast a curious look over his shoulder. “So, all those Lakewalkers are going off to hunt for blight bogles, are they? With their, their ground-senses?” “Yes,” said Dag. “Pearl Riffle Camp doesn’t cover as big a territory as Hickory Lake—that’s my, was my, home camp. Hickory has eight, nine thousand folks, the biggest camp in Oleana. Doubt Pearl Riffle has eight or nine hundred. They can field maybe two or three patrols, barely a company. But their more important task is right here, keeping the ferry crossing open in case of need. If the Glassforge malice had gotten out of hand—more out of hand—we might have called on Lakewalker camps from south of the Grace to help out. Or the other way around, if they ran into trouble down there.” “The way Hickory Lake sent Dag’s company west to fight the malice that came up in Raintree, couple of months back,” put in Fawn, for Tanner’s sake. And, at Tanner’s next question, went on to give him an accurate summary of the summer’s campaign, if sketched in broad strokes, and all in terms a farmer might readily grasp, because, after all, Fawn was one. Which drew braver questions from the teamster in
turn. Dag listened in grateful silence, backing her with an occasional nod. This fruitful exchange lasted till the wagons reached the bottom of the long slope and turned across the narrow floodplain toward the river. When they reached the crossroads, Dag said, “Fawn, do you think you’d be all right staying with Whit for a little? I’d like to pay a visit.” He jerked his head upstream. “Sure. This is the camp where Saun and Reela stayed, right?” The two were fellow patrollers injured in the Glassforge fight, sent down here as the closest place to convalesce. Saun had been Dag’s own partner; Fawn had made friends of a sort with Reela, laid up in the hotel afterwards with a broken leg. “Yes,” Dag answered. “Do you have friends here? Or k—” She cut short the last word: kin. “Well, I’m not sure,” he said, passing over her little stammer. “It’s been a while since I was down this way. Thought I’d go check.” Which was not exactly the reason for his detour, but he was reluctant to discuss the real one in front of Tanner. Especially as Dag himself was doubtful of the result. “I’ll find you two after my errand. Might be a while. Stay by Whit, right?” “Dag, I don’t need my brother to guard me every minute.” “Who said it was you I thought needs a keeper?” She dimpled, taking this in; he cast her a return wink, possibly more cheerful-looking than he felt. The wagons turned right onto the downstream road toward Pearl Bend. Dag wheeled Copperhead around and trotted in the opposite direction. Across a shallow run and over a rise, he came to the camp’s perimeter and let his groundsense ease open just a hair, to present himself to the gate guard, if any. He felt an inquiring double-flick in return, and raised his eyes to spot not one but a pair of Lakewalkers lingering on a couple of stumps flanking the road. An older man was whittling pegs; a morning’s worth lay piled haphazardly at his feet, and Dag’s nostrils flared with the pleasant tang of new shavings. A young woman worked on weaving willow-withy baskets, but a bow and quiver leaned against a rock within easy reach. Patrollers both, on light camp duty. Dag drew up Copperhead and nodded. “How de’.” The man stood. “Good day to you”—a slight hesitation, as he looked Dag up and down—“patroller.” An anxious look crossed his face. “Courier, are you?” “No, sir, just stopping by. I was hoping you could tell me where to find your camp captain, and who’s holding that post these days.” The young woman frowned at his hook, wrapped with Copperhead’s reins, and he lowered it a trifle. The man directed Dag to look for Amma Osprey in the third tent to the left past the split oak tree, and Dag, not lingering to get tangled in talk, pressed Copperhead on. A last curious ground-flick touched him. Pass, friend. Both ease and anxiety knotted in him as he rode by the familiar domestic sights of a Lakewalker camp. Tents peeked through trees, the traditional log structures with hide awnings rolled up on their fourth, open sides, mostly looking southwest to the river. Stands of fruit trees, beehives, homely washing on lines. Smoke rising from chimneys, the smells of cooking and preserving. From a distance, a less pleasant whiff of tanning hides. Half a dozen black-and-white speckled chickens squawked and fluttered across
Copperhead’s path, and the horse tossed his head and snorted. Downslope near the shore, a couple of men were building a good-sized narrow boat on a rack, hammering in pegs. Twenty-five feet long, double-prowed, broad in the middle, clearly meant for the river trade—its boards looked mill-sawn. A few of the newer tent-cabins, too, were built of such planks; the farmers at Pearl Bend or Possum Landing must have put in a sawmill on one of the feeder creeks. Dag spotted patrol headquarters by the array of hitching posts in front, and the lack of washing and cook-smoke. The four-sided cabin had Glassforge glass windows, presently hooked open on what had to be one of the last warm days of the season. Dag dismounted, tied Copperhead, and let his groundsense dart out once more. Two folks inside right now, both ground-closed; a woman’s voice, sharp, drifted out the open windows. “If we upped and moved the camp and the ferry a mile upriver—better, five miles—we wouldn’t have these blighted clashes.” “And lose the rest of the business from the straight road to the Bend’s new ferry? We’re hurting already,” returned another woman, with a rougher, warmer voice. Not young. “Let it go. We don’t need a wagon road for our patrols and pack trains.” “Amma, three-fourths of the camp’s coin comes from farmers using our ferry. And flows right back to them. Everything from flour to horseshoe nails comes from the Bend goods-sheds these days.” “As it should not. Proves my point, I’d say.” A glum silence fell. When it remained unbroken, Dag stepped up onto the wooden porch and knocked, furling his groundsense more tightly around him. “Is that you, Verel?” the first voice called. “Come on in. When are you going to let those two—ah.” A tough, tall, strongly built older woman, one haunch half-up on a plank table, wheeled as Dag ducked through the door and touched his hand to his temple in polite greeting. He had no trouble identifying her as the camp’s patrol captain, given her riding trousers, worn leather vest, long steel knife at her belt, and harassed look. The cabin held the usual headquarters clutter of strewn gear, with maps and record books stuffed on overflowing shelves. The other woman, of like age but rather plumper and wearing skirts, might be some clan head; she seemed to bear herself with scarcely less authority. “Now what?” said the camp captain, in a voice of accumulated exasperation. Her lips began to shape the next query. “Not a courier, ma’am!” Dag hastened to reassure her, and she let the word fall unvoiced, with a relieved nod. “I’m just passing through. M’ name’s Dag Bluefield.” This won blank looks from both women. Bluefield was not a Lakewalker name, nor had Dag claimed a camp of origin. Before they could pry into this oddity, he hurried on. “I came about a sharing knife. But I could come back later.” A look of inexplicable enlightenment crossed the camp captain’s face. “Oh, no, if you witnessed anything, I definitely want it now. Take a seat, we’ll be starting soon.” She waved to a bench along the back wall. “Sorry, I thought you were our medicine maker out there.” They were at some cross-purpose, it seemed. But before Dag could open his mouth to uncross them, the other woman peered out the window and said, “Ah, here they come. Absent gods, what a sick and sorry pair they look.”
“They’re going to be a lot sicker and sorrier when I’m done with ’em.” Amma Osprey ran a stray strand of gray hair, escaped from the braid at her nape, back over her ear, then folded her arms and her lips equally tightly as the door opened. Two young men limped through. One was shorter, tawny-haired, and sturdy with muscle. But his right hand was bandaged, and his arm rested in a sling. His fair, square face was bruised. His shirt was clean and didn’t quite fit him—borrowed?—but his trousers were spattered with dried blood. He walked decidedly bent over. The one who followed was taller, brown-haired, maybe a bit older than his companion, though still very young to Dag’s eyes. His face was even more bruised, one eye swollen shut, lower lip twice its proper size. Beneath his torn shirt his ribs were wrapped in cloth strips. Chicken tracks of black stitches marched up two long cuts on his left arm. His knuckles were swollen and scabbed, though he gingerly helped himself along with a stick in his right hand. Two patrollers who’d lost a fight last night, obviously. To each other? They collected equally cold and silent glowers from the two women as they shuffled into line. The tawny youth made one attempt at a winning smile, wilting swiftly as the scowls deepened. Dag squinted in curiosity. He really ought to excuse himself and go. Instead, he sank back on his bench like a hunter lying up in tall grass, silent and unnoticeable. Amma Osprey began curtly, “Not the least of your offenses is that I had to pull two of your comrades off their camp leaves this morning to take your places in patrol. You can remember to apologize to them, too, when they get back.” Dag had done that in his time, cut his camp rest short in order to fill in for a sick or injured or bereaved patroller. The dark one looked, if possible, more hangdog, but the tawny one raised his bruised face and began, “But we didn’t start it! We were just—” The camp captain held up a quelling hand. “You’ll have your say in a moment, Barr. I promise you.” It sounded more threat than promise; in any case, the tawny youth subsided. Steps sounded on the wooden porch, and the door swung open once more. A broad-shouldered woman stepped through, nodded to the other two, and scowled at the youths. By the yellow leather gloves stuck in her belt and the thick-soled boots on her feet, Dag identified her as a ferrywoman; by her age and stride, likely the boat boss. She pulled a lumpy cloth from her belt, and said, “I found this piece up in the woods back of Possum Landing this morning.” “Oh, good,” said the camp captain. “Remo, do you have the rest?” The dark youth hitched around and pulled another lumpy cloth from his shirt, reluctantly handing it over to his captain. She slid off the table and laid open both scraps. Dag was disturbed to see the pieces of a broken sharing knife, carved from pale bone. Such a knife was supposed to break when it released its burden of mortality into the ground of a malice, but Dag already had an uncomfortable suspicion that there had been no malice involved, or these two patrollers would be in much better odor this afternoon. Amma Osprey swiftly aligned the shards. “That’s got it all, Issi,” she reported. The ferrywoman nodded satisfaction; the dark youth, Remo, let out a faint breath. “Now we have a council quorum,” said the skirted woman. The three exchanged nods and settled, two in
chairs, Amma hitched up on the edge of the table again. The two young patrollers were not invited to sit. “All right,” said the camp captain grimly to the pair, “start explaining. How did this get started?” The two exchanged unhappy looks; Remo of the swollen mouth waved a purpling hand at his companion, and said, “Oo ’ell ’m, Arr.” Barr gulped and began, “It was a good deed, blight it! It really got started when that last coal flat tried to take the Riffle when the water’d got too low, ten days back, and tore out its bottom and dumped its load for half a mile down the shoals. Remo and I took out a narrow boat to pick off some of the crew that had got themselves hung up in the white water and the cottonwood wrack. Probably saved three flatties from drowning. Anyway, they seemed to think so. We hauled ’em into the tavern at Pearl Bend looking sorry as wet rats. Got them all dried out, on the outside anyway. At least they bought us drinks. Seeing as everyone was saved, they were all in a mood to celebrate, except maybe the boat boss who’d lost his cargo. So some of the keelers who’d helped out and the flatties started some games.” “You know you are not to play games of chance with farmers,” said Amma Osprey in a dangerous voice. Because Lakewalkers were inevitably accused of sorcerous cheating in such situations. Although only if they had the ill luck or poor judgment to actually win. “’Ee ’idn’t,” protested Remo. “It was arm wrestling,” said Barr. “With a couple of the keelers. And despite what they claimed, we didn’t cheat—though I could have, blight it!” The peculiar indignation of the accused not-quite-guilty livened his voice, and Dag, still quiet on his bench by the wall, suppressed an upward mouth twitch. “It made me so mad,” Barr went on. “So I told them it was true, but they could protect themselves from evil Lakewalker influences with metal helmets, like what you see the soldiers of the old Lake League wearing in the broken statues, which was what those helmets had been for, see. And they bought it. By the next afternoon, we had half the flatties up at Possum Landing walking around with their cook pots and wash bowls stuck on their heads. It was, it was”—he struggled for a moment, eyes brightening in defiant memory—“it was glorious.” His jaw set, then slacked instantly as he winced and rubbed its bruises. “So that’s where that fool nonsense came from!” cried the ferry boss, Issi, in a voice that shook in a good imitation of anger. She turned away from the truants and rubbed her face till the betraying laugh lines were smoothed back out. Dag, who could just picture a herd of naive Lakewalker-fearing flatboat crews wandering about the Landing in their clanking makeshift helmets, laid his palm hard over his jaw and kept listening. Oh, to have been here last week! “I was just balancing the scales a bit,” Barr continued. “You know what we do for those stupid farmers, and how little thanks we get in return. And it wasn’t hurting anyone, till your crew told them it was all a fiddle.” The ferry boss sighed. “It took my girls near three days to talk them out of it. Even then, some of them refused to give up their headgear.” She added reflectively, “The rest were plenty mad, though. The Possum folks and the older flatties gave ’em a ripe ribbing for it all.” Captain Osprey pinched the bridge of her nose. “Despite all that, I suppose it would have all passed downstream harmlessly at the next rise, if you two unaccountable fools hadn’t gone over there last night and stirred them up again. Why?” “I was baited,” Barr admitted in a surly voice.
“Tol’ yuh,” his partner muttered, rolling his good eye. “How?” demanded the patrol captain. An even more surly silence. The ferry boss put in, “I’ve already heard one version of it over at the Landing this morning, Barr. We’d better have yours.” Barr hunched. Remo mumbled, “Tell t’ truth, blighdit. Can’t be worse f’r you th’n f’r me.” Barr hunched lower. With a voice that seemed to come from somewhere around his knees, he said, “A flatboat girl invited me. To meet her in the woods back of the Landing.” Amma Osprey broke the chill silence that followed this with “When and where did this invitation take place?” “Down at the Bend wharf boat. Yesterday afternoon.” He looked up indignantly into the thick disapproval that now blanketed the room. “She seemed all excited. I didn’t think she was lying. Well, you know how those farmer girls throw themselves at patrollers, sometimes!” “You’re supposed to throw them back,” said the skirted woman in a grim voice. “Tol’ yuh it was a setup,” said Remo, with a black stare at his partner. “He said, no, it was too obvi’us.” Barr turned redder around his livid bruises. “I didn’t ask you to come.” “Y’r muh partner. I’m supposed t’ watch y’r back!” Barr took a long breath, then let half of it out with his protest unvoiced. “Six of the flatties jumped me in the dark. I wasn’t carrying any weapon. Neither was Remo. The flatties just had fists and sticks, at first. Then when Remo piled in to help me, and things started to turn back our way, one of the flatties pulled a knife on us. Remo had to use his knife to defend himself, it was the only thing we had, except for our bare arms!” “You drew a primed sharing knife in a common brawl.” Amma Osprey’s voice was flatter than winter ice. And colder. And harder. “Wisht ’d just used muh arms,” mumbled Remo. And lower, more despairing, “Or muh neck…” It was all becoming clear to Dag, and he almost wished it weren’t. He eyed the pale bone shards laid accusingly on the plank table. His heart ached for these two young fools. He curled his right arm around himself and waited for the rest. “And now we come to it,” said Amma. “Why were you wearing your sharing knife at all last night, when you knew you weren’t to go out on patrol till today?” Remo’s face set in an agony that had nothing to do with its bruises. “I…it was new. I’d jus’ been given it. I was trying t’ get used to it!”
The picture was plain. Dag knew exactly how excited and proud a young patroller entrusted with a first primed knife would be. A pride sobered, frequently, with personal grief and the heart-deep determination to be worthy of such mortal trust. Ow. Ow. Behind their stern facades, he thought the three women shared his pang. “And then those blighted flatties, those blighted farmers, broke it to pieces,” Barr went on, remembered rage flaring in his voice. “And then we both, well, we both went after them full-out. I don’t even remember getting this.” He touched his smashed hand. “And they broke and ran off. Some of them are still running, for all I know.” Dag could picture that, too, rage and outrage and appalling guilt boiling up to a loss of control as terrifying, perhaps, for its sufferers as their victims. A patroller should never lose control. Especially not around farmers. It was ingrained, if sometimes not deeply enough. Because when such control failed, everyone was subject to the frightened farmer backlash. “Your great-grandmother Grayjay didn’t share early for this fate,” said the skirted woman. “She might have had months yet, except that she feared passing in her sleep.” Remo’s face went from red to white, beneath his bruises. “I know.” His ground-veiling was held so tight, his body was shaking as if with physical effort. “I was going to take the pieces to your parents, but I think you should.” Remo’s eyes closed. “Yes, ma’am,” he whispered, dead-voiced. Barr was very quiet. Amma Osprey gestured at Dag. “You, sir. I gather you were at Possum Landing. You have any information to add to all this?” Issi stared at the newcomer; she must know he hadn’t crossed north over the river by the ferry since last night. Squinting at his arm harness, she asked, “Do I know you, patroller?” Dag cleared his throat uncomfortably, and rose. “My apologies, Captain Osprey. I actually just rode down from Glassforge. I came to ask you about another matter. I think this isn’t a good time for it, though.” An irate look from the camp captain confirmed this belief, but Issi snapped her fingers and pointed. “I have seen you! You used to ride with Mari Redwing of Hickory Lake. You’re her nephew, aren’t you?” Yes, Issi and Dag’s aunt Mari could well be near-contemporaries. Acquaintances. Maybe even passing friends, who knew? “Yes, ma’am.” The skirted woman said, “But he said his name was Dag Bluefield.” “I’m lately married, ma’am.” “What kind of name is—” the skirted woman began. The two young patrollers looked wildly at each other. Barr burst out, “Sir! Are you Dag Redwing Hickory, Saun’s partner? Who slew the Glassforge malice, single—all by himself?” Dag sighed. “Not by myself, no.” Oh, yes—these two were just the age and sort to have become Saun’s boon companions in his convalescence here last spring. Dag winced at the thought of what kind of Dag-stories Saun might have been inspired to tell, to alleviate his boredom and entertain his new friends. Dag could see his hope of anonymity evaporate like morning dew in the heat of those suddenly interested
eyes. Captain Osprey blinked, rocking back. “Then are you also the same Dag Redwing who led the Hickory Lake company to Raintree a couple of months ago, and took down that horrendous malice they had running wild over there?” Dag set his teeth, briefly. “I was Dag Bluefield by then, ma’am.” “Fairbolt Crow’s report on Raintree in the latest patrol circular named a Captain Dag Redwing.” Oh, so that was how the word had got around. Yes, there had been time for such official patrol news to have slipped ahead of Dag while he was lingering in West Blue. Fairbolt kept up. “Then Fairbolt named me wrong.” At Amma’s rising brows, he offered, “Habit, maybe. I patrolled under him for eighteen years as Dag Redwing. I was in his company even before he became Hickory Lake’s camp captain.” “Eh. So what is this other matter?” Dag hesitated. Amma made an impatient gesture. “Spit it out and get it over with. It can’t be worse than the rest of my morning.” Dag nodded, trying to get over the jolt of having his recent reputation run before him, even if some of it was no doubt due to Saun’s exaggerations. But perhaps it would do him some good. “I left Hickory Lake on business of my own, after—as a result of—the Raintree campaign. I expect to travel a lot of territory in the next few months. I used my last primed knife on the Glassforge malice, and haven’t yet found another. You don’t have to be on patrol to run across a malice—when I was riding courier alone up in Seagate, I once took out a new sessile that might have grown a lot more dangerous before anyone had got back to it with a patrol. I made it a rule after that never to walk bare. I know sometimes folks leave their primed knives to the patrol generally, to outfit patrollers who have none. I was wondering if you happened to have any such”—his eye fell uncomfortably on the broken bone knife on the table, and avoided Remo’s face—“spares. Just now.” The camp captain crossed her arms. “Why didn’t you get one before you left Hickory Lake, then?” The skirted woman’s expression seconded the question. Because he’d still been reeling, sick and heartsick, exhausted. Not thinking. “I hadn’t yet settled my plans.” “What plans?” asked Amma. “I figure to take the rivers down to Graymouth. Ride back in the spring. After that, I’m not sure. I might be able to return the loan then, if I don’t cross a malice.” And if he did, and used the knife, no one would ask for a better fate for it. His voice softened. “I promised my wife I’d show her the sea.” The skirted woman touched her lips. “Wait up. Are you also that same Dag Redwing who was just banished from Hickory Lake Camp for consorting with some farmer girl?” Dag’s head shot up. “I was not banished! Where did you hear such a lie?” “Well”—she waved a hand—“not banished, precisely. But the camp council circular didn’t make it sound like a happy outcome.” Buying a moment to gather his wits and his temper, Dag touched his temple, and said stiffly, “You have
the advantage of me, ma’am.” The skirted woman gestured at herself. “Nicie Sandwillow. Pearl Riffle Camp council leader, this season.” Therefore a senior tent head, that being the pool from which council members were selected by various sorts of rotations, depending on the camp. With the patrol’s camp captain always a permanent member. Dag wondered if the ferry boss was also a permanent member, here. It seemed likely. Making this morning’s inquiry doubly efficient, serving the patrol and the council at once. But it meant that one of Nicie Sandwillow’s tasks was to receive and pass along critical council news from around the hinterland of Oleana, just as Captain Osprey received patrol news. Dag said carefully, “The Hickory Lake council was deeply divided on my case—” “So there was a charge.” Dag overrode this. “Pakona Pike, our—Hickory Lake’s council leader this past summer—was not on the side favorable to my arguments. But I can’t believe she’d twist the facts that much.” “No, not if the facts are that you came in alone, late from a leave, dragging some farmer girl with the pair of you wearing Lakewalker wedding braids that you’d somehow cooked up together, claiming she was your wife and not just your whor*. The letter warns all camp councils to watch out for similar trickery.” Grimly, Dag rolled up his left sleeve. “I say they’re valid cords, and so did a lot of others. Including Fairbolt Crow. See for yourself. Fawn made this one.” A flicker of grounds touched him, felt the spark of Fawn’s live ground in her cord, drew back. The women looked nonplussed, the two sagging young patrollers confused. It was like the hearing at Hickory Lake all over again, and Dag was bitterly reminded of why he’d left. “And Fawn isn’t just some farmer girl,” Dag went on, growing more heated. “It was her hand slew the Glassforge malice, with my knife. Or I wouldn’t be alive now to tell it. It was a scramble, I admit, but I can’t believe the tale you had was this distorted, because Saun knew the truth of it, and so did Reela.” “Hm.” Amma Osprey rubbed her chin. “I believe the scramble part.” Dag bit out, “This is beside the point. Do you have a spare knife to lend, or not?” “Good question, Dag Redwing-Bluefield-whoever,” said Amma. “Are you still a patroller, or not?” Dag hesitated. He could claim to be on the sick list, or pretend to be on long leave. Or disciplinary leave, they’d believe that! But in the midst of all these aggravating half-truths, he refused to lie. “No. I resigned. Although Fairbolt made it clear that if I ever wanted to un-resign, he’d find a place for me.” “And your farmer, ah, woman?” asked Nicie Sandwillow. “That was the sticking point. One of them.” Amma eyed the gaping, hurting young patrollers, now leaning on each other and looking ready to cave on their feet. Dag was sorrier than ever for their witness of this, because Amma would certainly trim her judgment with an eye to making an impression on them. At least, Dag would never have missed such an opportunity, when he’d been a patrol leader. She said, “Such knives are bequeathed in trust for the patrol, specifically the Pearl Riffle patrol. I can’t very well ask the dead if they want to make an exception. As their guardian, it’s my duty to conserve them—especially as they seem to be needed here.”
Remo flinched. Them, implying she was not down to her last primed knife. She might lend one and still not strip her patrol’s reserve bare. But not to me. Not today. Dag had the frustrating sense, watching her face set, that if he’d arrived with the same request yesterday, before this trouble with the boatmen had broken out over at Possum Landing, the balance of her decision might well have tipped the other way. He let his gaze cross the two miserable miscreants with new disfavor. There were other sources, other Lakewalker camps downriver. He would simply have to try again elsewhere. “I see. Then I’ll not take more of your time, captain.” Dag touched his hand to his temple and withdrew.
6 Fifty paces up the slope from the Pearl Bend wharf boat, Fawn craned her neck as the wagons halted in front of a plank shed. It seemed to be trying to grow into a warehouse by budding, add-ons extending in all directions. Whit jumped down from the lead wagon to help Hod hobble over to a bench against the front wall, displacing a couple of idlers that Mape, after a prudent sobriety check, promptly hired to help unload his fragile cargo. To Fawn’s surprise, they only shifted the top layer of slat boxes from her wagon; after that, Whit climbed up with them and Tanner took the reins to turn the rig toward the river. “Where are we going?” she asked. Tanner nodded toward the ferryboat tied next to the wharf boat. It looked like a barn floor laid out on a barge, except for a pole sticking up on one side like a short, stubby mast. “Across the river, and up past the Riffle. This load goes upstream from Possum Landing.” Well, Dag could doubtless find her even over there. Fawn went to Weft’s head to coax her up the broad gangplank, which rather resembled a barn door tossed on its side, while Whit did the same for Warp. The horses were dubious, but at last seemed convinced that it was only some sort of strange bridge, and did not disgrace themselves or their former owner by trying to bolt. The boredom of the lead pair also helped. The stubby mast turned out to be a capstan; a thick hemp rope was wound about it a few times, high up, one end leading to a stout tree up the bank, the other, supported by a few floats, to a similar tree on the other side. Fawn was a little disappointed not to ride on the famous Lakewalker ferry, but watched with interest as the two Bend ferrymen stuck oak bars into holes on the capstan and started turning it. Whit, equally fascinated, volunteered to help and went to work pushing the squeaking post around, winding and unwinding the rope and slowly pulling the ferry across the river. The water seemed clear and calm to Fawn’s eye, but she jumped when a log floating just under the surface thumped into the side, and she was reminded that this was no quiet lake. Working the ferry might not seem so pleasant when the water was high or rough, or in rain or cold. From out here in the middle, the river looked bigger. “How do the other boats get past the rope?” she asked Tanner, watching the big log catch, roll under the obstruction, right itself, and sluggishly proceed. “The ferrymen have to take it down,” he said. “They haul it back and forth across the river with a skiff, usually, but with the river this low nothing’s going over the Riffle anyways, so they just leave it up.” When the ferry nosed up to the far bank, the ferrymen ran out the gangplank on that end. She and Whit repeated their reassurances to the horses, and the rig rumbled safely, if noisily, onto dry land once more. They both clambered up next to Tanner as he turned the team onto a rutted track leading upstream.
Fawn sat up in anticipation as they topped a rise and the line of flatboats tied to the trees beyond Possum Landing came into view. They were as unlike the Lakewalkers’ graceful, sharp-prowed narrow boats as they could be, looking like shacks stuck on box crates, really. Ungainly. Some even had small fireplaces with stone chimneys, out of which smoke trickled. It was as if someone’s village had suddenly decided to run off to sea, and Fawn grinned at the vision of an escaped house waddling away from its astonished owners. People ran away from home all the time; why shouldn’t the reverse be true? On one of these, she and Dag would float all the way to Graymouth. All running away together, maybe. Her grin faded. But even such odd thoughts could not quench her excitement, and when Tanner brought the wagon to a halt in front of another rambling shed-warehouse, she hopped down and told her brother, “I’m going to go look at the boats.” He frowned after her in frustration but stuck with his task as Tanner directed him to unlatch the tailboard and start lugging. “You be careful, now,” Whit called. More in envy than concern, she suspected. “I won’t even be out of sight!” She just barely kept herself from skipping down to the bank. She was a sober married woman now, after all. And besides, it would be a tad cruel to Whit. Deciding which, she let herself skip just a little. Reaching the bank, she caught her breath and stared around eagerly. There were fewer folks in view than she’d expected. She’d seen some fellows hanging around up at the storage shed, others down on the wharf boat, which Tanner had said doubled as a general store for the riverfolk. One or more of the houses in the hamlet, still obscured by the half-denuded trees, probably served as taverns. Maybe some boatmen had gone hunting in the hills to replenish their larders during this enforced delay. But a few men were quietly fishing off the backs of their flatboats—one, strangely, wore an iron kettle over his head like a helmet, although Fawn could not imagine why. Perhaps he’d lost a bet? A group of several men atop one level boat roof had their heads down over some game of chance; dice, Fawn thought, although she couldn’t see for sure at this angle. One looked around to watch her pass and drew breath for what was likely going to be a rude catcall, but some turn of the game sent up hoots and a murmur of comment, and he turned back. A woman came out of the shack on one boat and emptied a pan over the side, a reassuring domestic sight. Fawn strolled along the row, looking for likely candidates for their boat. Some had long top-sheds that clearly left no room for a horse. Others were carrying livestock already—one had four oxen stalled on the bow end, quietly chewing their cud, so the boats could carry big animals, but that one was plainly full-up. Several had chicken coops, on top or tucked into a corner, and some had dogs, though none roused enough from their naps in the sun to bark at her. She stopped and studied a likely prospect. A fellow sitting on a barrel in the open bow tipped back his floppy hat and grinned in return with what teeth he had. “Do you take passengers?” she called to him. “I’d take you, little lady!” he replied enthusiastically. Fawn frowned. “It would be me, my husband, and his horse.” He swept off the hat with a flourish, revealing greasy hair. “Oh, leave the husband and his horse. I bet I can give you a better ride. If you—ow!” He clapped his hand to the side of his head as a small wooden block from seeming nowhere bounced off it with an audible clonk. Looking up to his left, he complained, “Now, what’d you go and do that for? I was just bein’ friendly!” Atop the flat roof of the next boat over, a figure in homespun skirts sat in a rocking chair, whittling. As Fawn squinted, she saw it was a surprisingly young woman, almost lanky in build, with straight blond hair
escaping from a horse-tail tied at her nape. She had light blue eyes and a wide mouth, both pinched with annoyance. “To remind you to behave your fool self, Jos,” she replied tartly. “Now apologize.” “Sorry, Boss Berry.” This won another wooden missile, which Jos did not dodge quite fast enough. “Ow!” he repeated. “To her, you nitwit!” snapped the blond woman. Jos put his hat back on, for the purpose of tugging its brim, evidently. “Sorry, miss—missus,” he mumbled to Fawn. He shuffled into his boat’s shack, out of range. “Dolt,” observed the woman dispassionately. Fawn strolled on a few paces, noting with interest that while Jos’s boat had its hull stuck in the mire, Berry’s, moored farther out, still floated. And it had an empty animal pen in one corner of the bow. Some chickens were penned on the opposite side, pecking up a scattering of corn, and their coop didn’t stink in the sun, unlike a few she’d passed; someone here cleaned it regularly. She put her hands on her hips and stared up at the woman, who didn’t look to be much older than Fawn herself. “What are you carvin’ on?” Fawn called up. The woman held out a rounded block. “Floats. Cottonwood makes good floats, for ropes and whatnot. A lot of softwoods do.” Fawn nodded, encouraged by the sociable explanation and an almost-smile that erased the earlier tightness from the woman’s face. She might have just said floats, or none of your business. “So…does this boat take passengers?” The blond woman—girl—rocked forward to eye Fawn more closely. “I hadn’t thought to. I’m doing a bit of trading down the river, plan a lot of stops. It’d be a slow ride.” “That’s all right. We’re not in a hurry. How far down the river are you going?” “I’m not sure yet.” “Can I see inside your boat? I’ve never been on a flatboat.” Fawn smiled up hopefully. Not a request she’d have dared make of the lewd—well, would-be-lewd—Jos; she was in luck to find this woman. The woman tilted her head, then nodded. She stuck her whittling knife in a sheath at her belt and dismounted from the roof of the cabin by simply jumping down the five feet, ignoring the crude ladder of nailed slats, landing with a thump and a spring of her knees. She grabbed a long board and ran it out to the bank. Fawn eyed the narrowness and flex of it dubiously, but held her breath and picked her way aboard without falling into the mud. She hopped down onto the deck and straightened in exhilaration. “Hi, I’m Fawn Bluefield.” The woman bobbed her head. She had wide cheekbones, but a pointed chin, lending an effect like a friendly ferret. She was taller than Fawn—as who was not?—and even a bit taller than Whit, likely. Her fine, fair skin was sunburned. “Berry Clearcreek. I’m boss of this boat.”
A boat boss was captain or owner or sometimes both; Fawn guessed both, and was impressed and heartened. Berry stuck out a welcoming hand, slim but even more work-roughened than Fawn’s. Fawn clasped and released it, smiling. “What lives in the pen?” she asked, nodding toward it, then spotted the droppings in the straw. “Oh, a goat.” “Our nanny Daisy. My little brother took her ashore to graze.” “So you have fresh milk. And eggs.” Already this boat seemed homey. Berry nodded. “Some.” “I grew up on a farm. Up by West Blue.” And at Berry’s puzzled look, added, “North of Lumpton Market.” Berry still looked geographically uncertain, so Fawn added, “Lumpton’s way up the same river that comes out to the Grace near Silver Shoals.” Berry’s face cleared. “Oh, the Stony Fork. Big sand bar, there. You know how to milk a goat, do you?” “Sure.” “Hm.” Berry hesitated. “You can cook, too, I guess. Good cook?” “My husband says so.” The boat boss regarded Fawn’s shortness, which, Fawn knew, made her look even younger than she was. “How long’ve you two been married?” Fawn blushed. “About four months.” It seemed longer, with all that had happened. Berry smiled a little. “Not sure whether to trust his judgment or not, then. Well, come see my boat!” A small doorway or hatch in the front of the shack led down by a few crude plank steps into a dark interior. Even Fawn had to duck through; Dag would likely have to bend double, and be very careful when he straightened up. The front of the shelter was full of cargo: coils of hemp rope, rolls of woolen and linen cloth, stacks of hides, barrels and kegs. Fawn could smell apples, butter, lard, and what might be bear grease. One barrel was set up on sawhorses and had a spigot in the end. It hissed a little ominously as the apple cider within hardened, fermenting in the unseasonable warmth. There were sacks of nuts, and smoked meats hanging from the rafters. Tucked everywhere were bundles of barrel staves. All the local produce from up some tributary river or creek of the Grace. At one side was an array of what were obviously Tripoint steel and iron tools and metalwork, from shovel and axe heads, coulters, and kegs of nails, to needles and pins. “Did you come all the way from Tripoint?” asked Fawn in awe, fingering a shiny new plow blade. “No, only from about halfway. We pick up things in one place, sell them downstream in another, as chance offers.” The back end of the shack was living quarters, lit by two little glazed windows and another door up to the back deck. Two narrow bunk beds with pallets stacked three-high along the walls had more cargo jammed underneath; one bunk had a curtain. This was one of the boats with a real stone hearth. A few coals glowed under a black iron water-kettle. A cleverly hinged tabletop could be raised up and hooked flat to a wall, its legs folded in tight, to cover and contain a shelf full of metal dishes and cups and cooking supplies.
“How did you come to own this nice boat?” Berry’s smile faded to a grimace. “My papa builds—built—builds one every year, to float down to Graymouth. He and my big brother do the timberwork, and I do the caulking and fitting. He’s been taking us kids along ever since my mama died when I was ten.” Her expression softened. “He’d come back upriver working as a hand on a keelboat, he and my big brother, with me and my little brother as cargo, till I learned me how to play the fiddle for the keelers. Then I got paid more than him! He used to complain mightily about that, in a proud sort of way.” Fawn nodded understanding. “Papas,” she offered. Berry sighed agreement. Fawn considered the worrisome hesitation in Berry’s description of her papa, and how to tactfully phrase her next question. “Does he, um…not build boats anymore?” Berry crossed her arms under her breasts and regarded Fawn with a hard-to-figure stare. She drew breath and seemed to come to some decision. “I don’t know. He and my big brother took a boat down last fall and never came back in the spring. Never heard anything about them, though I asked all the keelers I knew to watch out for signs and pass the word back. This here boat, he’d left half-finished. I finished it up and loaded it, and I’m taking it down myself. So’s his work won’t be wasted.” Her voice fell. “If it’s his last work, it’s about all he left to me. I mean to stop a lot along the way and ask after them. See if I can find out anything.” “I see,” said Fawn. “I think that’s right clever of you.” There were numerous reasons a man might not come back from a down-river trip, and most of them were dire. A family man, anyway. A young fellow you might picture running off on some new adventure found along the way, selfishly sending no word back to his anxious kin, but not a papa. “How was it you didn’t go along, his last trip?” A brief silence. Berry said abruptly, “Come see the rest of my boat.” And led the way out the back, twin to the hatch in front. Fawn stepped, blinking in the light glimmering off the water, onto what she decided was the boat’s back porch. A long, heavy oar mounted on sturdy wooden hinges extended at an angle from the roof above to the water below, and Fawn realized it must be the rudder. Berry or someone had dropped a few fishing lines out over the stern, tied to a cord with a little bell dangling off it. “Catch much?” said Fawn, nodding to it. “Now and then. Not much right here—there’s too much competition.” She glanced down the long row of flatboats, most of which also had similar lines sagging out into the water. “Dag—my husband—is pretty clever at catching fish.” “Is he?” Berry hesitated. “Does he know boats?” “A lot more than I do, but that’s not saying much. I’m not sure if he’s ever been on a flatboat, but he can paddle a narrow boat, and sail. And swim. And do most anything he sets his mind to, really.” “Huh,” said Berry, and rubbed her nose. Fawn gathered her resolve. “How much would it cost to go on your boat? For two people and a horse?” “Well, there’s this,” said Berry, and fell silent. Fawn waited anxiously.
Berry looked out over the bright river, absently rolling a fishing line between her fingertips, and went on, “We might find some extra room. But…two of my crew, the strong-arm boys who man my sweeps—those are the big oars on the sides—got themselves in some stupid fight up behind the Landing last night and haven’t come back.” She glanced over to the shore. “It’s beginning to look like they’ve run off permanent. Leaving just me, my brother, and old Bo to run this boat. Me, I can man—woman—the rudder, but I can’t do that all day and be lookout and cook the meals as well, which is what I had been doing. You say you can cook. Now, if this husband of yours is a good strapping farm lad with two strong arms who isn’t afraid of the water, Uncle Bo ’n I could likely teach him to man a sweep pretty quick. And we could make a deal for you to work your passage. If you’ve a mind for it,” she added a shade uncertainly. “I could cook, sure,” said Fawn valiantly, stirred by the thought of the savings on their purse. Which, to her mind, was none too fat for a trip of this length, though she’d shied from confiding her money doubts to Dag. “I used to help cook for eight every night, back home. Dag, well…” Dag did not exactly fit Berry’s description of the sort of crewman she was looking for, though Fawn had no doubt he could man any sweep made. “Dag’ll have to speak for himself, when he comes.” Berry ducked her head. “Fair enough.” An awkward silence followed this, which Berry broke by saying lightly, “Fancy a mug of cider? We’ve got lots. It’s all going hard in the warm. I’ve been selling some to the boatmen here, who like it better fizzy, so I’ve not lost my whole trouble, but even they won’t drink it after it goes vinegar.” “Sure,” said Fawn, happy for the chance to maybe sit and talk more with this intriguing riverwoman. Fawn had been stuck on one farm her whole life, till this past spring. She tried to imagine instead traveling the length of the Grace and the Gray not once, but eight or ten—no, sixteen or twenty—times. Berry seemed very tall and enviably competent as she led Fawn back inside, picked up a couple of battered tankards in passing, and turned the barrel’s spigot. The cider was indeed fizzy and fuzzy, but it hadn’t lost quite all its sweetness yet, and Fawn, who had been growing hungry, smiled gratefully over the rim of her mug. Berry led her back to the folding table, and they both pulled up stools. “I wish it would hurry up and rain,” said Berry. “I was done asking around here the first day, but I’ve been stuck for ten days more. I need at least eighteen inches of rise to get the Fetch over the Riffle, and that’d be scraping bottom.” She took a pull and wiped her mouth on her sleeve, and said more diffidently, “You haven’t been long on the river, I take it?” Fawn shook her head, and answered the real question. “No, we wouldn’t have heard anything of your people.” She added conscientiously, “Well, Whit and I wouldn’t. Can’t speak for Dag.” “Whit?” “My brother. He’s just along for the ride as far as the Grace. He’ll go home with the glass-men tomorrow.” Fawn explained about Warp and Weft, and Whit’s financial schemes. With half her cider gone, Fawn felt bold enough to ask, “So how come you stayed home this past fall?” Fawn knew exactly how agonizing it was not to know what disaster had befallen one’s beloved, but she couldn’t help thinking Berry might have been lucky not to have shared it, whatever it had been. “You really got married this summer?” said Berry, in a wistful tone. Fawn nodded. Beneath the table, she touched Dag’s wedding cord wrapping her left wrist. The sense of his direction that he had laid in it, or in her, before Raintree had almost faded away. Maybe, with his ghost hand coming back, he could renew the spell? Groundwork, she diligently corrected her thought.
“I thought I would be wed by then, too,” sighed Berry. “I stayed behind to fix up what was going to be my—our—new house, see, and so papa left my little brother with me, because I was going to be a grown-up woman. Alder, my betrothed, he went with papa too, because he’d never been down the river, and papa thought he ought to learn the boatman’s trade. We were to be married in the spring when they all came back with the profits. Papa said this was going to be his best run ever. ’Course, he says that every fall, whether it’s true or not.” She drank more cider. “Spring came back to Clear Creek, but they never did, not any of the three or their hired hands. I had everything ready, everything—” She broke off. Fawn nodded, not needing a list to picture it: linens and cooking gear all assembled, bride bed built and feather ticks stuffed and maybe all of it garnished with embroidered coverlets, curtains hung, food laid in, the house cleaned and repaired and all sprigged out. Wedding dress sewn. And then the waiting: first with impatience, then with anger, then with helpless fear, then with fading hope. Fawn shivered. “Strawberry season came and went, and I left off fussing with the house and started fussing with this boat instead. The only kinsman who’d give me a hand was my uncle Bo, who’s my mama’s older half-brother that never married. The rest of my cousins have got no time for him ’cause they say he drinks too much and is unreliable, which is true enough, but half-help’s better than none, I say. And none was what I got from the rest of ’em. They said I’d got no business going on the river by myself, as if I didn’t know ten times as much about it as any of them!” “Think you’ll find ’em? All your lost menfolk?” asked Fawn shyly. “They’d have to be stuck somewhere pretty tight, you’d figure.” She didn’t name the more likely possibilities: a boat broken on rocks or snags and all drowned, or eaten by bears or those appalling southern swamp lizards Dag had described, or bitten by rattlesnakes, or, even more likely and grimly, all dying of some sudden gut-wrenching illness, on a cold riverbank with no one left to bury the last in even an unmarked grave. “That’s why I named my boat the Fetch and not just the Finder, which was the first name I’d thought of. I’m no fool,” said Berry, in a lower tone. “I know what all might have been. But I scorned to go on living with the not-knowing-for-sure for one more week, when I had a boat to hand to go look for myself. Well, partly to hand.” She tilted up her tankard to drain the cider. Swallowing, she continued, “Which is why I want a crew to hand, as well. If the rise comes up sudden, I don’t want to be stuck waiting for those two scared-off fools to show themselves.” “If they turned up anyhow, would there still be room for us?” “Oh, yeah.” Berry grinned suddenly, making her wide mouth wider; not pretty, but, well, fetching was just the word, Fawn thought. “I don’t like cookin’.” “If you—” Fawn began, but was interrupted by a plaintive voice from outside. “Fawn? Hey, Fawn, where’d you go?” Fawn grimaced and drained her own tankard. “There’s Whit. He must be done unloading. I’d better go reassure him. Dag told me to watch after him.” She rose to make her way through the gloom out to the bow of the boat, calling, “Over here, Whit!” “There you are!” He strode down the bank, a trifle red in the face. “You gave me a turn, disappearing like that. Dag’d have my hide if I let anything happen to you.”
“I’m fine, Whit. I was just having some cider with Berry.” “You shouldn’t be going on boats with strangers,” he scolded. “If you hadn’t—” His mouth stopped moving and hung half-open. Fawn glanced around. Berry, smiling, came up by her shoulder, leaned on the rail, and gave Whit a friendly-ferret wave. “That your husband?” “No, brother.” “Oh, yeah, he looks it.” Whit was still standing there at the end of the board gangplank. Why should he be so shocked that his sister was chatting with a boatwoman? But he wasn’t looking at Fawn at all. The gut-punched look on his face seemed strangely familiar, and Fawn realized she’d seen it there before. Recently. Ah. Ha. I’ve never seen a fellow fall in love at first sight twice in one day before.
7 The afternoon was waning when Dag at last caught up with Tanner’s wagon at the Possum Landing goods-shed. His roundabout chase had taken him first to Pearl Bend, where Mape had redirected him across the river. A long wait for the Lakewalker ferry, a short ride up the bank, a turn left to the Landing—Dag tensed as his sputtering groundsense, reaching out, found no spark of Fawn. But Whit was out front, waving eagerly at him. “Dag!” he cried, as Dag drew Copperhead to a halt and leaned on his saddlebow. “I was wondering when you was going to show up. I was just trying to figure how to find you. We’ve got the boat ride all fixed!” Tanner climbed up onto his driver’s box, gathered up his reins, and regarded Whit with some bemusem*nt. “No messages then, after all?” “No, not now he’s here. Thanks! Oh, no—wait.” Whit went to the wheelers and gave Weft a pat and a hug around the neck, then ran around the wagon and repeated the gestures with Warp. “Good-bye, you two. You be good for Tanner now, you hear?” The horses flicked their ears at him; Warp gave him a soulful return nudge—unless he was just trying to use the boy as a scratching post—which made Whit blink rather rapidly. “They’re real good, for such young ’uns,” Tanner assured him. “You take care, too.” He donned his hat and tugged the brim at Dag. “Lakewalker.” And, a little to Dag’s surprise, slapped his reins on the team’s rumps and drove off minus Whit. A quick look around located both Fawn’s and Whit’s saddlebags leaning against the porch steps of the goods-shed. A couple of idlers on the shaded bench, one whittling, the other just sitting with his hands slack between his knees, frowned curiously at Dag. “Aren’t you going along to help him?” Dag asked Whit, nodding toward the wagon rumbling away. “I just helped him load on about a ton of goods from Tripoint and upriver that he’s taking back to Glassforge. Mape was going to get up a load from downriver at the Bend—cotton and tea, he said, and indigo if they had any, if the price was right.” “He did. I just saw him.” “Oh, good.”
“Mape told me they mean to start home tomorrow morning, after they rest the horses,” said Dag. “You, ah, mean to catch up?” “Not exactly.” “So, what? Exactly?” Gods, he was sounding just like Sorrel. But Whit didn’t seem to notice. “Oh, you have to come see, you have to come see. Come on, get our bags up on Copper and I’ll show you.” Dag had no heart to dampen such enthusiasm, despite his own lingering foul mood. Dutifully, he dismounted and helped sling the bags across his saddle, wrapped the reins around his hook, and strolled after Whit, who strained ahead like a puppy on a leash. The idlers’ eyes followed them, narrowing in suspicion at Dag. Edgy, far from friendly, but not quite the hostility that might have been expected had any of Barr’s and Remo’s victims died during the night. Absent gods be thanked. Walking first forward, then backward, Whit waved and called good-bye to them as well, by which Dag reckoned they’d been briefly hired by Tanner as fellow-loaders, a typical way for such rivertown wharf rats to pick up a little extra coin. “So if you’re not going back to Glassforge with Tanner and Mape and Hod, what are you going to do?” Dag probed. “I’m gonna try me some river-trading. I spent some of my horse money on window glass, to sell off the Fetch. That’s Berry’s boat. Boss Berry,” Whit corrected himself with a lopsided grin. “What about that promise to your parents about going straight home?” “That wasn’t a promise, exactly. More like a plan. Plans change. Anyhow, if I get all my glass sold by the time we reach Silver Shoals, I could take the river road home and not get lost, and get back hardly late at all.” There seemed a certain disquieting vagueness to this new plan. Well, Dag would find out what Fawn thought of it shortly. He returned his attention warily to his surroundings. They passed along the scattered row of flatboats tied to the trees along the bank. A man sitting on a crate in one bow hunched and scowled as Dag went by. A woman frowned, clutched up a wide-eyed toddler, its thumb stuck in its mouth, and skittered inside her boat’s top-shed. A collection of flatties idling and laughing on a boat roof fell abruptly silent, stood, and stared across at Dag. “Why are they starin’?” Whit asked, craning his head in return. “They starin’ at you, Dag? I been by here twice and they never stared at me…” “Just keep walking, Whit,” said Dag wearily. “Don’t turn your head. Turn around, blight it!” Whit was walking backward again, but he obediently wheeled. “Huh?” “I’m a Lakewalker, seemingly alone, in farmer country. Corpse-eater, grave-robber, sorcerer, remember? They wonder what I’m up to.” They wonder if I’m an easy target. They wonder if they could take me. He supposed they might also be wondering if he was some sort of consequence of last night, looking for retribution. “But you aren’t up to anything.” Whit squinted over his shoulder.
“You sure it isn’t just the hook?” Dag set his teeth. “Quite sure. Don’t you remember what you thought, first time Fawn brought me into your kitchen at West Blue?” Whit blinked in an effort of recollection. “Well, I suppose I thought you were a pretty strange fellow for my sister to drag in. And tall, I do remember that.” “Were you afraid?” “No, not particularly.” Whit hesitated. “Reed and Rush were, I think.” “Indeed.” Whit’s eyes shifted; the mob of flatties on the boat roof was gradually settling back down. “This feels creepy, y’know?” “Yes.” “Huh.” Whit’s dark brows drew in. Thinking? Dag could hope. “What did you hear up at the goods-shed about the fight last night?” Dag asked. “Oh, yeah, that was lucky for us!” “What?” said Dag, astonished. His steps slowed. Whit waved a hand. “It seems two fellows from the Fetch got roped into it by some of their friends, jumping some local Lakewalker they were mad at. When the ferrywomen and a bunch of other Lakewalkers came to break it up, they run off scared, along with some girl and her beau. The other three was in no shape for runnin’ and are back on their boats now. But it means Boss Berry needs two stout fellows to pull the broad-oars.” Whit pointed to Dag and himself, grinned, and held up two fingers. “And Fawn to cook,” he added cheerily. “Let me get this straight,” said Dag. “You’ve volunteered me—and Fawn—as flatboat crew?” “Yeah! Isn’t it great?” said Whit. Dag was just about to blister him with an explanation of how not-great it was, when he added, “It was Fawn’s idea, really,” and Dag let his breath huff out unformed. On his next breath, Dag managed, “Do you have any idea how to man a flatboat sweep?” “No, but I reckoned you would, and Berry and Bo said they’d teach me.” It wasn’t exactly Dag’s vision of the marriage trip he’d promised Fawn—or himself, for that matter. It wasn’t just the work, which Whit plainly underestimated. Dag was still dragging from his encounter with Hod, though it wasn’t his bodily strength that had suffered. But he remembered the recuperative effects of the harvest, and was given pause. He said more cautiously, “Did you tell this boat boss I’m a Lakewalker?” “Uh…I don’t remember as it came up,” Whit admitted uneasily. Dag sighed. “Was he wearing a pot on his head?” “Her head, and no. What kind of pot? Why?”
Dag’s terse summary of Barr and Remo’s jape surprised a shout of laughter from Whit. “Oh, that’s ripe! No, the loaders at the goods-shed didn’t tell me that part! I wonder if they was some of the pot-pated ones?” “Not so ripe in the result,” said Dag. “One of the patrollers was wearing his sharing knife last night, which he should not have
