Beguilement

Chapter 9

Fawn leaned precariously around Dag’s shoulder and gazed down the main street, lined with older buildings of wood and stone or newer ones of brick. Plank sidewalks kept people’s feet out of the churned mud of the road. A block farther on, the mud gave way to cobblestones, and beyond that, brick. A town so rich they paved the street with brick! The road curved away to follow the bend in the river, but she could just glimpse a town square busy with a day market. Most of the smokes that smudged the air seemed to be coming from farther downstream and downwind. Dag turned the mare into a side street, jerking his chin at the brick building rising to their left, blunt and blocky but softened by climbing ivy.

“There’s our hotel. Patrols always stay there for free. It was written into the will of the owner’s father. Something about the last big malice we took out in these parts, nigh on sixty years ago. Must’ve been a scary one. Good thinking on someone’s part, because it gets the area patrolled more often.”

“You looked for sixty years without finding another?”

“Oh, there’ve been a couple in the interim, I believe. We just got them so small, the farmers never knew. Like, um… pulling a weed instead of chopping down a tree. Better for us, better for everyone, except harder to convince folks to chip in some payment. Farsighted man, that old innkeep.”

They turned again under a wide brick archway and into the yard between the hotel and its stable. A horse boy polishing harness on a bench glanced up and rose to come forward. He did not reach for the mare’s makeshift bridle.

“Sorry, mister, miss.” His nod was polite, but his look seemed to sum up the worth of the battered pair riding bareback and find it sadly short. “Hotel’s full up. You’ll have to find another place.” The twist of his lips turned slightly derisive, if not altogether without sympathy. “Doubt you could make the price of a room here anyways.”

Only Fawn’s hand on Dag’s back felt the faint rumble of—anger? no, amusement pass through him. “Doubt I could too. Happily, Miss Bluefield, here, has made the price of all of them.”

The boy’s face went a little blank, as he tried to work this out to anything that made sense to him. His confusion was interrupted by a pair of Lakewalkers hobbling out of the doorway into the yard, staring hard at Dag.

These two looked more like proper patrollers, neat in leather vests, with their long hair pulled back in decorated braids. One had a face nearly as bruised as Fawn’s, with a strip of linen wrapped awkwardly around his head and under his jaw not quite hiding a line of bloody stitches. He leaned on a stick. The other had her left arm, thickened with bandages, supported in a sling. Both were dark-haired and tall, though their eyes were an almost normal sort of clear bright brown.

“Dag Redwing Hickory… ?” said the woman cautiously.

Dag swung his right leg over the mare’s neck and sat sideways a moment; smiling faintly, he touched his hand to his temple in a gesture of acknowledgment.

“Aye.

You all from Chato’s Log Hollow patrol?”

Both patrollers stood straighter, despite their evident hurts. “Yes, sir!”

said the man, while the woman hissed at the hotel servant, “Boy, take the patroller’s horse!”

The boy jumped as though goosed and took the halter rope, his stare growing wide-eyed. Dag slid down and turned to help Fawn, who swung her legs over.

“Ah! Don’t you dare jump,” he said sternly, and she nodded and slid off into his arm, collecting something pleasantly like a hug as he eased her feet to the ground. She stifled her longing to lean her head into his chest and just stand there for, oh, say, about a week. He turned to the other patrollers, but his left arm stayed behind her back, a solid, anchoring weight.

“Where is everyone?” Dag asked. The man grinned, then winced, his hand going to his jaw. “Out looking for you, mostly.”

“Ah, I was afraid of that.”

“Yeah,” said the woman. “Your patrol all kept swearing you’d turn up like a cat, and then went running out again anyway without hardly stopping to eat or sleep.

Looks like the cat fanciers had the right of it. There’s a fellow upstairs name of Saun’s been fretting his heart out for you. Every time we go in, he badgers for news.”

Dag’s lips pursed in a breath of relief. “On medicine tent duty, are you?”

“Yep,” said the man.

“How many carrying-wounded have we got?”

“Just two—your Saun and our Reela. She got her leg broke when some mud-men spooked her horse over a drop.”

“Bad?”

“Not good, but she’ll get to keep it.”

Dag nodded. “Good enough, then.”

The man blinked in belated realization of Dag’s stump, but he added nothing more awkward. “I don’t know how tired you are, but it would be kindly done if you could step up and put Saun’s mind at ease first thing. He really has been fretting something awful. I think he’d rest better for seeing you with his own eyes.”

“Of course,” said Dag.

“Ah…” said the woman, looking at Fawn and then, inquiringly, at Dag.

“This here’s Miss Fawn Bluefield,” said Dag.

Fawn dipped her knees. “How de’ do?”

“And she is… ?” said the man dubiously.

“She’s with me.” Something distinctly firm in Dag’s voice discouraged further questions, and the two patrollers, after civil if still curious nods at Fawn, led the way inside.

Fawn had only a glimpse of the entry hall, featuring a tall wooden counter and archways leading off to some big rooms, before she followed the patrollers up a staircase with a time-polished banister, cool and smooth under her hesitant fingertips. One flight up, they turned into a hallway lined with doors on either side and a glass window set in the end for light.

“You partner’s mostly lucid today, although he still keeps claiming you brought him back from the dead,” said the man over his shoulder.

“He wasn’t dead,” said Dag.

The man shot a look at the woman. “Told you.”

“His heart had stopped and he’d quit breathing, was all.”

Fawn blinked in bafflement. And, she was heartened to see, she wasn’t the only one.

“Er…” The man stopped outside a door with a brass number 6 on it. “Pardon, sir?

I’d always been taught it was too risky to match grounds with someone mortally injured, and unworkable to block the pain at speed.”

“Likely.” Dag shrugged. “I just skipped the extras and went in and out fast.”

“Oh,” said the woman in a voice of enlightenment that Fawn did not share. The man blurted, “Didn’t it hurt?”

Dag gave him a long, slow look. Fawn was very glad it wasn’t her at the focus, because that look could surely reduce people to grease spots on the floor.

Dag gave the other patroller a moment more to melt—precisely timed, she was suddenly certain—then nodded at the door. The woman hastened to open it.

Dag passed in. If the two patrollers had been respectful before, the look they now exchanged behind his back was downright daunted. The woman glanced at Fawn doubtfully but did not attempt to exclude her as she slipped through the door in Dag’s wake.

The room had cutwork linen curtains, pushed open and moving gently in the summer air, and flanking the window two beds with feather ticks atop straw ticks.

One was empty, though it had gear and saddlebags piled on the floor at its foot.

So did the other, but in it lay an—inevitably—tall young man. His hair was light brown, unbraided, and spread out upon his pillow. A rumpled sheet was pulled up to his chest, where his torso was wrapped around with bandages. He stared listlessly at the ceiling, his pale brow wrinkled. When he turned his head at the sound of steps and recognized his visitor, the pain in his face transformed to joy so fast it looked like a flash flood washing over him.

“Dag! You made it!” He laughed, coughed, grimaced, and moaned. “Ow. Knew you would!”

The patroller woman raised her eyebrows at this broad claim but grinned indulgently.

Dag walked to the bedside and smiled down, adopting a cheerful tone. “Now, I know you had six broken ribs at least. I ask you, is this the time for speeches?”

“Only a short one,” wheezed the young man. His hand found Dag’s and grasped it.

“Thank you.”

Dag’s brows twitched, but he didn’t argue. Such sincere gratitude shone in the young man’s eyes, Fawn warmed to him at once. Finally, somebody seemed to be taking Dag at his worth. Saun turned his head to peer somewhat blearily at her, and she smiled at him with all her heart. He blinked rapidly and smiled back, looking a bit flummoxed.

Dag gave the hand a little shake from side to side, and asked more softly,

“How’re you doing, Saun?”

“It only hurts when I laugh.”

“Oh? Don’t let the patrol know that.” The dry light in Dag’s eyes was mirth, Fawn realized.

Saun sputtered and coughed. “Ow! Blast you, Dag!”

“See what I mean?” He added more sternly, “They tell me you haven’t been sleeping. I said, couldn’t be—this is the patroller we have to roll out of his blankets by force in camp in the morning. Feather beds too soft for you now?

Shall I bring you a few rocks to make it more homelike?”

Saun held a hand to his bandaged chest and carefully refrained from chuckling.

“Naw. All I want is your tale. They said”—his face grew grave in memory, and he moistened his lips—“they found your horse yesterday miles from the lair, found the lair, found half your gear and your bow abandoned in a pile. Your bow.

Didn’t think you’d ever leave that on purpose. Two rotting mud-men and a pile of something Mari swore was the dead malice, and a trail of blood leading off to nothing. What were we supposed to think?”

“I was rather hoping someone would think I’d found shelter at the nearest farm,”

Dag said ruefully. “I begin to suspect I’m not exciting enough for you all.”

Saun’s eyes narrowed. “There’s more than that,” he said positively.

“Quite a bit, but it’s for Mari’s ears first.” Dag glanced at Fawn.

Saun slumped in apparent acceptance of this. “As long as I get more sometime.”

“Sometime.” Dag hesitated, then added diffidently, “So… did they also find the body I’d left in the tree?”

Three faces turned to stare.

“Evidently not yet,” Dag murmured.

“See what I told you? See?” said Saun to his companions in a voice of vindication. He added to Dag through slightly gritted teeth, “Sometime soon, all right?”

“As I can.” Dag nodded at the two from the other patrol. “Did Mari say when she’d be back?”

They shook their heads. “She left at dawn,” the woman offered.

“Need anything more right now, Saun?” asked the patroller man.

“You just brought me what I wanted most,” said Saun. “Take a break, eh?”

“I think I will.” With a barely audible grunt of pain, the patroller man sat down on the other bed, evidently his own, shed his boots, and used his hands to swing the stiff leg inboard. “Ah.”

Dag nodded in farewell. “Sleep hard, Saun. Try and wake up smarter, eh?”

A faint snort and a muffled Ow! followed the three out. Dag’s face, turning away, softened like a man finding grace in an unexpected hour. “Yeah, he’ll be all right,” he muttered in satisfaction.

The patroller woman closed the door quietly behind them.

“So, was that Saun the Sheep?” asked Fawn.

“Aye, the very lamb,” said Dag. “If he lives long enough to trade in some of that enthusiasm for brains, he’ll be a good patroller. He’s made it to twenty, so far. Must be luck.” His smile took a twist. “Same as you, Little Spark.”

As they started down the hall, a woman’s voice called weakly from a room with an open door.

“That’s Reela,” said the patroller woman quickly. “Do you have all you need, sir?”

“If not, I’ll find it.” Dag gave a dismissing wave. “I’ve known this place for years.”

“Then if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go see what she wants.” She nodded and stepped away.

As they made their way down the stairs, Fawn heard Dag mutter under his breath,

“Stop sir-ing me, you dreadful puppies!” He paused at the bottom, his hand on the rail, and looked back upward, his face going distant.

“Now what are you thinking?” Fawn asked softly.

“I’m thinking… that when our walking wounded are set to look after our carrying-wounded, it’s a sure sign we’re too short-rostered. Mari’s patrol is sixteen, four by four. It should be twenty-five, five by five. I wonder how many Chato’s patrol is down by? Ah, well.” He vented a sigh. “Let’s rustle us up some food, Spark.” Dag led her to a rather astonishing little commode chamber, where she was able to swap out her dressings and wash up in the pretty painted tin basin provided.

When she emerged, he escorted her in turn to one of the big downstairs rooms, full of tables with benches or chairs but, at this hour, empty of other people.

In a few minutes, a serving girl came out of the kitchen in back with a tray of ham, cheese, two kinds of bread, cream-and-rhubarb pie, and strawberries, with a pitcher of beer and a jug of milk, fresh, the girl informed them, from the hotel’s own cows kept out back. Fawn mentally added serving girl to her list of potential Glassforge jobs, as well as milkmaid, and set to under Dag’s benign eye. More relaxed than she’d ever seen him, he plowed in heartily, she noted with satisfaction.

They were contesting the last strawberry, each trying to press it on the other, when Dag’s head came up, and he said “Ah.” In a moment, Fawn could hear through the open windows the clatter of horses and echo of voices in the stable yard.

In another minute, the door slammed open and booted footsteps rapped across the floorboards. Mari, trailed by two other patrollers, swept into the dining room, halted by their table, planted her fists on her hips, and glowered at Dag.

“You,” she uttered, and never had Fawn heard one syllable carry so much freight.

Deadpan, Dag topped up his beer glass and handed it to her. Not taking her exasperated eyes from him, she raised it to her lips and gulped down half.

The other two patrollers were grinning broadly.

“Were you trying to give me the fright of my life, boy?” she demanded, plunking the glass back down almost hard enough to crack it.

“No,” Dag drawled, rescuing the glass and filling it again, “I suspect that was just a bonus. Sit down and catch your breath, Aunt Mari.”

“Don’t you Aunt Mari me till I’m done reaming you out,” she said, but much more mildly. One of the patrollers at her shoulder, catching Dag’s eye, pulled out a chair for her, and she sat anyhow. By the time she’d blown out her breath and stretched her back, her posture had grown much less alarming. Except for the underlying exhaustion creeping to the surface; Dag’s brows drew down at that.

He reached across the table and gripped her hand. “Sorry for any false scares.

Saun told me about you finding my messes yesterday. I kind of had my hand full, though.”

“Aye, so I heard.”

“Oh, did you find the Horsefords’ farm, finally?”

“About two hours ago. Now, there was a garbled tale and a half.” She glanced speculatively at Fawn, and her frown at Dag deepened.

Dag said, “Mari, may I present Miss Fawn Bluefield. Spark, this is my patrol leader, Mari Redwing Hickory. Mari’s her personal name, Redwing is our tent name, and the Hickory is for Hickory Lake Camp, which is our patrol’s home base.”

Fawn ducked her head politely. Mari returned an extremely provisional nod.

Gesturing, Dag continued, “Utau and Razi, also of Hickory Camp.” The two other patrollers made friendly salutes of greeting to her not unlike Dag’s. Utau was older, shorter, and burlier, and wore his thinning hair in a knot like Mari’s.

Razi was younger, taller, and gawkier; his hair hung down his back in a single plait almost to his waist, with dark red and green cords woven in.

The older one, Utau, said, “Congratulations on the malice, Dag. The youngsters were all hopping mad that they’d missed their first kill, though. I’d suggested we have you take them all out to the lair and walk them through it, for consolation, and to show them how it’s done.”

Dag shook his head, caught between a low laugh and a wince. “I don’t think that would be all that useful to them, really.”

“So just how much of a foul-up was it?” Mari inquired tartly.

The residue of amusement drained from Dag’s eyes. “Foul enough. The short tale is, Miss Bluefield, here, was kidnapped off the road by the pair I’d trailed from the bandit camp. When I caught up with them all at the lair, I was outmatched by the mud-men, who got a good way into taking me apart. But I noticed that the malice, mud-men, and all, were making the interesting mistake of ignoring Miss Bluefield in the scuffle. So I tossed my sharing knives to her, and she got one into the malice. Took it down. Saved my life. World too, for the usual bonus.”

“She got that close to a malice?” asked Razi, in a voice somewhere between disbelief and amazement. “How?”

For answer, Dag leaned over and, after a glance at her for permission, gently folded back the collar of her dress. His finger traced over numb spots of flesh around her neck that Fawn realized belatedly must be the bruises from the malice’s great hands, and she shuddered involuntarily despite the summer warmth of the room. “Closer than that, Razi.”

The two patrollers’ lips parted. Mari leaned back in her chair, her hand going to her mouth. Fawn had not seen a mirror for days. Whatever did the marks look like?

“The malice misjudged her,” Dag continued. “I trust you all will not. But if you want to repeat those congratulations to the right person, Utau, feel free.”

Under Dag’s cool eye, Utau unscrewed his face and slowly brought his hand to his temple. After groping a moment for his voice, he managed, “Miss Bluefield.”

“Aye,” Razi seconded, after a stunned moment.

“Wildly demonstrative bunch, you know, we patrollers,” Dag murmured in Fawn’s ear, his dry amusement flickering again.

“I can see that,” she murmured back, making his lip twitch.

Mari rubbed her forehead. “And the long tale, Dag? Do I even want to hear it?”

The grim look he gave her locked all her attention. “Yes,” he said. “As soon as may be. But in private. Then Miss Bluefield needs to rest.” He turned to Fawn.

“Or do you want to rest up first?”

Fawn shook her head. “Talk first, please.”

Mari braced her hands on her trousered knees and rolled her shoulders. “Ah.

All right.” She peered around, eyes narrowing. “My room?”

“That would do.”

She pushed to her feet. “Utau, you were up all night. You’re now off duty.

Razi, get some food in you, then ride out to Tailor’s Point and let them know Dag’s been found. Or shown up, anyway.” The patrollers nodded and turned away.

Dag murmured to Fawn, “Bring your bedroll.” Mari’s room proved to be on the third floor. Fawn found herself dizzy and shaky by the time she’d climbed the second flight of stairs, and she was grateful for Dag’s supporting hand. Mari led them into a narrower room than Saun’s, with only one bed, though otherwise similar right down to the messy pile of gear and saddlebags at the foot. Dag gestured for Fawn to lay her bedroll across the bed.

Fawn untied the bindings and unrolled it; the contents clinked.

Mari’s brows rose. She picked up Dag’s ruptured hand harness and held it out like the sad carcass of some dead animal. “That took some doing. I see now why you didn’t bother to take your bow along. You still got your arm?”

“Just barely,” said Dag. “I need to get that thing restitched with stronger thread, this time.”

“I’d rethink that idea if I were you. Which do you want to have come apart first, you or it?”

Dag paused a moment, then said, “Ah. You have a point, there. Maybe I’ll get it fixed just the same.”

“Better.” Mari set the harness back down and picked up the makeshift linen bag and let it drift through her hand, feeling the contents shift within. Her expression grew sad, almost remote. “Kauneo’s heart’s knife, wasn’t it?”

Dag nodded shortly.

“I know how long you’ve kept it aside. This fate was worthy.”

Dag shook his head. “They’re all the same, really, I’ve come to believe.” He took a breath and advanced to the bed, motioning Fawn to sit.

She perched cross-legged on the bed’s head, smoothing her skirt over her knees, and watched the two patrollers. Mari had gold eyes much like Dag’s, if a shade more bronze, and she wondered if she really was his aunt and his use of the title not, as she’d first thought, just a joke or a respectful endearment.

Mari set the bag back down. “Do you plan to send it up to be buried with the rest of her uncle’s bones? Or burn it here?”

“Not sure yet. It will keep with me; it has so far.” Dag drew a deeper breath, staring down at the other knife. “Now we come to the long story.”

Mari sat down at the bed’s foot and crossed her arms, listening closely as Dag began his tale again, this time starting with the night raid on the bandit camp.

His descriptions of his actions were succinct but very exact, Fawn noticed, as though certain details might matter more, though she was not sure how he sorted which to leave in or out. Until he came to, “I believe the mud-man lifted Miss Bluefield from the road because she was two months pregnant. And came back and took her from the farm for the same reason.”

Mari’s lips moved involuntarily, Was?, then compressed. “Go on.”

Dag’s voice stiffened as he described his risky raid on the malice’s cave. “I was just too late. When I hit the entrance and the mud-men, the malice was already taking her child.”

Mari leaned forward, her brows drawing down. “Separately?”

“So it seems.”

“Huh…” Mari leaned back, shook her head, and peered at Fawn. “Excuse me. I am so sorry for your loss. But this is new to me. We knew malices took pregnant women, but then, they take anyone they can catch. Rarely, the women’s bodies are recovered. I did not know the malice didn’t always take both grounds together.”

“I don’t think,” said Fawn distantly, “it would have kept me around very long.

It was about to break my neck when I finally got the right knife into it.”

Mari blinked, glanced down at the blue-hilted bone knife lying on the bedroll, and stared up again at Dag. “What?”

Carefully, Dag explained Fawn’s mix-up with his knives. He was very kind, Fawn thought, to excuse her from any blame in the matter.

“The knife had been unprimed. You know what I was saving it for.”

Mari nodded.

“But now it’s primed. With the death of Spark’s—of Miss Bluefield’s daughter, I believe. What I don’t know is if that’s all it drew from the malice. Or whether it will even work as a sharing knife. Or… well, I don’t know much, I’m afraid.

But with Miss Bluefield’s permission, I thought you could examine it too.”

“Dag, I’m no more a maker than you are.”

“No, but you are more… you are less… I could use another opinion.”

Mari glanced at Fawn. “Miss Bluefield, may I?”

“Please. I want to understand, and… and I don’t, really.”

Mari leaned over and picked up the bone knife. She cradled it, ran her hand along its smooth pale length, and finally, much as Dag had, held it to her lips with her eyes closed. When she set it down again, her mouth stayed tight for a moment.

“Well”—she took a breath—“it’s certainly primed.”

“That, I could tell,” said Dag.

“It feels… hm. Oddly pure. It’s not that souls go into the knives—you did explain that to her, yes?” she demanded of Dag.

“Yes. She’s clear on that part.”

“But different people’s heart’s knives do have different feels to them. Some echo of the donor lingers, though they all seem to work alike. Perhaps it’s that the lives are different, but the deaths are all the same, I don’t know. I’m a patroller, not a lore-master. I think”—she tapped her lips with a forefinger—“you had better take it to a maker. The most experienced you can find.”

“Miss Bluefield and I,” said Dag. “The knife is properly hers, now.”

“This isn’t any business for a farmer to be mixed up in.”

Dag scowled. “What would you have me do? Take it from her? You?”

“Explain, please?” Fawn said tightly. “Everyone is talking past me again.

That’s all right mostly, I’m used to it, but not for this.”

“Show her your knives, Mari,” Dag said, a rasp of challenge in his voice, for all that it was soft.

She looked at him, then slowly unbuttoned her shirt partway down and drew out a dual knife pouch much like Dag’s, though of softer leather. She pulled the strap over her head, pushed the bedroll aside, and laid out two bone knives side by side on the quilt. They were nearly identical, except for different-colored dye daubed on the lightly carved hilts, red and brown this time.

“These are a true pair, both bones from the same donor,” she said, caressing the red one. “My youngest son, as it happens. It was his third year patrolling, up Sparford way, and I’d just got to thinking he was getting over the riskiest part of the learning… well.” She touched the brown one. “This one is primed. His father’s aunt Palai gave her death to it. Tough, tough old woman—absent gods, we loved her. Preferably from a safe distance, but there’s one like that in every family, I think.” Her hand drifted again to the red one. “This one is unprimed, bonded to me. I keep it by me in case.”

“So what would happen,” said Dag dryly, “to anyone who tried to take them from you?”

Mari’s smile grew grim. “I’d outstrip the worst wrath of Great-aunt Palai.”

She sat up and slipped the knives away, then nodded at Fawn. “But I think it’s different for her.”

“It’s all strange to me.” Fawn frowned, staring at the blue-hilted knife. “I have no happy memories about this to balance the sorrows. But they’re my memories, all the same. I’d rather they weren’t… wasted.”

Mari raised both hands in a gesture of frustrated neutrality.

“So could I have leave from the patrol to travel on this matter?” asked Dag.

Mari grimaced. “You know how short we are, but once this Glassforge business is settled, I can’t very well refuse you. Have you ever drawn leave? Ever? You don’t even get sick!”

Dag thought a moment. “Death of my father,” he said at last. “Eleven years ago.”

“Before my time. Eh! Ask again when we’re ready to decamp. If there’s no new trouble landed in our laps by then.”

He nodded. “Miss Bluefield’s not fit to travel far yet anyway. You can see by her eyelids and nails she’s lost too much blood, even without how her knees give way. No fever yet, though. Please, Mari, I did all I could, but could you look her over?” His hand touched his belly, making his meaning clear.

Mari sighed. “Yes, yes, Dag.”

He stood expectantly for a moment; she grimaced and sat up, waving to a set of saddlebags leaning in the corner. “There’s your gear, by the by. Luckily your fool horse hadn’t got round to scraping it off in the woods. Go on, now.”

“But will you… can’t I… I mean, it’s not as though you have to undress her.”

“Women’s business,” she said firmly.

Reluctantly, he made for the door, though he did scoop up his arm harness and recovered belongings. “I’ll see about getting you a room, Spark.”

Fawn smiled gratefully at him.

“Good,” said Mari. “Scat.”

He bit his lip and nodded farewell. His boot steps faded down the hall.

Fawn tried not to be too unnerved by being left alone with Mari. Scary old lady or not, the patrol leader seemed to share some of Dag’s straightforward quality.

She had Fawn sit quietly on the bed while she ran her hands over her. She then sat behind Fawn and hugged her in close for several silent minutes, her hands wrapped across Fawn’s lower belly. If she was doing something with her groundsense, Fawn could not feel it, and wondered if this was what being deaf among hearing people was like. When she released Fawn, her face was cool but not unkind.

“You’ll do,” she said. “It’s clear you were ripped up unnatural, which accounts for the suddenness of the bleeding, but you’re healing about as quick as could be expected for someone so depleted, and your womb’s not hot. Fever’s a commoner killer in these things than bleeding, though less showy. You’ll have some blight-scarring in there, I guess, slow to heal like the ones on your neck, but not enough to stop you having other children, so you be more careful in future, Miss Bluefield.”

“Oh.” Fawn, looking back through clouds of regret, had not even thought ahead to her future fertility. “Does that happen to some women, after a miscarriage?”

“Sometimes. Or after a bad birth. Delicate parts in there. It amazes me the process works at all, when I think about all the things I’ve seen can go wrong.”

Fawn nodded, then reached to put away Dag’s blue-hilted knife, still lying on her bedroll atop her spare clothes.

“So,” said Mari in a carefully bland tone, “who’s the other half owner sides you of that knife’s priming? Some farm lout?”

Fawn’s jaw set. “Just me. The lout made it very clear he was giving it all to me. Which was why I was out on the road in the first place.”

“Farmers. I’ll never understand ‘em.”

“There are no Lakewalker louts?”

“Well…” Mari’s long, embarrassed drawl conceded the point.

Fawn reread the faded brown lettering on the bone blade. “Dag meant to drive this into his own heart someday. Didn’t he.” This Kauneo had intended that he should.

“Aye.”

Now he couldn’t. That was something, at least. “You have one, too.”

“Someone has to prime. Not everyone, but enough. Patrollers understand the need better.”

“Was Kauneo a patroller?”

“Didn’t Dag say?”

“He said she was a woman who’d died twenty years ago up northwest someplace.”

“That’s a bit close-mouthed even for him.” Mari sighed. “It’s not my place to tell his tales, but if you are to have the holding of that knife, farmer girl, you’d better understand what it is and where it comes from.”

“Yes,” said Fawn firmly, “please. I’m so tired of making stupid mistakes.”

Mari twitched a—provisionally—approving eyebrow at this. “Very well. I’ll give you what Dag would call the short tale.” Her long inhalation suggested it wasn’t going to be as short as all that, and Fawn sat cross-legged again, intent.

“Kauneo was Dag’s wife.”

A tremor of shock ran through Fawn. Shock, but not surprise, she realized. “I see.”

“She died at Wolf Ridge.”

“He hadn’t mentioned any Wolf Ridge to me. He just called it a bad malice war.”

Though there could be no such thing as a good malice war, Fawn suspected.

“Farmer girl, Dag doesn’t talk about Wolf Ridge to anyone. One of his several little quirks you have to get used to. You have to understand, Luthlia is the biggest, wildest hinterland of the seven, with the thinnest population of Lakewalkers to try to patrol it. Terrible patrolling—cold swamps and trackless woods and killing winters. The other hinterlands lend more young patrollers to Luthlia than to anywhere, but they still can’t keep up.

“Kauneo came from a tent of famously fierce patrollers up that way. She was very beautiful I guess—courted by everyone. Then this quiet, unassuming young patrol leader from the east, walking around the lake on his second training tour, stole her heart right out from under all of them.” A hint of pride colored her voice, and Fawn thought, Yes, she’s really his aunt. “He made plans to stay. They were string-bound—you farmers would say, married—and he got promoted to company captain.”

“Dag wasn’t always a patroller?” said Fawn.

Mari snorted. “That boy should have been a hinterland lieutenant by now, if he hadn’t… agh, anyway. Most of our patrols are more like hunts, and most turn up nothing. In fact, it’s possible to patrol all your life and never be in on a malice kill, by one chance or another. Dag has his ways of improving those odds for himself. But when a malice gets entrenched, when it goes to real war…

then we’re all making it up as we go along.”

She rose, stalked across the bedchamber to her washstand, poured a glass of water, and drank it down. She fell to pacing as she continued.

“Big malice slipped through the patrol patterns. It didn’t have many people to enslave up that way, no bandits like the malice you slew here. There are no farmers in Luthlia, nor anywhere north of the Dead Lake, save now and then some trapper or trader slips in that we escort out. But the malice did find wolves.

It did things to wolves. Wolf-men, man-wolves, dire wolves as big as ponies, with man-wits. By the time the thing was found, it had grown itself an army of wolves. The Luthlian patrollers sent out a call-up for help from neighbor hinterlands, but meanwhile, they were on their own.

“Dag’s company, fifty patrollers including Kauneo and a couple of her brothers, was sent to hold a ridge to cover the flank of another party trying to strike up the valley at the lair. The scouts led them to expect an attack of maybe fifty dire wolves. What they got was more like five hundred.”

Fawn’s breath drew in.

“In one hour Dag lost his hand, his wife, his company all but three, and the ridge. What he didn’t lose was the war, because in the hour they’d bought, the other group made it all the way through to the lair. When he woke up in the medicine tent, his whole life was burned up like a pyre, I guess. He didn’t take it well.

“In due course his dead wife’s tent folk despaired of him and sent him home.

Where he didn’t take it well some more. Then Fairbolt Crow, bless his bones—our camp captain, though he was just a company captain back then—got smart, or desperate, or furious, and dragged him off to Tripoint. Got some clever farmer artificer he knew there to make up the arm harness, and they went round and round on it till they hit on devices that worked. Dag practiced with his new bow till his fingers bled, pulled himself together to meet Fairbolt’s terms, and let me tell you Fairbolt didn’t cut him any slack, and was let back on patrol.

Where he has been ever since.

“Some ten or twelve sharing knives have passed through Dag’s hand since—people keep giving them to him because they’re pretty sure to get used—but he always kept that pair aside. The only mementos of Kauneo I know of that he didn’t shove away like they scorched him. So that’s the knife now in your keeping, farmer girl.”

Fawn held it up and drew it through her fingers. “You’d think it would be heavier.” Did I really want to know all this?

“Aye.” Mari sighed.

Fawn glanced curiously at Mari’s gray head. “Will you ever be a company captain?

You must have been patrolling for a long time.”

“I’ve had far less time in the field than Dag, actually, for all I’m twenty years older. I walked the woman’s path. I spent four or five years training as a girl—we must train up the girls, for all that fellows like Dag disapprove, because if ever our camps are attacked, it’ll be us and the old men defending them. I got string-bound, got blood-bound—had my children, that is—and then went back to patrolling. I expect to keep walking till my luck or my legs give out, five more years or ten, but I don’t care to deal with anything more fractious than a patrol, thank you. Then back to camp and play with my grandchildren and their children till it’s time to share. It will do, as a life.”

Fawn’s brow wrinkled. “Did you ever imagine another?” Or being thrown into another, as Fawn had been?

Mari cocked her head. “Can’t say as I ever did. Though I’d have my boy back first if I were given wishes.”

“How many children did you have?”

“Five,” Mari replied, with distinct maternal pride that sounded plenty farmerish to Fawn, for all she suspected Mari would deny any such thing.

A rap on the door was followed by Dag’s plaintive voice: “Mari, can I please come back in now?”

Mari rolled her eyes. “All right.”

Dag eased himself around the door. “How is she doing? Is she healing at all?

Could you match grounds? Or do a little reinforcement, even?”

“She’s healing as well as could be expected. I did nothing with my ground, because time and rest will do the job every bit as well.”

Dag took this in, seeming a bit disappointed, but resigned. “I have you a room, Spark, down one floor. Tired?”

Exhausted, she realized. She nodded.

“Well, I’ll take you down and you can start in on the resting part, leastways.”

Mari rubbed her lips and studied her nephew through narrowed eyes.

Groundsense.

Fawn wondered what the patrol leader had seen with hers that she wasn’t saying.

Did closed mouths run in the Redwing family like golden eyes? Fawn rolled up her bedroll and let Dag shoo her out.

“Don’t let Mari scare you,” Dag said, letting his left arm drift along at her back, whether protectively or for subtle concealment Fawn could not tell, as they descended the stairs. They turned into the adjoining corridor.

“She didn’t, much. I liked her.” Fawn took a breath. Some secrets took up too much space to keep tiptoeing around. “She told me a little more about your wife, and Wolf Ridge. She thought I needed to know.”

Silence stretched for three long footfalls. “She’s right.”

And that, evidently, was all Fawn was going to get for now.

Fawn’s new room was narrow like Mari’s, except this one overlooked the main street instead of the stable yard. A washstand with ewer already filled, piecework curtains and a quilt in a matching pattern, and rag rugs on the floor made it fine and homey to Fawn’s eyes. A door in the side wall apparently led into the next chamber. Dag swung the bar across and shoved it down into its brackets.

“Where is your room?” Fawn asked.

Dag gestured at the closed door. “Through there.”

“Oh, good. Will you take a rest? Don’t tell me you aren’t owed some healing too.

I saw your bruises.”

He shook his head. “I’m going out to find a harnessmaker. I’ll come back and take you down to dinner later, if you’d like.”

“I’d like that fine.”

He smiled a little at that and backed himself out. “Seems all I do in this place is tell folks to go to sleep.”

“Yes, but I’m actually going to do it.”

He grinned—that grin should be illegal—and shut the door softly.

On the wall beside the washstand hung a shaving mirror, fine flat Glassforge glass. Reminded, Fawn slid up to it and turned down the collar of her blue dress.

The bruise masking most of the left side of her face was purple going greenish around the edges, with four dark scabs from the mud-man’s claws mounting to her cheekbone, still tender but not hot with infection. The pattern of the malice’s hand on her neck, four blots on one side and one on the other, stood out in sharp contrast to her fair skin. The marks had a peculiar black tint and an ugly raised texture unlike any other contusion Fawn had ever seen. Well, if there was any special trick to their healing, Dag would know it. Or might have experienced it himself, if he had got close enough to as many malices as Mari’s inventory of his past knives suggested.

Fawn went to the window and just caught a glimpse of Dag’s tall form passing below, arm harness tossed over his shoulder, striding up the street toward the town square. She gazed out at Glassforge after he’d made his way out of sight along the boardwalk, but not for long; yawning uncontrollably, she slipped off her dress and shoes and crawled into the bed.