Beguilement

Chapter 10

Dag returned at dinnertime as promised. Fawn had put on her good dress, the green cotton that her aunt Nattie had spun and woven; she followed him downstairs. The raucous noises coming out of the room where they’d eaten their quiet lunch gave her pause.

Seeing her hesitate, Dag smiled and bent his head to murmur, “Patrollers can be a rowdy bunch when we all get together, but you’ll be all right. You don’t have to answer any questions you don’t want. We can make out you’re still too shaken by our fight with the malice and don’t want to talk about it. They’ll accept that.” His hand drifted to her collar as if to arrange it more tidily, and Fawn realized he was not covering up the strange marks on her neck, but rather, making sure they showed. “I think we don’t need to mention what happened with the second knife to anyone besides Mari.”

“Good,” said Fawn, relieved, and allowed him to take her in, his arm protective at her back.

The tables this evening were indeed full of tall, alarming patrollers, twenty-five or so, variously layered with road dirt. Given Dag’s warning, Fawn managed not to jump when their entrance was greeted with whoops, cheers, table pounding, and flying jibes about Dag’s three-day vanishing. The roughness of some of the jests was undercut by the real joy in the voices, and Dag, smiling crookedly, gave back: “Some trackers! I swear you lot couldn’t find a drink in a rain barrel!”

“Beer barrel, Dag!” someone hooted in return. “What’s wrong with you?”

Dag surveyed the room and guided Fawn toward a square table on the far side where only two patrollers sat, the Utau and Razi she’d met earlier. The two waved encouragement as they approached, and Razi shoved out a spare chair invitingly with his boot.

Fawn was not sure which patrollers were Mari’s and which were Chato’s; the two patrols seemed to be mingled, not quite at random. Any sorting seemed to be more by age, as there was one table with half a dozen gray heads at it, including Mari; also two other older women Fawn had not seen at the well-house, so presumably from the Log Hollow patrol. The young woman with her arm in the sling was at a table with three young men, all vying to cut her meat for her; she was presently holding them off with jabs of her fork and laughing. The men patrollers seemed all ages, but the women were only young or much older, Fawn noticed, and remembered Mari’s account of her life’s course. In the home camps would the proportions be reversed?

Breathless serving maids and boys weaved among the tables lugging trays laden with platters and pitchers, rapidly relieved by reaching hands. The patrollers seemed more interested in speed and quantity than in decorum, an attitude shared with farmhouse kitchens that made Fawn feel nearly comfortable.

They sat and exchanged greetings with Razi and Utau; Razi leaped up and acquired more plates, cutlery, and glasses, and both united to snag passing food and drink to fill them. They did ply Dag with questions about his adventures although, with cautious glances, spared Fawn. His answers were either unexcitingly factual, vague, or took the form that Fawn recognized from the Horsefords’ table of effectively diverting counterquestions. They finally desisted and let Dag catch up with his chewing.

Utau glanced around the room, and remarked, “Everyone’s a lot happier tonight.

Especially Mari. Fortunately for all of us downstream of her.”

Razi said wistfully, “Do you suppose she and Chato will let us all have a bow-down before we go back out?”

“Chato looks pretty cheerful,” said Utau, nodding across the room at another table of patrollers, although which was the leader Fawn could not tell. “We might get lucky.”

“What’s a bow-down?” asked Fawn.

Razi smiled eagerly. “It’s a party, patroller-style. They happen sometimes, to celebrate a kill, or when two or more patrols chance to get together. Having another patrol to talk to is a treat. Not that we don’t all love one another”—Utau rolled his eyes at this—“but weeks on end of our own company can get pretty old. A bow-down has music. Dancing. Beer if we can get it…”

“We could get lots of beer, here,” Utau observed distantly.

“Lingerrrring in dark corners—” Razi trilled, catching up the tail of his braid and twirling it.

“Enough—she gets the idea,” said Dag, but he smiled. Fawn wondered if it was in memory. “Could happen, but I guarantee it won’t be till Mari thinks the cleanup is all done. Or as done as it ever gets.” His eye was caught by something over Fawn’s shoulder. “I feel prophetic. I predict chores before cheer.” “Dag, you’re such a morbid crow—” Razi began.

“Well, gentlemen,” said Mari’s voice. “Do your feet hurt?”

Fawn turned her head and smiled diffidently at the patrol leader, who had drifted up to their table.

Razi opened his mouth, but Dag cut in, “Don’t answer that, Razi. It’s a trick question. The safe response is, ‘I can’t say, Mari, but why do you ask?’ ”

Mari’s lips twitched, and she returned in a sugary voice, “I’m so glad you asked that question, Dag!”

“Maybe not so safe,” murmured Utau, grinning.

“How’s the arm-harness repair coming?” Mari continued to Dag.

Dag grimaced. “Done tomorrow afternoon, maybe. I had to stop at two places before I found one that would do it for free. Or rather, in exchange for us saving his life, family, town, territory, and everyone in it.”

Utau said dryly, “Naturally, you forgot to mention it was you personally who took their malice down.”

Dag shrugged this off in irritation. “Firstly, that wasn’t so. Secondly, none of us could do the job without the rest of us, so all are owed. I shouldn’t…

none of us should have to beg.”

“It so happens,” said Mari, letting this slide by, “that I have a sitting-down job for a one-handed man tomorrow morning. In the storeroom here is a trunkful of patrol logs and maps for this region that need a good going-over. The usual.

I want someone with an eye for it to see if we can figure how this malice slipped through, and stop up the crack in future. Also, I want a listing of the nearby sectors that have been especially neglected. We’re going to stay here a few extra days while the injured recover, and to repair gear and furbish up.”

Utau and Razi both brightened at this news.

“We’ll do some local search-pattern catch-up at the same time,” Mari continued.

“And let the Glassforge folk see us doing so,” she added, with dour emphasis and a nod at Dag. “Give ‘em a show.”

Dag snorted. “Better we should offer them double their blight bogles back if they’re not happy with our work.”

Razi choked on the beer he was just swallowing, and Utau kindly if unhelpfully thumped his back. “Oh, how I wish we could!” Razi wheezed when he’d caught his breath again. “Love to see the looks on their stupid farmer faces, just once!”

Fawn congealed, her beginning ease and enjoyment of the patrollers’ banter abruptly quenched. Dag stiffened.

Mari cast them both an enigmatic look, but moved off without comment, and Fawn remembered their exchange earlier on the universal nature of loutishness. So.

Razi burbled on obliviously, “Patrolling out of Glassforge is like a holiday.

Sure, you ride all day, but when you come back there are real beds. Real baths!

Food you don’t have to fix, not burned over a campfire. Little comforts to bargain for up in the town.”

“And yet farmers built this place,” Fawn murmured, and she was sure by his wince that Dag heard clearly the missing stupid she’d clipped out.

Razi shrugged. “Farmers plant crops, but who planted farmers? We did.” What? Fawn thought.

Utau, perhaps not quite as oblivious as his comrade, glanced at her, and countered, “You mean our ancestors did. Pretty broad claim of credit, there.”

“Why shouldn’t we get the credit?” said Razi.

“And the blame as well?” said Dag.

Razi made a face. “I thought we did. Fair’s fair.”

Dag smiled tightly, drew a breath, and pushed himself up. “Well. If I’m to spend tomorrow peering at a bunch of ill-penned, misspelled, and undoubtedly incomplete patrol logs, I’d better get my eyes some rest now. If everyone else is as short on sleep as I am, it’ll be a good quiet night for catching up.”

“Find us lots of local patrols, Dag,” urged Razi. “Weeks’ worth.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Fawn rose too, and Dag shepherded her out. He made no attempt to apologize for Razi, but an odd look darkened his eyes, and Fawn did not like her sense of his thoughts receding to someplace barred to her. Outside, the late-summer dusk was closing in. He bade her good night at her door with studied courtesy. The next morning Dag woke at dawn, but Fawn, to his approval, still slept. He went quietly downstairs and nabbed two patrollers from their breakfast to lug the records trunk upstairs to his room. In a short time he had logs, maps, and charts spread out on the room’s writing table, bed, and, soon after, the floor.

He heard the muffled creak of the bed and Fawn’s footsteps through the adjoining wall as she finally arose and rattled around her room getting dressed. At length, she poked her head cautiously around the frame of his door open to the hall, and he jumped up to escort her down to a breakfast much quieter than last night’s dinner, as a last few sleepy patrollers drifted out singly or in pairs.

After the meal, she followed him back upstairs to stare with interest at the paper and parchment drifting across his room. “Can I help?”

He remembered her susceptibility to boredom and itchy hands, but mostly he heard the underlying, Can I stay? He obligingly set her to mending pens, or fetching a paper or logbook from across the room from time to time—make-work, but it kept her quietly occupied and pleasantly near. She grew fascinated with the maps, charts, and logs, and fell to reading them, or trying to. It was not just the faded and often questionable handwriting that made this a slow process for her.

Her claim to be able to read proved true, but it was plain from her moving finger and lips and the tension in her body that she was not fluent, probably due to never having had enough text to practice on. But when he scratched out a grid on a fresh sheet to turn the muddled log entries into a record visible at a glance, she followed the logic swiftly enough.

Around noon, Mari appeared in the open doorway. She raised an eyebrow at Fawn, perched on the bed poring over a contour map annotated with hand corrections, but said only, “How goes it?”

“Almost done,” said Dag. “There is no point going back more than ten years, I think. Quiet around here this morning. What are folks up to?”

“Mending, cleaning gear, gone uptown. Working with the horses. We found a blacksmith whose sister was among those we rescued from the mine, who’s been very willing to help out in the stable.” She wandered in and peered over his shoulder, then leaned back against the wall with her arms folded. “So. How did this malice slip past us?”

Dag tapped his grid, laid out on the table before him. “That section was last walked three years ago by a patrol from Hope Lake Camp. They were trying to run a sixteen-man pattern with just thirteen. Three short. Because if they’d dropped it down to a twelve-pattern, they’d have had to make two more passes to clear the area, and they were already three weeks behind schedule for the season.

Even so, there’s no telling they missed anything; that malice might well not have been hatched out yet.”

“I’m not looking to lay blame,” said Mari mildly.

“I know.” Dag sighed. “Now, as for neglected sections…” His lips peeled back in a dry smile. “That was more revealing. Turns out all sections within a day’s ride of Glassforge that can be patrolled from horseback are up-to-date, or as up-to-date as anything, meaning no more than a year overdue. What’s left are some swampy areas to the west and rocky ravines to the east that you can’t take a horse through.” He added reflectively, “Lazy whelps.”

Mari smiled sourly. “I see.” She scratched her nose. “Chato and I figured he’d lend me two men, and we’d both send out sixteen-groups, dividing up the neglected sections between us. He and I are both going to be stuck here arguing with Glassforgers about what we’re due for our recent work on their behalf, so I’d thought to put you in charge of our patrol. Give you first pick of sections, though.”

“You’re so sweet, Mari. Waist-deep wading through smelly muck, with leeches, or sudden falls onto sharp rocks? They both sound so charming, I don’t know how I can decide.”

“Alternatively, you can roll up your sleeves and come help me arm wrestle with Glassforgers. That works exceptionally well, I’ve noticed.”

Fawn, who had set down the map and was following the talk closely, blinked at this.

Dag grimaced in distaste. In his list of personal joys, parading their wounded to shame farmers into pitching in ranked well below frolicking with leeches and barely above lancing oozing saddle boils. “I swore the last time I put on that show for you, it would be the last.” He added after a reflective moment, “And the time before. You have no shame, Mari.”

“I have no resources,” she returned, her face twisting in frustration.

“Fairbolt once figured it takes at least ten folks back in the camps, not counting the children, to support one patroller in the field. Every bit of help we fail to pull in from outside puts us that bit more behind.” “Then why don’t we pull in more? Isn’t that why farmers were planted in the first place?” The argument was an old one, and Dag still didn’t know the right answer.

“Shall we become lords again?” said Mari softly. “I think not.”

“What’s the alternative? Let the world drift to destruction because we’re too ashamed to call for help?”

“Keep the balance,” said Mari firmly. “As we always have. We cannot ever let ourselves become dependent upon outsiders.” Her glance slid over Fawn. “Not us.”

A little silence fell, and Dag finally said, “I’ll take swamps.”

Her nod was a bit too satisfied, and Dag wondered if he’d just made a mistake.

He added after a moment, “But if you let us take along a few horse boys from the stables here to watch the mounts, we won’t have to leave a patroller with the horse lines while we slog.”

Mari frowned, but said at last, reluctantly, “All right. Makes sense for the day-trips, anyway. You’ll start tomorrow.”

Fawn’s brown eyes widened in mild alarm, and Dag realized the source of Mari’s muffled triumph. “Wait,” he said. “Who will look after Miss Bluefield while I’m gone?”

“I can. She won’t be alone. We have four other injured recovering here, and Chato and I will be in and out.”

“I’m sure I’ll be fine, Dag,” Fawn offered, although a faint doubt colored her voice.

“But can you keep her from trying to overdo?” Dag said gruffly. “What if she starts bleeding again? Or gets chilled and throws a fever?”

Even Fawn’s brow wrinkled at that last one. Her lips moved on a voiceless protest, But it’s midsummer.

“Then I’ll be better fit to deal with that than you would,” said Mari, watching him.

Watching him flail, he suspected glumly. He drew back from making more of a show of himself than he already had. He’d had his groundsense closed down tight since they’d hit the outskirts of Glassforge yesterday, but Mari clearly didn’t need to read his ground to draw her own shrewd conclusions, even without the way Fawn glowed like a rock-oil lamp in his presence.

He rolled up his chart and handed it to Mari. “You can have that to tack on the wall downstairs, and we can mark it off as we go. For whatever amusement it will provide folks. If you hint there could be a bow-down when we reach the end, it might go more briskly.”

She nodded affably and withdrew, and Dag put Fawn to work helping him restack the contents of the trunk in rather better order than he’d found it.

As she brought him an armload of stained and tattered logbooks, she asked,

“That’s twice now you’ve talked about planting farmers. What do you mean?”

He sat back on his heels, surprised. “Don’t you know where your family comes from?”

“Sure I do. It’s written down in the family book that goes with the farm accounts. My great-great-great-grandfather”—she paused to check the generations on her fingers, and nodded—“came north to the river ridge from Lumpton with his brother almost two hundred years ago to clear land. A few years later, Great-great-great got married and crossed the western river branch to start our place. Bluefields have been there ever since. That’s why the nearest village is named West Blue.”

“And where were they before Lumpton Market?”

She hesitated. “I’m not sure. Except that it was just Lumpton back then, because Lumpton Crossroads and Upper Lumpton weren’t around yet.”

“Six hundred years ago,” said Dag, “this whole region from the Dead Lake to nearly the southern seacoast was all unpeopled wilderness. Some Lakewalkers from this hinterland went down to the coasts, east and south, where there were some enclaves of folks—your ancestors—surviving. They persuaded several groups to come up here and carve out homes for themselves. The idea was that this area, south of a certain line, had been cleared enough of malices to be safe again.

Which proved to be not quite the case, although it was still much better than it had once been. Promises were exchanged… fortunately, my people still remember what they were. There were two more main plantations, one east at Tripoint and one west around Farmer’s Flats, besides the one south of the Grace at Silver Shoals that most folks around here eventually came from. The homesteaders’

descendants have been slowly spreading out ever since.

“There were two notions about this scheme among the Lakewalkers—still are, in fact. One faction figured that the more eyes we had looking for malice outbreaks, the better. The other figured we were just setting out malice food.

I’ve seen malices develop in both peopled and unpeopled places, and I don’t see much to choose between the horrors, so I don’t get too excited about that argument anymore.”

“So Lakewalker’s were here before farmers,” said Fawn slowly.

“Yes.”

“What was here before Lakewalkers?”

“What, you know nothing?”

“You don’t have to sound so shocked,” she said, obviously stung, and he made a gesture of apology. “I know plenty, I just don’t know what’s true and what’s tall tales and bedtime stories. Once upon a time, there was supposed to have been a chain of lakes, not just the big dead one. With a league of seven beautiful cities around them, commanded by great sorcerer-lords, and a sorcerer king, and princesses and bold warriors and sailors and captains and who knows what all. With tall towers and beautiful gardens and jeweled singing birds and magical animals and holy whatnot, and the gods’ blessings flowing like the fountains, and gods popping in and out of people’s lives in a way that I would find downright unnerving, I’m pretty sure. Oh, and ships on the lakes with silver sails. I think maybe they were plain white cloth sails, and just looked silver in the moonlight, because it stands to reason that much metal would capsize a boat. What I know is the tall tale is where they say some of the cities were five miles across, which is impossible.”

“Actually”—Dag cleared his throat—“that part I know to be true. The ruins of Ogachi Strand are only a few miles out from shore. When I was a young patroller up that way, some friends and I took an outrigger to look at them. On a clear, quiet day you can see down to the tops of stone wreckage along the old shoreline, in places. Ogachi really was five miles across, and more. These were the people who built the straight roads, after all. Which were thousands of miles long, some of them, before they got so broken up.”

Fawn stood up and dusted her skirt, and sat on the edge of his bed, her face tight with thought. “So—where’d they all go? Those builders.”

“Most died. A remnant survived. Their descendants are still here.”

“Where?”

“Here. In this room. You and me.”

She stared at him in real surprise, then looked down at her hands in doubt.

“Me?”

“Lakewalker tales say…” He paused, sorting and suppressing. “That Lakewalkers are descended from some of those sorcerer-lords who got away from the wreck of everything. And farmers are descended from ordinary folks on the far edges of the hinterlands, who somehow survived the original malice wars, the first great one, and the two that came after, that killed the lakes and left the Western Levels.” Also dubbed the Dead Levels, by those who’d skirted them, and Dag could understand why.

“There was more than one war? I never heard that,” she said.

He nodded. “In a sense. Or maybe there’s always only been one. The question you didn’t ask is, where do the malices come from?”

“Out of the ground. They always have. Only”—she hesitated, then went on in a rush—“I suppose you’re going to say, not always, and tell me how they got into the ground in the first place, right?”

“I’m actually a little vague on that myself. What we do know is that all malices are descendants of the first great one. Except not descended like we are, with marriage and birth and the passing of generations. More like some monstrous insect that laid ten thousand eggs that hatch up out of the ground at intervals.”

“I saw that thing,” said Fawn lowly. “I don’t know what it was, but it sure wasn’t a bug.”

He shrugged. “It’s just a way of trying to think about them. I’ve seen a few dozen of them in my life, so far. I could as well say the first was like a mirror that shattered into ten thousand splinters to make ten thousand little mirrors. Malices aren’t material at all, in their inner nature. They just pull matter in from around them to make themselves a house, a shell. They seem to feed on ground itself, really.”

“How did it shatter?”

“It lost the first war. They say.”

“Did the gods help?”

Dag snorted. “Lakewalker legends say the gods abandoned the world when the first malice came. And that they will return when the earth is entirely cleansed of its spawn. If you believe in gods.”

“Do you?”

“I believe they are not here, yes. It’s a faith of sorts.” “Huh.” She rolled up the last maps and tied their strings before handing them to him. He settled them in place and closed the trunk.

He sat with his hand on the latch a moment. “Whatever their part really was,”

he said finally, “I don’t think it was just the sorcerer-lords who built all those towers and laid those roads and sailed those ships. Your ancestors did, too.”

She blinked at this, but what she was thinking, he could not guess.

“And the lords didn’t come from nowhere, or elsewhere, either,” Dag continued tenaciously. “One line of thought says there was just one people, once, and that the sorcerers rose out of them. Except that then they bred up for their skills and senses, and then used their magic to make themselves more magical, and lordly, and powerful, and so grew away from their kin. Which may have been the first mistake.”

She tilted her head, and her lips parted as if to speak, but at that point a pair of footsteps echoed from the hall. Razi stuck his head through the doorframe.

“Ah, Dag, there you are. You should smell this.” He thrust out a small glass bottle and pulled off the leather stopper plugging its neck. “Dirla found this medicine shop up in town that sells the stuff.”

Dirla smiled proudly over his shoulder.

“What is it?” asked Fawn, leaning in and sniffing as the patroller waved the bottle past her. “Oh, pretty! It smells like chamomile and clover flowers.”

“Scented oil,” he answered. “They have seven or eight kinds.”

“What do you use it for?” Fawn asked innocently.

Dag mentally consigned his comrade to the middle of the Dead Levels. “Sore muscles,” he said repressively.

“Well, I suppose you could,” said Razi thoughtfully.

“Scented back rubs,” breathed Dirla in a warm voice. “Mm, nice idea.”

“How useful of you two to stop by,” Dag overrode this before it could grow more interesting still, either to himself, who didn’t hanker after a repeat of the discomforts of his ride from the Horsefords’, or to Fawn, who would undoubtedly ask more questions. “Happens I need this trunk taken back downstairs to the storeroom.” He stood up and pointed. “Lug.”

They grumbled, if lightheartedly, and lugged.

Dag closed the door behind them, shooed Fawn to her own room, and followed.

Wondering if he dared ask just where that shop was located, and if it might be on the way to the harnessmaker’s. Walking the patterns in the marshes west of Glassforge took six days.

Dag chose the closest section first, and so was able to bring the patrol back to the hotel’s comforts that night, and to check on Fawn.

After an increasingly worried search of the premises, he found her shelling peas in the kitchen and making friends with the cooks and scullions. With some relief, he gave over his vision of her as distressed and lonely among condescending Lakewalker strangers although not his fear of her imprudently overtaxing her strength.

For the next section he chose the most distant, of necessity a three-day outing, to get it out of the way. Dag met the complaints of the younger patrollers with a few choice tales of swamp sweeps norm of Farmer’s Flats in late winter, icily gruesome enough to silence all but the most determined grumblers. The patrol was able to leave most of their gear with the horses, but the need for skin protection meant that boots, shirts, and trousers took the brunt of the muck and mire. When they draggled back to Glassforge late the following night, they were greeted by the attendants of the hotel’s pleasant bathhouse, conveniently sited with its own well between the stable and the main building, with a marked lack of joy; the laundresses were growing downright surly at the sight of them.

This time Dag found Fawn waiting up for him, filling the time and her hands by helping to mend hotel linens and coaxing stories from a pair of seamstresses.

He returned the next night to exchange tales with her over a late supper. He held her fascinated with his account of a roughly circular and distinctively flat stretch of marsh some six miles across that he was certain was a former patch of blight, recovering and again supporting life—most of it noxious, not to mention ravenous, but without question thriving. He thought the slaying of that malice must have predated the arrival of farmer settlers in this region by well over a century. She entertained him in turn with a long, involved account of her day’s adventures in the town. Sassa the Horseford brother-in-law, now home again, had stopped by and made good on his promise to show her his glassworks.

They had capped the tour with a visit to his brother’s papermaking shop, and for extras, the back premises of the ink maker’s next door.

“There are more kinds of work to do here than I ever dreamed,” she confided in a tone of thoughtful speculation.

She had also, clearly, overdone; when he escorted her to her door, she was drooping and yawning so hard she could scarcely say good night. He spent a little time persuading her ground against an incipient cold, then checked the healing flesh beneath the ugly malice scabs for necrosis or infection and made her promise to rest on the morrow.

The next day’s pattern walk was truncated for Dag in the early afternoon when one patroller managed to trade up from mere muck and leeches to a willow root tangle, water over his head, and a nest of cottonmouths. Leaving the patrol to Utau, Dag rode back to town supporting the very sick and shaken man in front of him. Dag was not, happily, called upon to do anything unadvised and perilous with their grounds on the way, though he was grimly aware Utau had urged the escort upon him against just that chance. But the snakebit man survived not only the ride, but also being dipped briskly in the bathhouse, dried, and carried up and slung into bed. By that time, Chato and Mari had been found, allowing Dag to turn the responsibility for further remedies over to them.

Some news Mari imparted sent Dag in search of Fawn even before a visit to the bathhouse on his own behalf. The sound of Fawn’s voice raised in, what else, a question, tugged his ear as he was passing down the end stairs, and he about-faced into the second-floor corridor. A door stood open—Saun’s—and he paused outside it as Saun’s voice returned:

“My first impression of him was as one of those grumpy old fellows who never talks except to criticize you. You know the sort?”

“Oh, yes.”

“He rode or walked in the back and never spoke much. The light began to dawn for me when Mari set him at the cap—that’s the patroller in the end or edge position of a grid with no one beyond. We don’t spread out to the limits of our vision, d’you see, but to the limits of our groundsenses. If you and the patrollers to your sides can just sense each other, you know you aren’t missing any malice sign between you. Mari sent him out a mile. That’s more than double the best range of my groundsense.”

Fawn made an encouraging noise.

Saun, suitably rewarded, continued, “Then I got to noticing that whenever Mari wanted something done out of the ordinary way, she’d send him. Or that it was his idea. He didn’t tell tales often, but when he did, they were from all over, I mean everywhere. I’d start to add up all the people and places in my head, and think, How? I’d thought he had no humor, but finally figured out it was just maddening-dry. He didn’t seem like much at first, but he sure accumulated.

And you?”

“Different than yours, I’ll say. He just arrived. All at once. Very…

definitely there. I feel like I’ve been unpacking him ever since and am nowhere near the bottom yet.”

“Huh. He’s like that on patrol, in a way.”

“Is he good?”

“It’s like he’s more there than anyone… no, that’s not right. It’s like he’s so nowhere-else. If you see?”

“Mm, maybe. How old is he really? I’ve had trouble figuring that out—”

Suppressed ground or no, someone was bound to notice the swamp reek wafting from the hall on the humid summer air pretty soon. Dag unquirked his lips, knocked on the doorframe, and stepped inside.

Saun lay abed wearing, above, only his bandages; the rest, however clothed, was covered by a sheet. Fawn, in her blue dress, sat leaning back in a chair with her bare feet up on the bed edge, catching, presumably with her wriggling toes, whatever faint breeze might carry from the window. For once, her hands were empty, but Saun’s brown hair showed signs of being recently combed and rebraided into two neat, workmanlike plaits.

Dag was greeted with broad smiles on two faces equally fresh with youth and pale with recent injury. Both hurt near-fatally on his watch—now, there was a thought to cringe from—but their expressions showed only trust and affection. He tried to muster a twinge of generational jealousy, but their beauty just made him want to weep. Not good. Six days on patrol with nary a malice sign shouldn’t leave him this tired and strange.

“How de’, Spark. Lookin’ for you. Hello, Saun. How’re the ribs?”

“Better.” Saun sat up eagerly, his flinch belying his words. “They have me walking up and down the hall now. Fawn here’s been keeping me company.”

“Good!” said Dag genially. “And what have you two found to talk about?”

Saun looked embarrassed. “Oh, this and that.”

Fawn returned more nimbly, “Why were you looking for me?”

“I have something to show you. In the stable, so find your shoes.”

“All right,” she said agreeably, and rose.

Her bare feet thumped away up the hallway, and he called after her, “Slow down!”

He did not consider himself a wit, but this fetched her usual floating laugh.

In her natural state, did she ever travel at any pace other than a scamper?

He studied Saun, wondering if any warning-off might be in order here. That the broad-shouldered youth was attractive to women, he’d had occasion to note, if never before with concern. But in Saun’s current bashed state, he was no menace to curious farmer girls, Dag decided. And cautions might draw counterquestions Dag was ill equipped to answer, such as, What business is it of yours? He settled on a friendly wave farewell and started to withdraw into the hall again.

“Oh, Dag?” called Saun. “Old patroller?” He grinned from his propping pillows.

“Yes?” Blight it, when had the boy picked up on that catchphrase? Saun must have paid closer attention to Dag’s occasional mutters than he would have guessed.

“No need for the fishy glower. All your pet Spark wants to hear are Dag tales.”

He settled back with a snicker, no, a snigger.

Dag shook his head and retreated. At least he managed to stop wincing before he exited the stairs. Dag arrived in the stable, its stalls crowded with the horses of the two patrols, barely before Fawn did. He led her to the straight stall housing the placid bay mare, and pointed.

“Congratulations, Spark. Mari’s made it official. You now own this nice horse.

Your share of our pay from the Glassforge town fathers. I found you that saddle and bridle on the peg, too; should be about the right size for you. Not new, but they’re in real good condition.” He saw no need to mention that the tack had been part of a private deal with the willing harnessmaker who had done such a fine job repairing his arm-harness.

Fawn’s face lit with delight, and she slid into the stall to run her hands over the horse’s neck and scratch her star and her ears, which made the mare round her nostrils and drop her poll in pleasure. “Oh, Dag, she’s wonderful, but”—Fawn’s nose wrinkled in suspicion—“are you sure this isn’t your share of the pay? I mean, Mari’s been nice to me and all, but I didn’t think she’d promoted me to patroller.”

A little too shrewd, that. “If it had been left to me, there would be a lot more, Spark.”

Fawn did not look entirely convinced, but the horse nudged her for more scratches, and she turned back to the task. “She needs a name. She can’t go on being that mare.” Fawn bit her lip in thought. “I’ll name her Grace, after the river. Because it’s a pretty name and she’s a pretty horse, and because she carried us so smoothly. Do you want to be Grace, sweet lady, hm?” She carried on with the petting and making-much; the mare signified her acceptance of the affection, the name, or both by cocking her hips, easing one hind hoof, and blowing out her breath, which made Fawn laugh. Dag leaned on the stall partition and smiled.

At length, Fawn’s face sobered in some new thought. She wandered back out of the stall and stood with her arms folded a moment. “Except… I’m not sure if I’ll be able to keep her on a milkmaid’s pay, or whatever.”

“She’s yours absolutely; you could sell her,” Dag said neutrally.

Fawn shook her head, but her expression did not lighten.

“In any case,” Dag continued, “it’s too early for you to be thinking of taking on work. You’re going to need this mare to ride, first.”

“I’m feeling much better. The bleeding stopped two days ago, if I were going to get a fever I think I would have by now, and I don’t get dizzy anymore.”

“Yes, but… Mari has given me leave to take the sharing knife back to camp and have it looked at by a maker. I know the best. I was thinking, since Lumpton Market and West Blue are more or less on the way to Hickory Lake from here, we ought to stop in at your farm on the way and put your folks out of their cruel suspense.”

Her eyes flashed up at him with an unreadable look. “I don’t want to go back.”

Her voice wavered. “I don’t want my whole stupid story to come out.” And firmed:

“I don’t want to be within a hundred miles of Stupid Sunny.”

Dag took a breath. “You don’t have to stay. Well, you can’t stay; your testimony will be needed on the matter of the knife. Once that’s done, the choice of where to go next is yours.”

She sucked on her lower lip, eyes downcast. “They’ll try to make me stay. I know them. They won’t believe I can be a grown…” Her voice grew more urgent. “Only if you promise to go with me, promise not to leave me there!”

His hand found its way to her shoulder in attempted reassurance of this odd distress. “And yet I might with your goodwill leave you here?”

“Mm…”

“Just trying to figure out if it’s the here or the there or the me leaving that’s being objected to.”

Her eyes were wide and dark, and her moist lips parted as her face rose at these words. Dag felt his head dipping, his spine bending, as his hand slipped around her back, as if he were falling from some great height, falling soft…

A throat cleared dryly behind him, and he straightened abruptly.

“There you are,” said Mari. “Thought I might find you here.” Her voice was cordial but her eyes were narrowed.

“Oh, Mari!” said Fawn, a bit breathlessly. “Thank you for getting me this nice horse. I wasn’t expecting it.” She made her little knee-dip.

Mari smiled at her, managing to give Dag an ironic eyebrow-cock at the same time. “You’ve earned much more, but it was what I could do. I am not entirely without a sense of obligation.”

This crushed conversation briefly. Mari continued blandly, “Fawn, would you excuse us for a while? I have some patrol business to discuss with Dag, here.”

“Oh. Of course.” Fawn brightened. “I’ll go tell Saun about Grace.” And she was off again at a scamper, flashing a grin over her shoulder at Dag.

Mari leaned against the end post of the stall and crossed her arms, staring up at Dag, till Fawn had vanished through the stable door and out of ear shot.

The aisle was cool and shady compared to the white afternoon outside, redolent with horses, quiet but for the occasional champing and shifting of the heat-lazy animals and the faint humming of the flies. Dag raised his chin and clasped his hand and hand replacement behind his back, winding his thumb around the hook-with-spring-clamp presently seated in the wooden cuff, and waited. Not hopefully.

It wasn’t long in coming. “What are you about, boy?” Mari growled.

Any sort of response that came to, Whatever do you mean, Mari? seemed a waste of time and breath. Dag lowered his eyelids and waited some more.

“Do I need to list everything that’s wrong with this infatuation?” she said, exasperation plain in her voice. “I daresay you could give the blighted lecture yourself. I daresay you have.”

“A time or two,” he granted.

“So what are you thinking? Or are you thinking?”

He inhaled. “I know you want to tell me to back away from Fawn, but I can’t.

Not yet anyway. The knife binds us, till I get it up to camp. We’re going to have to travel together for a time yet; you can’t argue with that.”

“It’s not the traveling that worries me. It’s what’s going to happen when you stop.”

“I’m not sleeping with her.”

“Aye, yet. You’ve had your groundsense locked down tight in my presence ever since you got in. Well, that’s partly just you—it’s such a habit with you, you stay veiled in your sleep. But this—you’re like a cat who thinks it’s hiding because it’s got its head stuck in a sack.”

“Ah, mental privacy. Now, there’s a farmer concept that could stand to catch on.”

She snorted. “Fine chance.”

“I’m taking her up to camp,” Dag said mulishly. “That’s a given.”

In a sweetly cordial voice, Mari murmured, “Going to show her off to your mother? Oh, how lovely.”

Dag’s shoulders hunched. “We’ll go by her farm, first.”

“Oh, and you’ll meet her mother. Wonderful. That’ll be a success. Can’t you two just hold hands and jump off a cliff together? It’d be faster and less painful.”

His lips twitched at this, involuntarily. “Likely. But it has to be done.”

“Does it?” Mari pushed off the post and stalked back and forth across the stable aisle. “Now, if you were a young patroller lout looking to dip his wick in the strange, I’d just thump him on the side of the head and end this thing here and now. I can’t tell if you’re trying to fool me, or yourself!”

Dag set his teeth and went on saying nothing. It seemed wisest.

She fetched up at her post again, leaned back, scuffed her boot, and sighed.

“Look, Dag. I’ve been watching you for a long time, now. Out on patrol, you’d never neglect your gear or your food or your sleep or your feet. Not like the youngsters who get heroic delusions about their stamina, till they crash into a rock wall. You pace your body for the long haul.”

Dag tilted his head in acknowledgment, not certain where she was going with this.

“But though you’d never starve your body to wasting and still expect to go on, you starve your heart, yet act as though you can still draw on it forever without the debt ever coming due. If you fall—when you fall, you’re going to fall like a starving man. I’m standing here watching you start to topple now, and I don’t know if any words of mine are strong enough to catch you. I don’t know why, blast and blight it”—her voice shifted in renewed aggravation—“you haven’t let yourself get string-bound with any one of the nice widows that your mother—well, all right, not your mother—that one of your friends or other kin used to introduce you to, till they gave up in despair. If you had, I daresay you’d be immune to this foolishness now, knife or no.”

Dag hunched tighter. “It would not have been fair to the woman. I can’t have what I had with Kauneo over again. Not because of any lack on the woman’s part.

It’s me. I can’t give what I gave to Kauneo.” Used up, emptied out, dry.

“Nobody expected that, except maybe you. Most people don’t have what you had with Kauneo, if half of what I’ve heard is true. Yet they contrive to rub along tolerably well just the same.”

“She’d die of thirst, trying to draw from that well.”

Mari shook her head, mouth flat with disapproval. “Dramatic, Dag.”

He shrugged. “Don’t push for answers you don’t want to hear, then.”

She looked away, pursed her lips, stared up at the rafters stuck about with dusty cobwebs and wisps of hay, and tried another tack. “Now, all things considered, I can’t object to your indulging yourself. Not you. And after all, this farmer girl has no relatives here to kick up a fuss for me.”

Dag’s eyes narrowed, and a fool’s hope rose in his heart. Was Mari about to say she wouldn’t interfere? Surely not…

“If you can’t be turned or reasoned with, well, these things happen, eh?” The sarcasm tingeing her voice quenched the hope. “But if you are so bound and determined to get in, you’d better have a plan for how you’re going to get out, and I want to hear it.”

I don’t want to get out. I don’t want an end. Unsettling realization, and Dag wasn’t sure where to put it. Blight it, he hadn’t even begun…anything. This argument was moving too fast for him, no doubt Mari’s intent. “All the great plans I ever made for my life ended in horrible surprises, Mari. I swore off plans sometime back.”

She shook her head in scorn. “I halfway wish you were some lout I could just thump. Well… no, I don’t. But you’re you. If she’s cut up at the end—and I don’t see how this can be anything other than a real short ride—so will you be.

Double disaster. I can see it coming, and so can you. So what are you going to do?”

Dag said tightly, “What do you suggest, seeress?”

“That there’s no way you can end this well. So don’t start.”

I haven’t started, Dag wanted to point out. A truth on his lips and a lie in his ground, perhaps? Endurance had been his last remaining virtue for a long, long time, now; he hugged his patience to him and stood, just stood.

In the face of his stubborn silence, Mari shifted her stance and her attack once more. “There are two great duties given to those born of our blood. The first is to carry on the long war, with resolute fortitude, in living and in dying, in hope or out of it. In that duty you have not ever failed.”

“Once.”

“Not ever,” she contradicted this. “Overwhelming defeat is not failure; it’s just defeat. It happens sometimes. I never heard that you ran from that ridge, Dag.”

“No,” he admitted. “I didn’t have the chance. Surrounded makes running away a bit of a puzzle, which I did not get time to solve.”

“Aye, well. But then there’s the other great duty, the second duty, without which the first is futile, dross and delusion. The duty you have so far failed altogether.”

His head came up, stung and wary. “I’ve given blood and sweat and all the years of my life so far. I still owe my bones and my heart’s death, which I mean to give, which I will give in their due time if chance permits, but suicide is a self-indulgence and a desertion of duty no one will ever accuse me of, I decided that years ago, so I don’t know what else you want.”

Her lips compressed; her gaze went intent with conviction. “The other duty is to create the next generation to hand on the war to. Because all we do, the miles and years we walk, all that we bleed and sweat and sacrifice, will come to nothing if we do not also pass on our bodies’ legacy. And that’s a task on which you have turned your back for the past twenty years.”

Behind his back, his right hand gripped the arm cuff till he could hear the wood creak, and he forced his clench to loosen lest he break what had been so recently mended. He tried clamping his teeth down just as tight on any response, but one leaked out nonetheless: “Borrow my mother’s jawbone, did you?”

“I expect I could do her whole speech by rote, I’ve had to listen to her complaints often enough, but no. This is my own, hard-won with my life’s blood.

Look, I know your mother pushed you too soon and too hard after Kauneo and set your back up good and stiff, I know you needed more time to get over it all.

But time’s gone by, Dag, time and past time. That little farmer girl’s the proof of it, if you needed any. And I don’t want to be caught underneath when you come crashing down.”

“You won’t be; we’re leaving.”

“Not good enough. I want your word.” You can’t have it. And was that, itself, some decision? He knew he wavered, but had he already gone beyond some point of no return? Ana what would that point be? He scarcely knew, but his head was pounding with the heat, and a bone-deep exhaustion gripped him. His drying clothing itched and stank. He longed for a cold bath. If he held his head under for long enough, would the pain stop?

Ten or fifteen minutes ought to do it.

“If I had died at Wolf Ridge, I would be childless now just the same,” he snarled at Mari. And not even my kin could complain. Or leastways, I wouldn’t have to listen. “I have a plan. Why don’t you just pretend that I’m dead?”

He turned on his heel and marched out.

Which would have made a grander exit if she hadn’t shouted so furiously and so accurately after him, “Oh, certainly—why not? You do!”