Horizon

13

The departure in the morning from the smithy yard was even more of an uproar than the one from the Bridger farm. As he tightened his girths for the second-no, third time and swung up on Copperhead, neatly avoiding a welcoming cow-kick, Dag found himself falling into his old patrol leader habit of doing ground checks on every person, animal, and piece of equipment in range. The result was actually heartening: young, healthy, and in repair pretty much summed it up. Well, with a couple of exceptions on the young part, including Copperhead. But with a portable smithy and a portable medicine tent, together with folks who knew how to work them, Dag’s party was vastly better prepared for the Trace than most travelers.

My party? Really? Speaking of habits. Because he was fairly sure Sage thought of it as his party, and Finch as his, and for all Dag knew, Ash felt the same. Arkady was the one certain exception. Despite Dag’s stern remarks on self-reliance, Barr as silent conspirator had made sure Arkady and all his gear were loaded in good time, giving him no excuse to either break back to New Moon in a panic, or drag his feet hoping for an envoy of peace to pelt up.

The entire Smith family turned out to send their son off to his new life in the scary north, with lots of little presents popped into the back of the wagon at the last moment. A couple of folks from Ash’s family turned up, too. In the mob, it took a while for Dag to notice that there seemed to be no one at all for Calla and Indigo. There might be half a dozen sound reasons for this, starting with prior good-byes like Finch’s. But Dag’s mind picked at it anyway, as a six-mule wagon, seven riders, and four pack animals turned onto the Trace and struck north.

It was another dry day, thankfully. The Trace along here was well maintained by the villages that lived on its bounty, with deep creeks sturdily bridged, shallow ones with fords that nearly qualified as paved.

Even the mud puddles today were minor, to be splashed through cheerfully, and not yard-deep traps for wagon wheels. After a good night’s sleep, Fawn rode along on Magpie with her head up, taking in everything.

Unaware of how busily that bright ground in her belly swirled, self-making of the highest order. Now, there was true magic, world magic.

After an hour, the caravan sorted itself out and settled into the rhythm of the road. The way here was wide and straight. Dag took the chance to ride up alongside Finch, trailed by his pair of plodding pack mules. Fawn cast Dag a curious glance and kicked Magpie up on Finch’s other side. Finch gave them both friendly smiles, making it easy for Dag to start.

“Known Sage long? ”

“Oh, years. His papa’s was the closest big smithy to us, so we’d go every couple of months for repairs and special shoeing and whatnot. Stayed the night in Alligator Hat, usually. We two tads used to play together while the work got done. As we got bigger, his papa and big brothers let us work together alongside them. They taught me a lot.”

Finch vented a nostalgic sigh.

“And Ash? ”

“He’s more a friend of Sage’s than mine. Lives near the Hat. His family has a poor strip of a farm, so he always knew he’d have to find another way. He’s been talking about the north for years.”

“And, ah, Calla and Indigo? ”

Fawn shot him a look across Finch’s saddlebow, aware, as the boy was not, of the reason for Dag’s newly acute interest in half bloods. And hers. Dag could just about see her ears prick up.

“They used to be Sage’s neighbors when they were younger. Their folks had a harness shop on the square.”

Dag considered his next question carefully. Were Calla and Indigo’s bloodlines known to their village? Bastardy was not a Lakewalker concept.

Any child born to a Lakewalker woman was a full member of her tent, whether the parents were string-bound or not. As long as the father is a Lakewalker, too, Dag reminded himself. Farmers held a stricter view of paternity, tied as it was to their inheritances. If these siblings were the secret gifts of some passing patroller, Dag didn’t want to be the first to explode their lives with the news. He finally settled on, “Tell me about their parents.”

Fawn’s brows twitched; she gave him an approving nod. He’d evidently got that one right, good.

“Oh, yeah, you would be interested in that, wouldn’t you? ” Finch said blithely. “Their papa was a Lakewalker maker from Moss River. He left his camp to marry their mama, but he took her farmer name just like you did Fawn’s. Funny. I’m not sure how they first met; something to do with their trade, I think.”

Dag relaxed a little.

Fawn asked, “What happened to them? They weren’t out for the send-off this morning, were they? ”

“Oh, no. Eight, ten years ago, Alligator Hat had the worst outbreak of yellow fever-they still call it the Fever Summer. Indigo’s whole family came down with it. His mama and little sister died, but Indigo and his papa and Calla got better.”

Fawn’s eyes widened. “Oh my.”

Fawn had only seen the south in its more idyllic seasons. Dag was just as glad she’d be spared the full summer, when the heat came down like a hammer and you near choked on the water in the air, and mosquitoes patrolled in clouds almost as bad as northern Luthlian bogs, and for more months running. And lethal fevers of half a dozen sorts raged unchecked till the laggard frosts. “Then what? ”

“Well, their papa took a long time recovering, and was pretty unhappy at that. The harness shop failed.”

From the loss of the work of his wife’s hands? Or from having the heart torn out of the household? And of him, maybe. It was Dag’s turn to grow uneasy. While his groundwork might aid Fawn in some dire illness, he’d never pictured being deathly ill himself at the same time.

“He finally set Indigo and Calla with his wife’s sister, and went back to his people at Moss River Camp.”

“He abandoned his children? ” said Fawn indignantly.

“No, not really. He visited and brought their aunt and uncle horses and hides a couple of times a year, and other presents for them-cash money when he had it. Indigo and Calla were happy enough on her farm when they were younger, I guess.”

Dag was uncomfortably reminded of the renegade Crane’s tale. If Crane had had a more cooperative sister-in-law-or a more cooperative camp-might he have worked out some less disastrous fate? So was it the rigidity of the north, or was it Crane’s own chaos that had been the problem? Or both?

Fawn peeked over her shoulder at the wagon rumbling maybe twenty paces back, Sage and Calla on the box, Indigo riding alongside. Out of earshot, for now. “And when they got older? ” she asked.

“It was all right till lately.” Finch’s lips thinned. “Just the last year or so. There were these accusations. I didn’t think much of them. I mean, sure, Indigo’s good with animals, but a lot of folks are. Calla took it to heart, though, Indigo says.”

“Accusations of what? ” asked Fawn.

“Er…” Finch cast a sidewise look at Dag. “Lakewalker sorcery. Or powers, anyway. Indigo got in a lot of fights about it. And then, of course, if anything bad happened, just bad luck, to folks he was mad at or who were mad at him, there were suspicions it wasn’t luck, but some doing on Calla’s part, and Indigo got into even more fights over those. Defending his sister.”

“Oh, dear,” said Fawn.

“Anyway, it got so bad their aunt made their papa take them to Moss River for some sort of testing. I guess they might have been allowed to be Lakewalkers if they’d passed whatever it was, but they didn’t, and the camp sent them back. Which you would think would have stopped the rumors, but it didn’t.”

“Some people,” Fawn sighed.

“Testing? ” said Dag.

“A kind of Lakewalker magic, I guess. Weaving or something, which doesn’t sound too sorcerous to me. I didn’t understand it when Indigo tried to explain. I’m not sure he did, either.”

“Practice marriage cords, do you think? ” said Fawn across to Dag, touching her own.

“Might have been.”

“Too bad they didn’t know about-never mind. And then what? ”

“Well, luckily this spring Sage went sweet on Calla, and things started working out. I was a little surprised she took to him-she’s four, five years older. Mostly, older girls look at you like you’re a flour beetle in their bread dough.” A distinct sigh. “Anyway, Indigo’s notion is that up north, they don’t need to tell anyone about their Lakewalker papa, so no one will have reason to give them trouble anymore.”

Dag considered this plan. It struck him as overly optimistic. True, fellow farmers wouldn’t be able to tell the pair were half bloods, but most Lakewalkers would know with one glance at their grounds. And they’d certainly run into Lakewalkers sometime. But for the moment, he just said, “Mm.”

Fawn said rather carefully, “I got the idea Sage’s family had taken against Calla, some. Is it her age? ”

“She’s not that much older. And there are plenty of other girls around Alligator Hat just as poor. One of Sage’s sisters-in-law had no due-share at all. I guess some of his family believed those stupid rumors, though really, if Calla did have powers, I’d think you’d want them on your side.”

He did not deny the familial coolness, Dag noted. The bones of the tale all lined up true. With one joint possibly missing, although it would be easy enough to check now that Dag knew where to look.

“Well,” said Fawn, “I hope things work out for them all.”

Sincerely.

Waving Fawn to continue her amiable chatting with Finch, Dag held Copperhead back till the mule wagon came alongside. He eased closer to Sage, driving, and touched his temple to Calla, and to Indigo riding beyond. “Fine mornin’ for your start.”

Sage nodded, and came back friendly-like with, “I take it for a good sign.”

Calla sat up and turned her head stiffly Dag’s way, watching him as if she feared he might leap from Copperhead and attack her. Dag was reminded of his height, his hook, and his general-what was that phrase Arkady had used?-starveling vagabond air. He really did need Fawn by him, to make him look tame. Yet Calla should be far more used to Lakewalkers than the typical farmer girl. Her alarm was something more particular.

Dag smiled vaguely at them all and opened his ground. Indeed. Sage’s ground was planted with an ill-formed persuasion, fading as it was absorbed over time. He showed not a trace of beguilement, however.

Interesting.

Calla’s attention sharpened, as did Indigo’s. Both plainly possessed a residual groundsense, Calla’s much the stronger. Likely not the doubled vision of the world full-blooded Lakewalkers could call up, of light-shot shadows more weighty and true than the forms that cast them. But Dag would certainly seem suddenly more there to them, when he opened like this. Did they understand why? Surely this couldn’t be new to them.

“What? ” said Calla curtly, eyes narrowing. Tension quivered off her tight ground like noise from a badly tuned fiddle. Indigo was less strained, but alert.

Maybe Fawn could help Dag puzzle out the half-blood girl? They were both young women. Dag scraped for inspiration, and came up with, “I was wonderin’, Sage. Happens that my wife Fawn is lately with child, which is partly why we’re heading home just now. She’s holding up right well so far, but she does get weary in the afternoons. I’m thinking it would ease her to have a lie-down in your wagon, later, when the riding starts to exhaust her.”

Calla’s face fairly cried No!, but before she could speak, Sage said cheerfully, “Why, sure! We’d be happy to help her out. She’s such a little bit of a thing, she wouldn’t add more to my load than a sack of feathers.”

“Thank you kindly! I’ll let her know.” Dag switched his reins from his hook to his hand and raised his left arm as if in acknowledgment.

He let his ghost hand trail out and spread like a net, passing through the back of Sage’s head, defusing the tattered persuasion into nothingness, accepting the faint ground backsplash. Sage just smiled at him, blinking.

Calla looked worried but deeply uncertain.

As I thought. Good. Dag went on, “If there’s anything I can do for you folks-anything at all”-his eyes bored into Calla’s-“don’t wait to ask. I’ve helped train a world of young patrollers about your ages. There’s not too much I haven’t seen before.”

If Calla was struggling to manage rudimentary ground powers, and it certainly appeared that she was, she needed all the help she could get.

But she should have had help before now, blight it. What had her maker father been thinking? Or was she a late bloomer-like Dag-dismissed because someone mistook not yet for not?

She has to trust me, first. Which wasn’t going to happen in their first hour of acquaintance. Patience, Dag. They had weeks before them, just like a new patrol. He nodded and reined Copperhead away.

Arkady and Barr were trailing their pack string out of range of the kick-up of dirt from the wagon. At Barr’s wave, Dag joined them.

Arkady frowned at him. “What did you just do to your ground? ”

“Just a little cleanup. I flushed some old groundwork out of Sage. It would have been absorbed in a few more weeks, but I wanted to see exactly what it was.”

“That boy with the lockjaw-now this-your ground is going to be back in the same mess in no time if you keep this up.”

Dag shrugged. “Afraid so. Don’t do that isn’t going to be a good enough plan, out here. We need to come up with something else.”

“What? ”

“I was hoping you might get some new notions, once you had more cud to chew on. You’re the brilliant groundsetter. Aren’t you? ”

Arkady gave him a look between annoyance and amusement. “Don’t try those trainer tricks on me. I invented them.”

“Well, then.” Dag’s lips curled up in hope. Two days without a new problem to bite on, and already Arkady was getting restive. Dag just had to keep him moving north, and wait.

Barr, apparently wrenching his mind away from a disturbing vision of Arkady as a cow, said to Dag, “So what was the groundwork? ”

“Ah,” said Dag. “This may prove to come under what Arkady calls medicine tent work. Which means if I explain it to you, it’s in aid of someone, and not for tale-telling.”

Barr took this in. “This means if I gossip about it, you pound me? ”

“This means you don’t gossip about it. Period.”

Barr opened his free hand in cautious agreement, and set it again to his thigh.

“I believe Calla tried to persuade or beguile her sweetheart Sage,” said Dag. “And failed, near as I can tell.”

“Persuade him to do what? ” asked Barr.

“It seemed to be what a farmer might call a love spell.”

Arkady snorted. “Pointless. The boy’s besotted with her.”

“I wonder if she realizes that? ” Dag was put in mind of Fawn when he’d first met her, lumbered with desperate self-doubts. How could all these young women not know how lovely they were? “I don’t see my way clear yet, but I figure if I wait and watch, it will all lay itself open to me. Meanwhile, we have these two youngsters here with more than a touch of groundsense, and no one at all to instruct them how to go on with it. They seem to be”-he glanced at Arkady and picked his word-“damaged.”

“Oh? ” said Arkady, straightening in his saddle.

Hooked you. Dag repeated Finch’s tale, more or less, of the two young half bloods blundering between worlds, finding no clear path. Or paths deliberately blocked? Dag’s curiosity grew.

In a baffled voice, Barr said, “But you just met them yesterday, Dag. They don’t even like us. Why are you taking them up?” Dag’s and Arkady’s matching looks had barely intersected on his skull when he continued, “Oh. Fawn’s pregnancy. Of course you want to study half bloods now.”

Dag drew breath. “That, too. But do you also remember when I met you and Remo? Why did I take you two up? ”

“I don’t know,” said Barr. Reminded, he glanced back over his shoulder at the empty road where, to his obvious discouragement, no wayward partner galloped to catch up. “I… don’t know.”

He looked for aid to Arkady, who merely shrugged. “I don’t know that I can put a name to it, either. But it touches the heart of what marks a true maker. I promise that you didn’t get me out on this mad road just because Dag can do some tricks.”

Dag exchanged a salute even-all for Arkady’s considering nod, then turned Copperhead to catch up with Fawn.

–-

Fawn was glad for the invitation to nap in the wagon, and hardly needed Dag’s hint to want to make friends with Calla. But the Trace so fascinated her, she stayed upright on Magpie for the whole of that afternoon.

The landscape was much the same as it had been since Graymouth- now fifty-odd miles behind them-a succession of swamps, woods, woods in swamps, cleared fields on the higher ground, and little villages.

The good weather brought out not only local traffic-farm wagons and riders and pack mules-but road crews. They passed gangs of men and boys shoveling up barrows of dirt from the verges to raise the crown above the wet, or filling in low spots with wagonloads of gravel. It seemed to be a point of pride for each village to maintain the famous road in its vicinity; Fawn learned to spot the debatable boundaries between townships by the ruts.

During a midafternoon break, they were passed by what Fawn thought of as real Trace traffic, a caravan of some forty northbound mules loaded high with crates of valuable black tea. A muleteer strode along for every three beasts, fellows whose rough looks would have alarmed her before her time on the river, though now she could see they were merely ex-flatboat crews working their way home. They stared back at the bright wagon, and at her and Calla, but didn’t make rude hoots or anything. Indigo complained that the caravan would grab off the best campsites and their beasts eat all the new spring grass, and leave a lot of alarming-sounding mule diseases in their trampled wake, but Sage allowed amiably that their party could likely find other sites.

Some farms bordering the road made a bit of coin renting fenced pastures by the night for just this purpose. With seventeen animals to feed, this was tempting despite everyone’s youthfully slim purses, although the Smith women had loaded on enough gift grub for people that no one was going to have to cook for the first three days. But just before sunset they came upon an open meadow along a watercourse that no one seemed to be demanding payment for, not too eaten down by prior visitors, so they pulled off.

The still, brown channel was overhung with creeper-laced cypresses and thick with mysterious shadows and birdcalls, and Fawn was grateful for the Lakewalkers making an alligator patrol before bed. All they stirred up was a family of scurrying animals that looked to be the unlikely offspring of a possum mating with a turtle. Dag, accused, denied that ancient or recent Lakewalker magery had anything to do with the armor-plated possums. When the boys poked them with sticks they rolled up like pill bugs, inspiring a brief round of creature-ball till they unrolled and scampered indignantly away.

Sodden with fatigue, Fawn fell into their bedroll, pleased to learn the night song of a mockingbird from the circle of Dag’s arms; the next thing she knew, morning light tickled her eyes.

This day’s start was quicker but not so lively. She wasn’t the stiffest, climbing up onto her horse again; Arkady seemed creakier, but his chill squint defied anyone to comment. Dag and Barr mirrored each other in a series of patroller stretches accompanied by a rude, rhyming challenge chant that set them both laughing, but allowed them to lunge up onto their mounts without groans. Indigo was fun to watch, helping Sage hitch up their mules. When he talked to the beasts, coaxing and cajoling and praising, Fawn could almost imagine them talking back, or at least signaling with their big floppy ears. It wasn’t near the overwhelming effect Dag had on mice-fortunately, as being followed about by half a dozen entranced mules might get awkward-but put her in mind of it.

But by that afternoon, not all the charms of the Trace could keep her upright in her saddle. She crawled into the warm and creaking shadow of the wagon’s canvas roof with a thankful moan, and didn’t wake till the light was growing golden. Her mouth felt as if she’d been chewing on cotton, but at least her limbs didn’t seem to be dripping off. Recalling her mandate to make friends, she went forward to the box. Calla stiffened at her greetings, but Sage obligingly scooted over so she might sit up on his other side.

“Long way to Tripoint,” Fawn observed invitingly, gazing down over the harnessed backs of the mules. She liked the way their ears bobbed like swaying branches as they walked briskly along.

“Yep,” agreed Sage. “Though we have a good pace going, so far. If we can keep it up, it might take us a week to hit the Barrens, and maybe two after that to make the Hardboil River ferry. Which will be about the halfway mark, folks say.”

The Barrens, Dag had explained to Fawn, were a two-hundredmile- wide tongue of ancient blight extending due east from the Western Levels that had for long divided north from south. For most of a millennium, the only way across had been around, either down the Gray River or up the eastern seaboard. It had only become safely passable again a few hundred years ago. Because malices did not come up on old blight, no Lakewalkers patrolled that waste, and no farmers attempted to wrest a living from its still-bitter soils. Without camp or village markets, folks crossing it had to pack all their own supplies. Rumor made it bandit country, which went with the lack of patrols, Fawn supposed.

“I saw a bit of the Barrens when we were passing down the Gray on the Fetch,” Fawn offered. “Scrubby country, all sandy and flat, and no river towns at all. Quiet stretch, but it was still a relief when we got past it and saw green again.”

This triggered a string of interested questions from Sage about their river journey. Inevitably, their encounter with the awful river bandits infesting Crooked Elbow came out, but Fawn downplayed it in favor of explaining as much as she could about Dag’s dreams for healing the divisions between her people and his. She’d thought his notion of a Lakewalker medicine maker treating farmers might draw Calla out, but the young woman kept stubbornly silent.

Fawn tried a more direct lure, explaining how Dag, she, Hod, and Remo had among them cracked unbeguilement, that memorable day back up on the Grace. “It wasn’t something either a Lakewalker or a farmer alone could have figured out. It took all of us, working together.”

This finally startled a question from Calla: “Your husband can unbeguile folks? ”

“He can do no end of groundwork, these days. Arkady’s even better.”

This news failed to cheer up Calla; if anything, she looked… fearful?

Yet Fawn couldn’t see how a girl with a Lakewalker maker for a father could be afraid of groundwork. “Didn’t you ever watch your papa making? ”

Calla shrugged. “I was a child. I couldn’t tell that he was doing anything more than sewing leather.”

Oh. Right. Groundsense didn’t come in till a person was more than half grown, and Calla had been barely that when her mama had died and her papa had left her with her farmer kin.

Calla added after a moment, in an oddly wistful tone, “Folks always wanted to buy his work, though. Harness and bridles and saddles. It was plain, but it was extra pretty, somehow. And it never broke.” She straightened, jaw clamping as though she regretted letting even this mild memory escape.

“I remember that,” said Sage.

For a little while Fawn was able to get Sage-but not Calla-to reminisce about growing up in Alligator Hat, and she offered tales of West Blue in trade. Then Indigo cantered back from scouting ahead, claiming to have spotted one of those rentable pastures too fine and cheap to pass up. Arriving at the site, everyone agreed he was right, and they turned off for the night.

Sage drew the wagon to a halt in a stand of pecan trees just coming into leaf, overlooking a sparkling creek much too shallow to conceal alligators. Fawn approved. He went off to find the farmhouse and offer his coins, and Fawn followed Calla down from the box, glad to have unmoving ground under her feet. The two came briefly face-to-face, and Fawn smiled brightly.

“Why do you keep bothering me? ” said Calla through her teeth.

“I’d like to be friends. We’ve a long road ahead.” Why Fawn should feel a maternal regard for a girl five or six years older than herself was hard to explain, but she did. Or maybe not so hard. “Seems I’m newly interested in happiness for half bloods.”

“If you really wanted to increase happiness, you wouldn’t be making more half bloods,” snapped Calla, and strode away.

Fawn blinked, a bit discouraged. That did not go well. Yet. Keep trying.

She made her way over to the less-prickly Indigo, who was starting to unharness the mules, thinking up some unexceptionable praise for his animal handling.

–-

As darkness fell, Dag walked the perimeter of the pasture in pure patroller habit, but sensed no danger for a mile in any direction. He wandered back to the creek and eased himself down on a rock, listening to the gurgle of the water and the munching of the mules. Copperhead came over and lipped his hair, and Dag took a moment to impress upon the gelding, again, that there were to be no random attacks upon his pasture mates tonight. Magpie, being more ladylike, needed no such persuasion.

The two horses wandered away downstream in search of sweeter grass.

Dag became aware that he was being stalked, more or less. A thin figure approached from the shadows as cautiously as a hunter sneaking up on a bear or a catamount, or some other dangerous beast that might turn and rend. He sat still and waited.

Before long, Calla’s hoarse voice demanded, “What do you want? ”

“Beg pardon? ” said Dag.

“What is it that you’ll take, to leave me and mine alone? ”

Dag’s brows drew down. “Missus Smith, I truly do not understand that question.”

“Don’t make mock of me!” Her voice was sharp, but with a quaver at the end.

He reckoned a year of living with Fawn must have made him more fluent in female. He could already tell it was going to be one of those conversations. “Ma’am, I’m not. I’d take it as a privilege to help you out. And your brother, though it’s plain you’re the more gifted in groundsense. Someone should have taken you both in hand before this.”

“We don’t need help. We don’t need Lakewalkers.” Her voice went lower and, if possible, more bitter. “Lakewalkers don’t need us.”

“Maybe not at Moss River, but not all Lakewalkers think like that. What was that test Finch was talking about-weaving your ground into a cord? ”

“What about it? ”

“You should have passed.”

Her voice went lower still. “Indigo didn’t. So I didn’t.”

Dag’s brows rose. “You deliberately failed? ”

“They would have separated us. Kept me, thrown Indigo away. Everyone else had left us, one way or another. I wasn’t going to do that to him, not again.”

“Whose idea was it to go north? Yours, or his, or…? ”

“The boys always talked about it. But it was just talk. After Moss River, I wanted to get away from everything so bad, but it was too dangerous to go by ourselves. I had enough magic to make us targets, but not enough to protect us. We had to have the others, we had to.”

“Seems sensible thinking to me,” Dag said cautiously.

“Please”-her voice broke-“don’t take that away from us.”

Dag held his ground open wide, in the hopes she might sense he told no lies. “You talking about that attempt of yours to persuade Sage? ”

“You sensed it? ” A sharp-drawn breath. “Don’t touch it, you-! I’ll give you-I don’t know what. I don’t have much money, but I can give you some.”

“Absent gods, I don’t want your money!”

A long pause. “I’ve only got one other thing.” And from the scrunch in her shoulders, not something she’d be pleased to part with, not to him.

Dag was startled, bemused, and more than a little offended. “Absent gods! No. You’re young enough to be my daughter, you know.”

“So’s your wife.” A brittle pause. “Oh, full blood, you have to be older than you look. Granddaughter.”

“Now, that’s going a mite too far!” He didn’t know whether to laugh or be horrified.

Calla stood rigid. “It seemed it might be a fixation of yours. Younger women.”

Dag said sternly, “Fawn and I are a long story that you might learn more of if you listen, but in the meanwhile, don’t talk ignorant rubbish. Fawn’s earned every bit of loyalty I can give her.” His voice slowed. “We have a fair trade going on, that way.”

Calla flinched.

It finally clicked in. Oh gods, I’m slow. “I take it you believe you magicked young Sage into marrying you and taking you and your brother north? ”

“You know I did, Lakewalker. His family suspected. His sister told me to my face Sage wouldn’t have looked twice at such a horse-faced rack of bones without it.”

Dag began to speak, hesitated, and reversed the order. “You figure your spell is still holding? He hasn’t treated you any different, the past couple of days? ” It was a safe question; there had been a couple of happy grounds in that feather bed just last night, together with some faint, distinctive creaking from the wagon that sheltered it.

“Of course it’s holding. Or he’d have cast me off by now.”

“Well, no. If you’d had the training you should have, you’d know those sorts of persuasions are absorbed over time, and have to be renewed to keep working. That groundwork of yours faded weeks ago. In any case, I cleared the last of it out of Sage early yesterday.”

A faint cry, choked off. She quivered like a filly about to bolt.

“Stand still!” Dag used his old patrol captain’s voice; she froze rigid.

“Straighten up, girl, and gather the wits you were born with. I’m not saying your initial persuasion didn’t cause Sage to take a second look at you, because I think it likely did. But it was what he saw that made him stay. He doesn’t love you because you magicked him.” Dag’s voice softened.

“He loves you because you’re lovable.”

The kindness nearly broke her as the sternness never would; once again, Dag was reminded of Fawn. Tears laced her gasp, but she steadied her breathing. And listened; oh my, she was listening with all her heart now. Here’s your chance, old patroller; go carefully.

“More to the point,” he went on, “Sage was never a bit beguiled by you. And for the same reason that my groundwork on Fawn doesn’t beguile her. Your heart was entirely open to him, so your grounds flowed both ways, and he never choked on the imbalance.

“So as he loves you, and as you like him right well, too-and both your grounds prove it-there’s not a reason in the wide green world you can’t rub along as well or better than any other married couple. You could have set your persuasion into any other youth in Alligator Hat. You picked well when you picked Sage. I think you know that.”

“Oh…!”

“Though you might care to clear the air with a confession. It’s bound to make it easier between you not to be hiding that useless secret. And it will straighten out your ground for your next lessons in groundwork.”

“He’ll hate me!”

“Well”-Dag scratched his head for show-“I’m not saying he won’t be a touch unsettled, but he knew about your powers before, and they didn’t scare him off none. He might be flattered. A tall, handsome”-alarming-“older girl plucks him out from all the other fellows… he might even be proud.”

He could tell by her stillness that this was a completely new thought to her.

“And if he has any questions, he can bring them to me or Arkady. I meant it when I said I’ve helped a passel of youngsters learn to manage their groundsense. And trust me, some of them were even more thorny than you. You may not need Moss River-in fact, it seems Moss River was exactly what you didn’t need-but you need someone to show you how to go on.”

She’d moved close enough for him to see her; her hands clutched her hair. “But I don’t want this. These powers.”

“Then you can choose not to use them. But that’s not a choice you can make before you’ve learned to command them. Until then, you’ll just be blundering around in the dark bumping into things and hurting yourself-and maybe others-through ignorance.”

For the first time, her silence grew considering, and not just frightened.

“I can… choose not to be…? ”

“If you learn enough. And what I can’t teach, Arkady surely can. Chance has given you a prize, this journey. Absent gods, girl, seize it. I mean to.”

Calla made a faint, confused noise, and Dag explained, “Arkady’s my teacher.”

“You have a teacher? At your age? ”

Dag chose to ignore the second part of that. “Yes. And Fawn teaches me, too. She’s taught me more this past year than I imagined possible. The whole world teaches me new things every day, now that she’s made me alive to it again. You teach me.”

“What do I teach you?” Calla stared in bewilderment.

“What half bloods need, to start with. I expect there will be more surprises, as we go along.” He rose from his rock, gave her his softest salute. “I can hardly wait. Good night, Missus Smith.”

“Uh… good night, Mister Bluefield…”

He tracked her trudge back toward her wagon and her waiting husband.

He was reminded that he had a bedroll warmed by a waiting wife, but detoured through the nearby trees. A long, pale shadow detached itself from a pecan bole as he neared.

“Do you think she has the makings of a maker? ” said Dag to Arkady.

“In some small, useful ways, undoubtedly.”

“I hope you don’t mind me volunteering you, sir.”

“No…” A shrewd pause. “All in all, that was well done.”

From Arkady, who was quite capable of prefacing his milder critiques with You gormless, ham-handed half-wit! this was true praise.

“I hope so, sir,” said Dag. “I surely do.”