Horizon

22

Dag found himself atop the low mound, clawing at the dirt with his hook, with no memory of how he’d got there. He didn’t have his stick.

“We’ve got to get her out of there! She can’t breathe!”

“Dag, man!” Finch pulled at his shoulder. Ash clamped a big hand on the other, lifting him more effectively; he wavered unwillingly to his knees, still clawing dirt, then clawing air.

“It’s no good, Dag!” said Sage. “Give it up, please!”

A woman’s voice, Vio’s, in the background, calling in distress, “Oh, help! Grief’s gone and turned his wits!”

“I did not,” Dag gasped furiously, shrugging off the hands, “survive a fight with mud-men and a night on a blighted mountaintop, climb two miles back down the mountain, and ride ten with a busted ankle, all to find my wife, to stop six feet short!”

“Does he want her bones? ” said an unfamiliar voice-one of the muleteers?

“They say them Lakewalkers eat their dead-it’s like a funeral feast to them-but I’m not having with that here!”

“She was his wife, though. Maybe we should let him…”

“Well, he ain’t eating my brother, nor stealing his bones neither!”

Dag fought free; more hands clutched him. Bo called out, “There’s no use to this carryin’ on, Dag-let her rest in peace. We done her all the respects, I promise you.”

“She’s not dead! I don’t know what’s going on, but she’s not dead! She can’t be dead! Not Spark!” He whirled, shedding men. Farmers.

“Dag, stop, this is madness!”

“Blight it, help me!” he cried, anguished. One-handed shoveling was not one of his better skills. But somebody must have had tools to dig the grave, so there must still be tools around to dig it up. He didn’t expect the strangers to understand, but surely the southern boys…?

A muleteer shoved too close; Dag almost swiped at him with his lethal hook, just managed to slug the man instead. Six more helpful muleteers jumped Dag and wrestled him to the grass. Gods! He couldn’t groundrip them like mud-bats… Yes, I could. The unwelcome thought slowed him a little.

He wept in his frustration, water blurring his dizzied view of shadows, firelight, men’s frightened faces. “Look, fetch another Lakewalker! Anyone with a speck of groundsense! They’ll testify I’m right!” A knee pressed on his chest, making him think of the dirt that must be pressing down on Spark’s. Had they stamped down the grave mound? “Absent gods, did you cover her face? There’ll be dirt in her mouth-in her eyes-” They hadn’t sewn her eyelids shut, had they? He’d heard that was a farmer funeral practice, some places…

Bo’s voice, would-be-soothing but for the quaver: “Dag, there weren’t no mistaking. She was cold and stiff. We couldn’t feel a pulse. There weren’t no breath mistin’ on a knife blade.”

“It was a hot day, of course there wouldn’t be breath on a warm blade! Where’s Whit? Where’s Berry? Get me Whit, he’ll understand!”

“He’s too sick to stand up, Dag, and Berry ain’t no better,” Hawthorn’s voice called anxiously from beyond the circle of looming faces.

Wrong, wrong, what was wrong? With a mighty lunge, Dag wallowed to his feet, knocking aside muleteers.

Oh gods, thank gods, a man was running up with a shovel. Dag’s heart lifted in joyous relief. “Yes, yes, help me-!” He reached out his hand for the wildly swinging tool. Saw, too late, its intended purpose as the broad blade swept around his head and clouted him hard. Faces, firelight, spinning branches above, all dissolved in hot bright sparks.

–-

He came to himself wincing, sick to his stomach. Pain pulsed like forgehammer blows in his head, ankle. Lungs. Heart. He breathed shallowly, then more deeply. Made to touch his head, only to find his hand caught.

He wrenched around, or tried to, to discover he was sitting with his back to a slender tree, his hand and hook tied behind it. He hadn’t been stunned for long-his tears were not quite dried. It felt as if snails had been crawling across his face, and he jerked his arm again, desperate to wipe away the sensation.

Turning his wrist, Dag felt rope. He could ground-rip through rope, if he had to-it wouldn’t kill him to rip anything he could eat, Spark had figured that out, Spark, no! Not that gnawing down a mouthful of hemp would be good for him. He panted, trying to collect his scattered wits, because they seemed to be his last resource. Struggling for calm, he extended his groundsense. The dim sensation in his marriage cord was unchanged. That, at least. The shadowy blur under the mound at the meadow’s edge had not disappeared. Whatever had happened wasn’t growing worse. Yet.

He looked up to find Finch, Ash, Sage, and Bo all crouched around him in a half circle, staring apprehensively. Hod hovered behind Bo. He’d been crying, too, judging from the snail tracks down his spotty face.

Dag swallowed, moistened dry lips. Croaked, “I’m better now. You can untie me.”

Bo’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll be the judge of that, Dag.”

Subterfuge. He should have gone to subterfuge right off, instead of alarming the whole camp with a display of deranged Lakewalker.

Screaming-more screaming, gods, his throat was raw-would not be helpful. Stands to reason, stands to reason, and he choked down a shattered laugh at Spark’s favorite turn of phrase, because inexplicable cackling would not be helpful, either.

The sight of Sage’s strained face reminded him. “Sage. I saw Calla and Indigo. They escaped last night all right, and made it back to Arkady. Indigo’s gone back to the wagons, to catch anyone who shows up there, and Calla’s up on the east ridge with Arkady and a hurt patroller that Tavia and I found. Tavia, she got away from her mud-bat, too. Whole, we’re all whole. Well, I got a little bent.”

Sage almost melted before Dag’s eyes, as a man had a right to who’d just learned he would not be burying his new bride. Not to mention his tent-brother. And all, and all. Save for Spark. But this level-voiced report seemed to reassure his audience in more ways than one.

“Please. All I want… all I want is to see her face again. One last time. Is that too much to ask?” Dag would have crawled on his knees to beg, without hesitation, but until he convinced them to untie him he couldn’t move. It wasn’t enough just to break free and run off. Now that he’d recovered his senses, he could think of three ways to escape, quick as a cat. But he had to have help-willing, careful help. Right now. He gulped again, to hide his mad-looking desperation. “Fawn and me, we’ve done a lot for you folks. I know it’s late, and you’re all tired, but… but please. I just want to look at her. One last time.”

And if it really was the last time, well, he still had his bonded knife slung around his neck, didn’t he? Formerly when he was in desperate straits that thought had calmed and heartened him, in a bleak sort of way. Not tonight. I want Fawn, I want our baby, I want, I want… I want life. Years and decades and heaping plattersful more of life. It was not too much to ask. “For pity’s sake,” he whispered.

He tried to compose himself enough to muster a persuasion, or more than one, unfit for groundwork of any kind though he was in this distraction. But then he saw the hesitation in Sage’s face, and waited, one heartbeat, two, three.

“Maybe it’ll settle him down,” Sage said.

Dag quelled a howl of agreement, Yes, yes! Made his voice humble, mollified. “It’s all I want. Please.”

Bo’s brow wrinkled. Finch’s mouth twisted in doubt.

Ash, whose size had made him the victim of every cry of Need some help liftin’, here! since they’d left Alligator Hat, sighed, and said sadly, “All right. I’ll dig.”

–-

There was only the one shovel, belonging to the muleteer who’d belted Dag with it, and who gave it up dubiously. But even with the three southern boys to take it in turns, it would be agonizing minutes before they uncovered the hopes they had so prematurely buried. More frantic urging to Be careful! would do nothing but re-convince them that Dag was mad. Since he was terrified that they might yet stop short, and he couldn’t watch without screaming, he took himself across the clearing to see Whit and Berry, limping so stiffly that even Bo hurried to put a helping hand under his elbow. Dag did not protest.

His Bluefield tent-kin were laid out together on a thin blanket, just at the edge of the circle of firelight. Hawthorn crouched by his big sister and brother-in-law, looking forlorn; he shuffled back as Dag approached.

Berry, muzzy and weak, levered herself up onto one elbow.

Dag knelt awkwardly by her side. From this distance, now that he’d settled a bit, he could at last see what was going on. The pair had not, as he had first thought, been partially ripped by the malice, a crippling unpleasantness of which Dag had firsthand experience. Or… not exactly.

But their shields had closed down so tightly under the impact of the malice’s attempt to do so that their grounds were actually partially withdrawn from their bodies, drained from their extremities into quivering, defensive balls.

Dag huffed in astonishment and fascination, and reached to grasp Berry’s walnut pendant and pull it over her head. She whimpered in protest.

“No, it’s all right. It’s done its work.” Not only done, but nearly drained. The thinning groundwork was close to failure. In a few more hours, it would likely have fallen apart, freeing her ground from its shell, leaving her exhausted but alive. As he coaxed its cord from her hair, the deep connection pulled reluctantly apart in sheets like maple syrup just turning to sugar, and her ground flooded back out into its normal form, congruent with her skin.

Berry took a ragged breath, raising her hands to clutch her head.

“Oh.” She struggled to sit up. “What was that? Oh, Dag, what a night we’ve had! Whit-” She turned urgently to her unconscious young husband.

“Just a moment.” Dag half crawled around them. He stole a moment to study the effect of the other walnut shield. It, too, had held against the malice’s attempt at ground-ripping, but was clamped even more tightly. And was very close to failure. Whit wasn’t going to be his friskiest after it released, but his abused ground would recover in a few days.

I trust. Dag drew Whit’s braided cord over his head in turn, and felt the link shear apart.

Whit groaned, and mumbled, “I feel awful. Bo, what did I drink? ”

His gluey eyes peeled open to stare without comprehension up at Dag.

Blinked. Came abruptly to awareness. “Dag! You’re here! The malice- Fawn-she carved up your knife, put feathers on it-”

“We got the malice, Whit!” Berry told him.

“Did we…? Yes, I remember. Its wings blew off, wildest thing- Dag, your shields! They must have worked!” Whit felt all down his body as if surprised to find it still attached to his head.

“Yes, though it seems they still need some refinin’. You just rest, patroller boy. You’ve done your job.”

Whit settled back, pleased. “Hey, I did, didn’t I? Heh. Wait’ll Barr and Remo hear about this!”

And a great many others besides. Two dozen people had witnessed Fawn’s farmer patrol shoot down the terrifying malice. Dag suspected that this was one tale he wouldn’t have to labor to get across to folks. It would fly on wings.

Whit’s and Berry’s voices tumbled over each other to tell him the story of the past rough night, of all they’d done from the time they’d been driven away from the mind-captured company till their dawn ambush of the bat-malice. Dag barely listened, his groundsense straining toward the grave. If Fawn’s shield failed before she was unearthed, releasing her ground back into a body buried alive… That certainly would have happened, Dag thought, sometime before tomorrow morning.

Absent gods, and he’d almost let Arkady talk him into spending the night on the mountain. Don’t scream, don’t scream.

At the mound, the boys had stopped digging with the shovel and were leaning in, reaching down with their arms. Working something stiff and small up out of the soil. Dag found his stick and pushed to his feet again, turning hastily away from Whit’s urging that he go look for the fallen wings, and Berry’s woozy, belated query of, Hey, where’s Fawn?

Dag fell to his knees beside the opened pit in time to receive his wife in his arms, Ash’s face looming in sympathetic sorrow. She was every bit as stiff and cool as a real corpse, he had to allow the farmer boys that much. Her powerful shield had drawn her ground in deeply, centered on head, spine, chest, and especially belly. There’d been no shroud to wrap her in-she’d been buried in her shirt and shoes and riding trousers-but absent gods be thanked, someone had donated an old handkerchief to spread across her face. It lay dimpled and moist across her mouth and nostrils, which at least were not packed and blocked with dirt. He pulled the cloth away. Her face was set, her lips much too pale, but not the drained lavender yellow of a corpse’s. Her closed eyes were undamaged, the lids traced with the pale violet lines of her veins beneath the delicate skin, her black lashes lying in a curving fan above her cheekbones.

His hand shaking so much he could hardly get a grip, Dag found the walnut and drew it over her head. Its cord caught in her dark curling hair, thick with dirt clumps, and he had to stop a moment lest he tear away strands of her hair, too, in his terror. Gently, gently… the bond sheeted apart the way Whit’s and Berry’s had, and he flung the walnut from him with enough force to make it bounce halfway across the clearing.

Her rigidity changed under his hand to a shuddering stretch. He bent his head and kissed her forehead, cheekbones, all over her face, but not her mouth, for she needed that to take a sudden breath, then another, and another, long gulps of air. Color flooded back into her face, and his world. The lashes fluttered faintly…

–-

There had been voices in the darkness, distant, as though heard from the other side of time.

The poor little thing!

Oh, the pity of it…

It’s almost a blessing, that he’s gone first.

Yeah, he wouldn’t of took this well…

She’d wondered, in muzzy indignation before the voices faded out of hearing, where were her congratulations?

Pressure then, stealing her breath, and pain from the pressure, and panic from the loss. Air seemed absorbed through her skin, not her slow gaping mouth, seeping into her lungs and hot busy belly. Where had Dag gone off to now? She needed him, she was sure of it. Something was very wrong…

Time leaked away in the black. Hours? Years?

At last, mumbling sounds returned to her clogged ears, breaking up the worrying too-much-silence that had made her fear she’d been struck deaf. She felt suddenly heavy and dizzy, and only then realized how nothing she’d felt before. Almost, almost… there! Air!

Her eyelids fought apart onto the most welcome of sights: Dag. His eyes were turned their tea color in the graying shadows and flickering firelight, but a few gold flecks still glinted. From their crow-foot corners shimmering lines traced around his cheekbones, like inlaid silver wire beaten into a copper vessel. His cheeks were stubbly, face bruised and haggard, and his dirty iron-black hair stuck up every which way.

For once, he actually looked his age. Still looks good to me…

Her hand struggled upward to touch the silvery wetness as she at last caught her breath. Despite his wild eyes, his grin nearly split his face.

Her fingers traced the rough beard, his stretched lips, bumped over his slightly crooked teeth with the dear familiar chip out of a front one. His kisses found her knuckles, imprinting each one. Her hand slid across his jaw, around his neck, found a grip on his collar, and oh my what had he done to his good cotton shirt she’d made for him? More rips than cloth, she swore.

Kisses renewed, on her forehead, cheekbones, chin, mouth at last.

This is better. She was still stiff and hurting under her collarbone and in the track of the gouges across her shoulder blade from the mud-bat’s claws, but beneath her shirt, Calla’s plasters seemed to be holding, tugging on her tender skin when she moved. She had still been able to carve… they had… wait, what…?

“Dag! There was this huge bat-malice-it flew-but we got it!” She paused, worked her throat to clear the croak. “Whit got it, would you ever believe? And your shields, they must’ve worked! All those poor mice didn’t die in vain…” Her free hand searched her neck for her hair-and-walnut necklace. Best birthday present ever.

“Yes, yes, and yes, Spark.” A fierce hug with this last, which she didn’t quite like as much as usual, because the weight of it brought back her stifling nightmare-had she been asleep? Knocked unconscious?

“I knew you couldn’t be dead-you looked too mad to die, when those awful flying mud-bats were carryin’ you off upside down and backwards.” At her wriggle, his grip finally loosened enough for her to sit up. “Hey, is this evening? It was morning-did I sleep all day? I don’t feel so good. Was I out cold? Why am I all over dirt? My hair…” Her fingers, feeling among the dirt clumps, encountered a long, sticky, cool object that she withdrew from her curls with difficulty. An earthworm, big ol’ nightcrawler. She flung it from her with a heartfelt Eew! “Did Whit put worms in my hair while I was asleep? I’ll get him…” Her fingers searched her scalp in renewed alarm.

Bo’s voice, broken and maundering as if he’d been drinking again-“Sorry, I’m so sorry…” Amazed murmurs joined with Bo’s mumble, and Fawn looked up from the circle of Dag’s arms to find their tender reunion had an audience, crowding up around them: Bo and Hawthorn and Hod, Ash and Finch and Sage, unfamiliar Trace travelers-no, wait, she thought she recognized some of the tea caravan muleteers, nice fellows, if a bit rough around the edges.

Whit shouldered through the mob, crying, “Buried her? Buried her!

What’d you want to go and do a stupid thing like that for?” He knelt and pulled her away from Dag long enough to give her a hard and quite unprecedented brotherly hug. Dag tolerated this briefly, with a weird benign smile, then drew her back.

“Whit,” said Fawn in suspicion, “did you stick that fishin’ worm in my hair? You’d reckon a fellow your age would’ve outgrown such things!”

A muleteer’s voice rose in a quaver. “He raised her! That Lakewalker sorcerer raised her up from the grave!”

“Don’t think about it,” muttered Dag into her now worm-free hair.

“Don’t think about it.” As if to protect her from nightmare visions- hers, or his?

Another muleteer, one of the young ones-what was his name?

Spruce, that was it-went to one knee on their other side, and held out a hand quivering in entreaty. “Mister, Mister Lakewalker Bluefield, sir… would you raise my brother too? He’s younger’n me, it was his first trip, and I surely do dread taking the word of this back to our mama… oh, please!”

Dag stared back in bewilderment, his face as blank as if someone had hit him over the head with a shovel. Only Fawn felt his flinch as some realization slotted in. “Oh. No, you don’t understand. Absent gods. No one is that good a medicine maker. Fawn was never dead in the first place. You blighted fools buried her alive.” His arms trembled, tightened.

“I can’t help your brother. I’m sorry.”

Fawn began to piece it together. She supposed she ought to be horrified, but really, her outrage echoed Whit’s. “You buried me and didn’t even wait for Dag? Bo!”

“We thought for sure he was a goner, too,” Bo said in shaky apology.

“You could tell by my marriage cord he wasn’t! We told you that before!”

“Mebbe one o’ those other Lakewalkers could’ve, but we didn’t have none of them. Nobody thought to ask that girl who rode by, Neeta, she was in such a hurry ’bout that hurt patroller stuck up on the hill.”

Dag gave Bo a sharp glance, but he was distracted by the muleteer pulling on the remains of his sleeve.

“Please, sir, he weren’t but twenty years old, and dead without a mark on him. Just like her…” The muleteer nodded eagerly at Fawn.

Dismay, pity, and horror chased one another across Dag’s face.

“And my friend Bootjack…? ” said another muleteer, joining the first down on one knee. Fawn and Dag were suddenly surrounded by a mob of supplicating men. One tried to reach out to touch her, but his hand fell back, daunted by Dag’s renewed clutch and glare.

“You don’t understand,” Dag repeated, and under his breath: “Oh gods, I’ll have to talk.”

Beleaguered, Dag began a halting explanation of ground, malices, the walnut shields, and his hopes for supplying the defense to more farmers than just his Bluefield tent-kin. Someone gathered up the discarded necklaces and placed them in a pile at his knee; at Fawn’s urging, they were passed around the crowd so that the men might grasp with their hands what they did not quite take in through their ears. Some looked very interested, though the close friends and kin of the dead muleteers plainly wanted a different answer, and kept trying to get it through amending their questions. Bo and Whit and the Alligator Hat boys all testified to the parts they’d seen, which seemed to help; between that and Dag’s obvious exhaustion, the press around them eased from dangerous desperation to mere disappointment. One or two stared at Fawn in a lingering alarm that seemed disproportionate to her small, rumpled self.

Her small, rumpled, filthy, triumphant self. She and Whit and Berry deserved the bow-down of all bow-downs, Fawn thought. So when the argument about walnut shields and raising the dead ran down at last, she clambered up, eager to show Dag the remains of their malice.

The cool spring night spun crookedly around her head as she straightened; she groped for Dag’s arm, which he wrapped around her again, dropping his stick to do so. Only then did she discover what Dag had done to his ankle. His bare right foot was twice its normal size, colored a streaked deep purple that would have looked fine on a petunia but was very wrong for human skin. She led him in a mutual stagger over to show off the decaying traces of the wings-Dag made sure to warn everyone not to touch the poisonous blight of the malice’s remains, and no souvenir taking, either. He plainly didn’t even want to camp so close to it, but the deepening dark and everyone’s utter exhaustion looked to keep them all planted in this clearing till morning.

Everyone in Sumac’s party had carried light bedrolls and food with them, for the failed flight to Laurel Gap, and most folks had hung on to them despite their forced malice march. While Dag looked after his horse with the help of Sage, being careful not to let Fawn out of his sight, she nibbled a piece of hardtack till her stomach settled, then was able to get down a couple of strips of dried plunkin. The meal made her cold shakiness pass off. She was reminded of the very first time she had met Dag, with his firm belief in grub as a cure for shock, and smiled a little.

Her bedroll had contained a wedge of soap, and despite the hour she wanted a bath above all things. They borrowed a lantern from one of the muleteers and made their way across the road and around a crook in the creek to a pool of sorts. It was too chilly for lingering; they stripped down and splashed quick, although Fawn soaped up and rinsed her hair twice, holding her breath and shaking her head underwater, to be sure.

She fussed over Dag’s ankle, not to mention his impressive new collection of gouges and bruises, and he fussed over her shoulder. They could do no more with their filthy clothes than whack them against a tree trunk and shake them out before skinning damply back into them.

It would be better when they got back to the wagons and their gear.

Meanwhile, this… helped.

It wasn’t till they were lying down together between two thin blankets on the grass that her mind began to turn over the events of the past day, imagining other, grimmer outcomes. Then she cried, muffled in Dag’s shoulder. Mostly, he just held her, but then, he’d hardly let her out of his arms since… since she’d… been dug up out of her grave.

Which seemed horror enough, till she dwelled on not being dug up. To have come all this way, and survived so much, only to be killed on the last leg, not by bandits or mud-men or malices, but just by an ignorant misunderstanding…

“Shh,” he murmured into her hair, when her shudders renewed.

She swallowed to control her sniffling-was she crying too much?-and managed, “Is the baby all right after all that, can you tell? ”

Under her hands she could feel the familiar stillness of his concentration as he went deep with his groundsense. “Yes, seems to be,” he said, coming back up and blinking at her, eyes a mere gleam in the firelight and shadows. “Far as I can tell, leastways. She’s no bigger than your little finger yet, you know. But I’ll have Arkady check when we meet up again, for luck.”

Fawn melted with relief. But-“She? You sure, now?”

“Yep,” he said, and if his voice was tinged with a faint, smug glee, well, that was all right by her. As she shivered again, he said blandly, “We’ll name her Mari.”

His gentle teasing was a deliberate distraction from her grave thoughts, and she was grateful for it. “Hey, shouldn’t you ask me about that? ” She cogitated. “What about Nattie? ”

“Dirla’s a nice name for a smart strong girl. Or Sumac.”

“Too confusing, if Sumac’s going to be around with Arkady. Maybe for later.”

“Later,” he murmured. “Ah. I like later.”

“No baby animals, that’s for sure. I do sometimes wonder what my parents were thinking.” They’d certainly never pictured her as a grownup woman-then or later. “Can you imagine a grandmother still named Fawn?”

“With great delight.”

She snickered, and poked him fondly. “Just don’t you ever start saying, Yes, Deer.”

She could feel his smile in her curls, and finally grew warm enough to stop shivering. She wondered when a thin bedroll on plain grass had started to seem such unutterable luxury. As long as Dag is in it with me, and we’re safe. The safety, not the coverlet, was the true source of her comfort, she realized. And the comfort of all the folks with them, too, so nearly lost to one another, sleeping close in blanketed lumps around the fire tonight for more than warmth. She cuddled in harder and, for all her hurts and wobbling thoughts, slept.