Horizon

2

Descending the steps to Drowntown, Berry shot a wide grin over her shoulder at Fawn; Fawn grinned back in equal delight. They’d switched places, Whit and Berry holding hands hard, Fawn clutching Dag’s hand scarcely less tightly. Barr and Remo followed. But when they came to a landing where the stairs doubled back, Barr’s grip fell on Dag’s shoulder.

“Hold up, Dag,” he growled. Dag came to a halt, staring blandly out over the riverside.

Fawn turned, surprised by Barr’s tone. Remo, after a glance at the two tense faces, waved Whit and the rest of the party on. Whit raised his brows, but thumped on down the boards after the rest of his new Clearcreek in-laws.

Barr’s strong teeth set. Through them, he said, “You planted a persuasion on that clerk fellow.”

Dag’s eyelids fell, rose, in that peculiar Daggish I-am-not-arguing look he got sometimes. It could be very aggravating, Fawn knew, to the person on the wrong side of the non-argument. She touched her lips in dismay. I thought that might have been what happened back there. Though she could not perceive groundwork directly, Barr and Remo evidently had.

Remo didn’t look angry like Barr, but he looked plenty worried in his own way. More so than usual, that is.

“You tore the blighted hide off me for trying to plant a persuasion in Boss Berry that time, and I didn’t even make it work!” said Barr.

Dag blinked again, and waited patiently and unencouragingly. He didn’t deny this, either, Fawn noted.

“So how come you get to persuade farmers, and I don’t?”

Remo offered uneasily, “It settled the fellow down. You wouldn’t have wanted to let all his nonsense about land and wills and due-shares wreck the wedding, would you?”

“No, but-but that’s not the point! Or maybe it is the point. Persuasion’s allowed if it’s a good deed? Mine was a good deed! I was just trying to get Remo to come back to Pearl Riffle with me, which is what I was sent after him to do-that wasn’t just a good deed, it was my duty! If you’re gonna make up rules for me and then go break them yourself, how can I trust anything you say?”

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” said Dag dryly.

Before Barr could get out some heated response, Fawn cut in. “Dag, you didn’t leave that fellow beguiled, did you?”

“Of course not.”

“So you took in a little of his ground.”

“I’ll just have to add it to the collection, Spark.”

Fawn’s mind ran down all the bits and pieces of strange grounds that Dag had absorbed into his own during these past weeks, either through the trick of unbeguiling all the folks he’d done his healing work on, or the odd experiments with food and animals, or the darker deed of ground-ripping the renegade Crane. “It’s getting to be a pretty queer collection.”

“Yeah, well… yeah.”

Barr started to renew his protest, but was stopped by his partner’s grip on his arm. Remo gave him a headshake; Fawn wasn’t sure what else passed between the pair, except that something did. Remo said, “We can take this up later. Let’s catch up with the others. It’s Fawn’s birthday, too, remember.”

“Yeah, I need to get back to the Fetch and finish cooking dinner,” Fawn put in anxiously.

Barr let his breath blow out; he shot one last glower at his fellow Lakewalkers, but produced a smile for Fawn’s sake. “You’re right. It’s not the time or the place to settle this.” He added in a mutter, “It’s going to take more time. And a bigger space.”

Remo gave a satisfied nod; Dag said nothing, though his lips twisted.

They all started down the stairs once more. Fawn could only think: I’m in Barr’s camp on this one.

–-

The combined wedding-and-birthday-supper chores didn’t fall too heavily on Fawn, as everyone pitched in to help, dodging around the little hearth in the kitchen-and-bunk area at the rear of the Fetch’s cabin. She served up the inevitable ham, potatoes, and onions, but also fresh fish from the sea, golden yams, the bright oranges and chewy sweet dried persimmon, and molasses to go along with the last of the salt butter for the biscuits. Bo’s gift was a new keg of beer, and if it was darker in color and stronger in taste than the paler brews Fawn had encountered up along the Grace Valley, well, maybe it wasn’t made that way just to hide the murkiness of Graymouth water, because it did a fine job of washing everything down.

The birthday-wedding cake was mostly apple flavored. There had been a debate over candles, as, properly, a birthday cake should have them but a wedding cake was decorated with flowers. Hawthorn had begged for candles mainly for the fascination of making Dag light them, so Fawn put thin beeswax sticks on top and flowers around the edge.

Hawthorn happily had his eyebrows nearly singed off as Dag waved his hook, and, Fawn presumed, ghost hand across the top, and nineteen little flames sprang up behind with a satisfying foomp.

Confronted with the bright warmth, reflected in Dag’s flickering smile, Fawn realized she’d been too busy fixing up the party to think of a wish. Watching Whit and Berry grin at each other, she considered wishing them well, but really, that’s what this whole day was about for everyone. The birthday-wishing-candles part was all Fawn’s own.

With a sudden catch of her breath, she thought, I wish to go home.

It wasn’t homesickness, exactly, because the last thing in the world she wanted was to go back to her parents’ farm in West Blue. She’d been fascinated by life on a flatboat, but the Fetch had been a very cramped shack floating down a very wide river, and not always bow first, either, and anyhow it had come to the end of its travels. Fawn wanted a real house, planted in solid ground, all her own, hers and Dag’s. With an iron cookstove. I want my future. She wanted these people in it-she glanced up at them all, Dag, Whit and Berry, Remo and Barr, Hawthorn and Bo and even Hod, waiting to applaud her when she blew out the flames. And, with an ache so abrupt it hurt her heart, she wanted the new ones in it, the shadowy children she and Dag had not yet made together. I want us all home safe. Wherever our real home turns out to be. She took a deep, deep breath, shut her eyes, and blew until the lights no longer glowed red against her eyelids. When the clapping started she dared to open them again, and smile.

After cake came the presents, birthday and wedding both. Normally, wedding presents were practical items to outfit the young couple’s new house or farm, or tent if they were Lakewalkers-the same aim, Fawn understood, if different in detail. But Whit and Berry still had a long way to travel to get back to the debatable house in Clearcreek. So any presents had to be small, light, and packable. Barr had somehow come up with new shoes made of red-brown alligator hide for both Berry and Fawn, which actually fit, and not by chance; he’d slyly sneaked off old shoes to compare. Hawthorn and Hod proudly presented Fawn with a bound blank book, found at the same place Whit had bought his, but smaller to fit in her saddlebags, and likely in their budget.

Fawn gave two new pairs of cotton drawers each to Whit and Berry, because she’d found good cotton cloth ready-made in the market here cheaper than raw cotton fiber back in Oleana, and it was all too splendid to pass up. The straight seams and simple drawstrings had kept her fingers flying the past few days, but it wasn’t as if she hadn’t made drawers for Whit before, underclothes being one of the first things her aunt Nattie had ever taught Fawn to sew. For good measure, she’d made up a pair for orphaned Hod, who wiped thrilled tears on his shirtsleeve when she surprised him with them, then disappeared into the dark recesses of the forward cabin to put them on right away. Too shy to parade them for the company, he did make Whit come look before he put his trousers on again, which Whit agreeably did. Whit had a funny look on his face when he came back, and fingered his own pairs thoughtfully before folding them away with rather more care than he’d ever shown to Fawn’s taken-for-granted work before.

Whit and Remo then tiptoed out mysteriously, leaving Fawn and Berry smiling at each other while everyone else took care of the cleaning up. Of all the gifts this day had brought, gaining a sister ranked the highest in Fawn’s heart. Berry, too, had grown up sisterless-and had become, not long after Hawthorn had been born, motherless-without even the older female company afforded Fawn by her mother and her aunt Nattie. When Berry was smaller the house in Clearcreek had been run, she’d told Fawn, by a succession of older female cousins. But one year no such woman could be found when it was time to launch the flatboat and catch the rise, so Papa Clearcreek had simply packed all three of his children along on his six-months-long round-trip. To the amazement of all their kin, no young Clearcreeks gratified their dire predictions by falling overboard and drowning, so he’d taken them every year thereafter. It seemed a colorful life to Fawn’s eyes, but flatboats and keelboats both were thin of female companionship. She suspected Berry thought Fawn was Whit’s best present to her, too.

Loud clumping from the front deck brought the whole company out to find Whit holding the reins of a small piebald mare, and Remo muffling the smirk of a successful conspirator. Dag’s chestnut gelding Copperhead, sharing the pen with Daisy-goat, pinned his ears back in jealousy, but Dag promptly settled him down. To Fawn’s utter shock, Whit handed the reins to her.

“Here you go,” he said. “To make up for me making you leave your mare in West Blue. Berry bought you the saddle and bridle, and Remo came up with the saddlebags.” The gear was secondhand, but looked to be in good condition; someone had cleaned it up. “Though if I’d known what horses go for in Graymouth, I’d have brought Warp and Weft along to sell here!”

“Whit! Remo! Oh-!”

“It’s all right-my window glass went for a jaw-droppin’ price, too,” Whit allowed, shrugging off her hug in smiling embarrassment. “ Berry was right to make me hang on to most of it till we got down here.” He tossed a salute at his new wife and old boat boss, who accepted it with a contented nod.

“Wait,” said Fawn to Remo, “isn’t that one of the horses those Lakewalkers from New Moon Cutoff were selling in the square yesterday?”

“Yep. I took Whit back, later,” Remo said smugly. “Don’t worry; this mare’s sound. Lively little thing, rising four, I think. They were only culling her because she’s too small to be a patrol horse.”

Truly, the mare looked as if she’d have to take two steps to leggy Copperhead’s one, but she also looked as if she wouldn’t mind. Fawn fell to petting her with delight; Berry, less horse-savvy, stroked her mane more cautiously.

“And I found out those girls’ tent names, too.” By Remo standards, he sounded almost cheerful.

“What girls?” asked Barr.

“Oh… just… some girls. They’re gone now.”

“Huh?” Barr regarded him with some suspicion, but then was drawn into the general admiration of the new mare. After Fawn took a first short ride up and down the muddy riverbank, Dag watching closely, she let Hawthorn and Hod try her gift horse’s paces, too. They settled the mare back aboard tied to the rail opposite Copperhead, with an armload of hay all around. At length Fawn went back inside, trying to think of a name. The first black-and-white thing that came to her mind was Skunk, which seemed both unkind and ungrateful. She would have to think harder.

After testing the level of beer left in the keg, they all settled around the hearth with their tankards. Fawn was just sighing in contentment and considering asking Berry to get out her fiddle and give them all some tunes, as a birthday present Fawn wouldn’t have to pack, when Whit said suddenly, “Hey, Dag! What did you get Fawn for her birthday?”

“Ah,” said Dag. He looked down into his tankard in discomfort. “I was trying to make her a surprise, but it didn’t work out.” He took a sip, and added, “Yet, anyway.”

“Oh, what?” asked Fawn in eager curiosity. Given that he only had the one hand, Dag hardly ever attempted carving or any sort of complicated craft work. It came to her almost at once; he’d meant making, Lakewalker groundwork. Magic, to farmer eyes, although Fawn had nearly trained herself out of using that word. But it seemed his attempt had failed, whatever it was, and he was feeling the failure. Especially after Whit’s grand present of the mare. She added, “Sometimes you have to give up on the surprise part. Remember your birthday, when I gave you one sweater sleeve?”

Dag smiled a little and touched the finished garment, which he was wearing now against the damp chill seeping back into the boat as the bustle of dinner wore off. “Indeed, Spark. Thing is, you already knew you could finish that promise. You didn’t have to stop and invent knitting, first.”

“All right, now you have to say,” said Whit, leaning back. “You can’t trail that sort of bait across the water and then just haul in your line.”

“Aye, give us the tale, Dag,” said Bo, a bit sleepily. “A tale is as good as a coin, some places.”

“Well…” Reluctantly, Dag shoved his hand down into his pocket, leaned over, and deposited a black walnut, still in its shell, on the hearthstone.

The farmers around the fire all looked blankly at it, and at Dag, but Barr and Remo both sat up, which made Fawn prick her ears, too.

“Dag, what in the world did you do to that poor walnut?” asked Remo. “Its ground is all… shiny.”

Dag touched the hard ridges with a finger, rolling the green-black sphere around on the stone, then sat back and stared glumly at it. “A shell protects and shields life. It seemed a good natural essence to try to anchor an involution on. The way a knife maker anchors an involution into the bone of a sharing knife, although that cup is made to hold a death, and this… was going to hold something else.”

Dag had made his first sharing knife bare weeks back, in the aftermath of the horrors of the bandit cave. Barr and Remo had been wildly impressed; having met Dag’s knife-maker brother Dar, Fawn had been less surprised.

“I’ve been trying and trying to think,” Dag went on, “what might protect farmers the way ground veiling protects patrollers.”

“Absent gods, Dag, how could farmers veil?” said Remo. “It’s like turning your whole ground sideways to the world. It gave me conniption fits, when I was first trying to learn. Not even all Lakewakers can catch the trick of it.”

Dag nodded, not disagreeing. “But see… Fawn can’t feel me in her marriage cord the way I can feel her in mine, the way any married Lakewalker does, but last summer I was able to do a shaped reinforcement in her arm that let her feel something like it, leastways for a while until her ground absorbed it again. It wasn’t the same thing, but it accomplished the same end.”

Fawn nodded vigorously. “It was better, actually. Old Cattagus said you can’t tell direction with regular cords, just if your spouse is alive or not. But I could tell which way you were from me. Roughly, anyhow.”

Barr’s brows rose. “From how far away?”

“Over a hundred miles, part of the time.” Fawn added scrupulously, “I don’t know if it would have faded at bigger distances.”

Remo’s brows climbed, too.

“See, the thing is,” Dag went on, “nobody’s trying to do groundwork on farmers. Except to sneak some healing now and then out of pity, which as like as not leaves an accidental beguilement, or the occasional”-he cleared his throat-“illicit persuasion. The strongest makers don’t much get outside their camps, and patrollers don’t do complex or clever making.”

“If you show clear talent for making,” said Barr, “they don’t send you for patroller. So how did you ever get let out on the trail, Dag?”

“I… was a difficult youngster.” Dag scratched his head ruefully, but did not expand, although eight people perked up in hope of the story. “I don’t know what’s not done because it’s impossible, or what’s not done because it’s never been tried. Or tried and kept secret, or discovered and then lost again.”

“That still doesn’t explain why you wanted to give my sister a walnut for her birthday,” said Whit.

“I thought she could put it on a string, wear it like a necklace.”

“She probably would. Just like you wore that silly-lookin’ straw hat she wove you.”

“That hat was very practical,” Dag said defensively.

“So what’s the use of a walnut, again?”

Dag sighed. “None, apparently. I wanted to make something that would protect her ground.”

“What from?” Fawn asked.

Dag took a short breath. “Anything. People like Crane, for one.”

Fawn refrained from pointing out that the renegade had actually threatened her with a perfectly ordinary steel knife, not with any magic.

What’s going on in that murky head of yours, beloved?

“Also, maybe some sort of shield could blur or soften farmer grounds so they wouldn’t strike on Lakewalker groundsense so hard,” Dag went on.

So she wouldn’t, Fawn realized he meant, have to walk around ground-naked in front of Lakewalkers. So that her presence in a Lakewalker camp wouldn’t disturb the neighbors?

“In other words,” said Berry slowly, “you’re thinking of something that would work like those wash-pan hats that Barr made up were supposed to, and didn’t.”

Barr winced. “It was just a stupid joke,” he muttered. “I said I was sorry.”

A few slow smiles around the circle, as the crew of the Fetch recalled the uproar back at Pearl Riffle when Barr had hoaxed a gang of flatties into believing they could protect themselves from Lakewalker magic by wearing iron helmets. Iron helmets weren’t usual boat gear, but iron cook pots were; the results had been pretty entertaining, for a time.

Fawn thought if Barr ever encountered any of those fellows again, he’d better be ready to run really fast.

“Oh my, Dag,” said Whit, his eyes suddenly aglow. “If you want something for Lakewalkers to sell to farmers for cash money, you’ve hit on it. Magic up a bunch of these walnuts, and you could likely peddle them at any price you wanted to name!”

“Yeah,” said Bo, “and by the next afternoon at the latest, there’d be folks selling off fake ones, too. It’d be a right craze, it would.” He looked suddenly thoughtful. “A feller could make a killing, if he timed it right.”

“Absent gods.” Dag wiped his left sleeve across his forehead, a look of some horror rising in his eyes. “I never thought of that. You’re right. I just wanted to protect Fawn. Makers wouldn’t… but if… never mind, it doesn’t matter. I couldn’t make it work anyway.”

“Dag,” said Fawn, “if it involves my ground, wouldn’t you have to work with my ground? Like you did, um, with that extra reinforcement in my arm?”

“Yes. Well, maybe not just like that. Although that would certainly make selling ground shields to farmers an unusual enterprise…”

With an effort, he untwisted his reminiscent smile. “It might need to be bonded to its user, yes. Custom-made. The way sharing knives are bonded to the grounds of their pledged donors,” he added in explanation all around. And Fawn thought it was a high mark of how far they’d all come that what he got in return were understanding nods.

Dag heaved a despondent sigh. “Except that all I’ve been able to do so far is make an unbreakable walnut.”

“Really?” said Berry, rocking back in doubt.

Hawthorn, entranced by this promise of more Lakewalker magic, scuttled up to go find a Tripoint steel hammer and test the proposition.

Many thwacks later, entailing flying chips from the hearthstone and turns taken by Barr and Remo, everyone agreed that it was one blighted unbreakable walnut, all right.

Whit scratched his head and stared at the little dark sphere. “That’s pretty useless, I admit. You wouldn’t even be able to eat it!”

“Oh, I dunno,” drawled Bo. “I ’spect you could win bets with it. Wager some o’ those big strong keeler boys they can’t crack it, and watch the drinks roll in…”

He shared a long, speculative look with Whit, who said, “Say, Dag… if you don’t want that ol’ thing, can I have it?”

“No!” cried Fawn. “Dag made it for me, even if it doesn’t do what he wanted. Yet. And anyhow, you aren’t planning to go tavern crawling with Bo tonight, are you?”

Berry gave Whit’s hair a soft tug, which made him smirk. “No,” she said definitely. “He ain’t.”

Fawn scooped up the walnut and thrust it into her own skirt pocket. It was growing dark outside the cabin windows, she noted with approval. There was one advantage to a midwinter wedding- early nightfall. Bo put another piece of driftwood on the fire, and Berry rose to light an oil lantern. Fawn caught Dag’s eye and gave a jerk of her chin.

As planned, Dag levered himself up and invited the crew of the Fetch out to a nearby boatmen’s tavern for a round of drinks on him.

Hawthorn’s helpful observation that they hadn’t run out of beer yet was ignored, and Hod and Bo shepherded him off. Fawn paused to exchange a quick farewell hug with Berry, who whispered, “Thanks!” in her ear.

“Yep,” Fawn murmured back. “I ’spect we’ll be out most of the evening, but Hawthorn and Hod’ll make sure Bo doesn’t stay out all night. Don’t you worry about us.” She added after a moment, “I’m sure we’ll make plenty of noise clomping back in.”

She left Berry and Whit holding hands, looking at each other with matching terrified smiles, and sneaking peeks at their new bed nook.

Formerly, the boat boss had slept in one of the narrow, three-high bunk racks at the side of the kitchen just like her crew, except that her bunk had been made a tad more private by curtains strung on a wire. Fawn and Berry together had rearranged the bedding last evening, in the space freed up by the sold-off cargo, making two little curtained-off rooms on either side of the aisle. The task had ended with them going up on the roof for a really long, nice private talk. Berry, as she put it, wanted a pilot for the snags and shoals of the marriage bed. Because while Berry was a brave boat boss, and an experienced riverwoman, and a couple of years older than Fawn, Fawn had been married for a whole six months. So Fawn tried her best to explain it all. At least Berry was smiling and relaxed when they came back in.

Whit, in the meanwhile, had taken a long walk with Dag, and returned looking pale and terrified. Fawn took Dag aside, and whispered fiercely, “You know, if it was just Whit, I’d let you exercise your patroller humor to your heart’s content, but I won’t have any of it fall on Berry, you hear?”

“Don’t fret, Spark. I controlled myself,” Dag assured her, eyes glinting gold with his amusement. “I admit, it was a bit of a struggle. Two virgins, oh my.”

“Really?” said Fawn, with a surprised peek around Dag’s side at Whit, hunkering down to warm his hands at the fire. “I would have thought Tansy Mayapple… oh, never mind.”

“They’ll be fine,” he’d promised her.

Now, as they strolled away into the darkness after the rest of the crew, and Fawn turned to look over her shoulder at the glow of the lantern hung up on the Fetch’s bow, Dag repeated, “They’ll do fine, Spark.”

“I sure hope so.” Fawn reflected that it was likely just as well that everything about this wedding was as different as it could possibly be from the one that Berry had planned back in Clearcreek with her dead betrothed Alder. No reminders. Because while bad memories were plainly bad, it was the good memories, lost in them, that hurt the worst.

The tavern was crowded and noisy tonight, so after Dag had done his duty buying the first round, Fawn bequeathed her barely sipped tankard to the table and drew him back outside for a walk despite the dark. Partway up the steps to Uptown, Fawn found the lookout point that she’d spied earlier that day. She ducked under the rail around the landing and picked her way along the damp path, inadequately lit by the half-moon riding overhead between fitful clouds. At its end, a board propped up between two piles of stones made a smooth, dry seat, with a fine view over the serene river, all hazy silver in the night mist.

In summer, Fawn guessed couples came here to spoon. Even for northerners like themselves, this wasn’t quite outdoor spooning weather. She cuddled in gratefully under Dag’s right arm. Though the view was romantic, and Dag shared warmth generously, it was plain he was not in a romantic mood. He was in his worrywart mood, and he’d been stuck in it for days, if not weeks. Plenty long enough, anyhow.

Fawn fingered the walnut in her pocket, and said quietly, “What’s troubling your mind, Dag?”

He shrugged. “Nothing new.” After a long hesitation, while Fawn waited in expectant silence, he added, “That’s the trouble, I guess. My mind keeps looping and looping over the same problems, and never arrives anywhere different.”

“Same paths do tend to go to the same places. Tell me about them, then.”

His fingers wound themselves in her curls, as if for consolation or courage, then his arm dropped back around her and snugged her in; maybe she wasn’t the only one feeling the chill.

“When we two left Hickory Camp at the end of the summer-when we were thrown out-”

“When we left,” Fawn corrected firmly.

A conceding nod. “My notion was that if I walked around the world with my eyes new-open for a time, the way you’ve made them be, I could maybe see some way for farmers and Lakewalkers to work together against malice outbreaks. Because someday, the patrol won’t be perfect, and a malice will get away from us again, not in the wilderness or even by a village like Greenspring, but by a big farmer town. And then we’ll all be in for it. But if Lakewalkers and farmers were already working together before the inevitable happens… maybe we’d have a fighting chance.”

“I thought the Fetch was a good start,” Fawn offered.

“Good, but… so small, Spark! Eight people, and that’s counting you along-with. For six or so months of trying.”

“So, that’d be, um, sixteen folks a year. A hundred and sixty in a decade. In forty years, um…” A long hesitation while Fawn secretly tapped her fingers in her skirt. “Six or seven hundred.”

“And if the crisis breaks next year, and not forty years from now?”

“Then it won’t be any worse than if you hadn’t tried at all. Anyhow”-really, you’d think despair was his favorite corn-husk dolly, the way he clutches it-“I think your count is way off. There was all my kin in West Blue you talked to, and those teamsters from Glassforge, and Cress that you healed in Pearl Riffle and all her kin, and boatloads of boatmen along the river. And your show at the bandit cave with Crane; gods, Dag, they’ll be talking about that up and down these rivers for at least as many years as folks’ll be trying to wear those stupid pots of Barr’s. This river, I’ve figured out, is a village-one street wide and two thousand miles long.

It’s been a great place for you to tell your tale. Because river folks get around to gossip. And swap yarns like they were barter. And sometimes, change each other’s minds even when you aren’t looking on.”

Dag shook his head. “The absent gods may know what kind of path I blazed down the Grace Valley. I sure don’t. Did I light a fire, or was it all a damp sputter and right back to the gloom?”

“Why are all or nothing the only two choices, here?” Fawn asked tartly. “What I think is-”

Dag looked down, brows rising at the resolve in her voice.

“What I think is, you’re trying to carry a lazy man’s load. Inside your head, you’re trying to lift the whole world all by yourself, in one trip.

No wonder you’re exhausted. You’ve got to start smaller.”

“Smaller! How much smaller can I get?” Dag motioned down at the riverbank, by which Fawn guessed he meant to indicate their modest flatboat. A rhetorical reply in any case, so she paid no heed to it.

“Your own ground. I know it’s true because you told me so yourself, and you never lie to me: the first thing a maker has to make is himself. But nobody ever said he had to do it by himself.”

“Do you have a point, Spark?”

She ignored his stung tone and answered straight out. “Yes. It’s true for cooking or sewing or boatbuilding or harness making or crafting arrows-so I don’t guess it’s false for groundwork. Before you tackle any new job, first you have to get your own tools in order, clean and sharpened and tidy and laid out ready to hand. The main tool for groundwork is your own ground. And yours, from everything everyone has ever told me about such things, has got to be in the most awful mess right about now.

“What I think you need is another maker. Not a farmer girl, much as she loves you, and not just a couple of earnest patroller boys, as much as they want to help, because they don’t know beans about that trail, either, but instead someone like Hoharie or Dar.” Fawn took a breath, shaken by a moment of panic when she realized that Dag, unlike any member of her family ever, was actually listening to her. The notion that a man so strong might actually change or do something differently on the basis of something she’d blathered was alarming. Back when she’d longed in vain for any sign that she was heard, had she ever imagined also accepting responsibility for the results? Well, they’re in my lap now. She gulped.

“So… so I’ve been asking around. Every visiting Lakewalker I could get to talk to me up in the day market, I asked about the best medicine makers in these parts. They told me about a lot of different folks, but the one they all talked up is a fellow named Arkady Waterbirch. Seems he’s to be found at a Lakewalker camp called New Moon Cutoff, which is less’n thirty miles northeast of here, right off the Trace. Not much more’n a day’s ride away for ol’ Copperhead.” She added in anxious appeal, “They call him a groundsetter, whatever that means.”

Dag looked taken aback. “Really? That close? If…” But then he rubbed his forehead with his left arm and smiled ruefully. “Oh, gods, Spark. Wouldn’t I just… but it won’t work. It would be Dar and Hoharie all over again, don’t you see?” His teeth set in unfond memory.

“I’ve patrolled down this way a time or two. These southern Lakewalkers haven’t got any more use for farmers than the ones back in Oleana do-and more land jealousy, what with the camps being squeezed up between farmer areas. And with malices so seldom found in these parts, the farmers don’t even give their patrollers that thin gratitude we get in the north. Though when a southern patrol does find a little sessile, ’bout once in a lifetime, you’d think it was the Wolf War breaking out again, the way they carry on… anyway. I doubt the pair of us would be any more welcome at New Moon Cutoff than we were at Hickory Lake.”

“Maybe, maybe not, if we made it plain we were just visiting. Seems to me it was mainly your tent-kin who thought I was a problem they had to fix.”

“Mm,” said Dag.

Fawn swallowed. “Or you could go without me. At least to see the man, and ask. I’d be all right staying with Berry and Whit.”

“You’re the light that I see by, Spark. I’m not letting go of you again.”

The flash in his eyes reminded her of the lantern reflection off Crane’s knife blade, held tight to her throat, that had shimmered across Dag’s face just before… just before.

“Then we’ll both go, and I’ll deal with whatever I’m dished out. If it’s no better than Hickory Lake, it’ll be no worse, either, and I survived that.” She pulled the unbreakable walnut from her pocket and rolled it curiously in her hand. “What you’re doing now all by yourself isn’t working, you say. If any of the rest of us could help you, we would have by now. Time to try something else. Stands to reason Dag! And if this Arkady fellow doesn’t work out, either, well, at least you can scratch him off your list, and be that much farther along.”

She watched his face scrunch up in doubt so intense it looked like pain, and added, “I can’t be happy while you’re hurtin’. We have some time to pass anyhow, waiting down here at the edge of the world for the cold to end before we travel. You’ve kept all your promises to show me the river, and Graymouth, and the sea. Now you can just show me New Moon Cutoff for dessert. And if it’s not as fine as the sea, at least it’ll be new to me, and that’ll be good enough.” She gave a determined nod, which made him smile, if a bit bleakly.

“If that’s what you really think, Spark,” he said, “then I’ll give the fellow a try.”