Horizon

3

Two days of cold rain masked Dag’s disinclination to travel to New Moon Cutoff, so Fawn did not badger, but she did draw Barr and Remo into the project. When the next day dawned clear, the three of them had Dag on the road north, if not early, at least before noon. Barr and Remo claimed to be interested in buying horses for a better price than found in the Drowntown market, where the flatboat men not wishful to join keeler crews bid for mounts to carry them back home on the Tripoint Trace. Fawn wasn’t sure Dag was fooled, because he looked pretty ironic about it all, but he didn’t say anything cutting. Fawn rode rather guiltily on her new mare, now named Magpie; three sets of saddlebags were piled onto Copperhead, led by his master; the patroller men strode.

Or tried to. Outside of Graymouth, the road became a quagmire.

It was nearly impassable to wagons-they paused several times to offer help to farmers with wheels stuck up to the hubs; and once, the man was so desperate that he even accepted the offer, despite the three tall strangers being Lakewalkers. Though his thanks, afterward, were brief and worried, cast over his shoulder as he urged his team into motion once more. Pack trains of horses or mules made fairly good time on the hoof-pocked verge-a couple of them passed by southbound, bringing in loads of cotton, tea, and other mysterious local goods to the river port. Barr, however, complained bitterly about slogging in his farmermade boots, new bought in Graymouth.

“Don’t they fit right?” Fawn asked. “I thought you said you’d broken them in. Do they leak?”

“No more than you’d expect,” said Barr. “But look!” He raised one knee to display a boot.

From her saddle, Fawn looked blankly down at it.

“There must be ten pounds of mud stuck to each foot!” fumed Barr.

Fawn glanced at Remo, standing with his hands on his hips and grinning at his partner, and realized that his boots, though damp and stained, were largely clump-free. “Hey, Remo, how come your boots aren’t like that?”

Remo held out a leg and smugly rotated his ankle. “My cousin made these for me. They’re groundworked to shed the mud.”

“Cheer up, Barr,” Dag advised, smiling faintly. “I’ll help you fix them when we make camp tonight. Didn’t you learn how to renew leatherwork when you were on patrol back in Oleana?”

“Well, yes, but-”

“He usually sweet-talked one of the girls into doing it for him,” remarked Remo, staring off artlessly over sodden fields.

“I was going to say, renew, yes, but these boots have never been worked at all! I thought that needed to happen while they’re first made.”

“Usually, but I’ll see what I can lay in,” said Dag. “It’s not like I haven’t done trail fix-ups on leather gear ’bout ten thousand times.”

They trudged onward past a hamlet boasting an inn of sorts, but they still had two hours of daylight left for walking; only Fawn looked back in regret. When dusk descended, they found a high spot off the road to make a camp. Fawn was not impressed with its comforts, although the boys did get a fire going despite the damp. She unpacked their food and shared it around.

Dag and Barr were soon heads down over the offending boots. Dag, quite adeptly it seemed to Fawn, instructed Barr in how to persuade them to be more waterproof. Muddy boots. Soon to be un-muddy boots, but which would not then walk on their own, nor force their owner to dance through the night, nor stride leagues at a step. So much for glamorous Lakewalker magic, wicked necromancy, rumors of cannibalistic rites. If only other folks could see these fellows as I do…

“Hey, Fawn!” Remo called from beyond the firelight, where he’d been rustling around along a weed-choked drainage ditch. “Want an alligator?”

“No!” she cried back in alarm. “I don’t want one!” Had he found one? How big? Could it smell her new shoes from there? If so, would it be angry? And if Remo caught it, instead of being promptly bitten in traplike jaws as his carefree enthusiasm deserved, would he make her try to cook it…?

Remo came tromping back out of the darkness with a wriggling form stretched between his two hands. Boot magic was temporarily abandoned as Barr jumped up to look, too. Dag, unhelpfully, sat on his log and grinned at Fawn’s expression. Which would have annoyed her more except his grins had grown too rare, lately.

“It’s… small,” said Fawn as the beast was eagerly presented to her gaze. A foot and a half of struggling lizard; Remo had one hand firmly clamped around its long snout and the other stretching its lashing tail. It hissed protest and churned its short legs, trying to claw its captor.

“Just a baby,” agreed Remo. “They hatch from eggs, they say. Like chickens.”

The bulging yellow eyes, with vertically slit pupils, looked even less friendly than a chicken’s. Baby or no, this was not, Fawn sensed, an animal that would welcome cuddling. Bo’s tale of the boy, the bear cub, and the thorn would have come out very differently in the end, if the boy had drawn the barb from the paw of a creature like this.

When the Oleana boys had finished exclaiming over the catch, they then squabbled over whether to let it go again. Fawn gave this plan no encouragement.

Even barring what horrors a malice might make of such a creature, those things grew, presumably, into what had mauled that boy at the Lakewalker camp. And if she volunteered to cook it, it couldn’t end up introduced alive into her bedroll later, although she supposed the boys would be more likely to try that game on each other than on Dag. They weren’t her own brothers. Their ruckus would still disrupt her sleep.

They toasted the meager fragments over the coals. Fawn found that alligator meat tasted like some off cross between pork and the boiled crab claw she had tried in the Drowntown market-and like campfire smoke, of course, but everything tasted of that. It would beat starving, but Fawn did not foresee a future in alligator farming. Treating the skin did keep the patroller boys occupied for the rest of the evening, leaving Fawn to cuddle with Dag in their reptile-free bedroll in a vain attempt to get warm.

When the camp finally settled for the night, she murmured into his collarbone, “Dag…?”

“Mm?”

“I thought what you and Remo discovered about unbeguiling, back up on the Grace, was pretty exciting. I figured you’d be talking about it to every new Lakewalker we met. Instead, I don’t recall as you’ve even spoken to any Lakewalker we’ve passed.”

He gave an unrevealing grunt. The verbal equivalent to that thing he did with his eyelids, she decided.

“I been wondering why not,” Fawn finished, refusing to be daunted.

He sighed. “It wasn’t quite that simple. Yes, my trick works to unbeguile farmers, I’m sure of that part, but I still don’t know what the effects are on the Lakewalker, to be taking in all that strange ground. I’m willing to experiment on myself. I’m less willing to put others at risk, till I know-” He broke off.

“What?”

“What I don’t know yet.”

She wanted to reassure him, to say, Well, at least we’re heading in the right direction to find out, but for all she knew she’d dragged them out on a fool’s errand. Tomorrow would-might-tell. “You will let this Arkady fellow know all about it, though, won’t you? Promise?”

“Oh, yes,” he breathed, stirring her curls. “Sleep, Spark.”

–-

Midday, on a side road striking west from the Trace, they passed from fallow fields into woods; Dag guessed they were crossing out of farmerowned land onto that of the Lakewalker camp. The camp itself came up sooner than he’d expected, only a few miles farther on. Magpie, recognizing her former home, tried to pull ahead, and for the first time Fawn had to rein back to her companions’ walking pace. The road climbed a low rise that proved to be a former river bluff, and Dag’s heart gave an odd lurch when he glimpsed the familiar glint of lake water through the leafless trees. I’ve been long away from home, this patrol. This cutoff was an old watercourse of the Gray River, which had ages ago looped thirty miles west instead, leaving this crescent-shaped lake and the groove of land in which it lay.

A quarter mile along the crest, the road dodged left again, descending to the shallow lake valley. A spur curved back down the slope into the woods. Just past where the tracks met, two flanking tree stumps cradled a peeled pole across the road at knee height; not so much a gate as the idea of a gate. Less cursory were two armed patrollers, taking their turn at this light camp duty between patrols. They watched Dag’s little party approach with alert curiosity. Dag presumed their open groundsenses-his was nearly closed just now-assured them that their visitors bore no ill will.

“Oh, hey!” said Remo, his spine straightening. “It’s those two girls who were selling horses at the Drowntown market last week!”

“Oh?” Barr followed his gaze, brows climbing. “Aha! So, partner, why didn’t you take me along to help buy that birthday horse, huh?”

“Didn’t think you were interested in horses,” said Remo blandly.

They all paused before the level pole.

“Well, if it isn’t the quiet fellow from Oleana!” said one of the patrollers, who had red-brown braids wreathing her head. “How de’, Remo. What brings you here?” Her taller blond companion looked approvingly at the boys, curiously at Dag, and doubtfully at Fawn. The redhead added more anxiously, “That piebald mare is working out all right, isn’t she?”

Remo ducked his head and smiled. “Hi again! Yes, the mare’s fine.”

Fawn nodded friendly confirmation from atop Magpie, who stretched out her nose and snuffled at her former handlers. “We’ve just brought our, uh, friend Dag here along to see that Arkady Waterbirch fellow you two told us about.”

Remo having apparently become spokesman, Dag was inclined to let him continue; he merely added a nod and touched his forehead in polite greeting. Then he wondered exactly what Fawn and Remo had said about him, because the two women stared at him in some surprise. He rehitched Copperhead’s reins around his hook and waited.

Barr chipped in, with a fine white grin, “Hi, my name’s Barr. I’d be Remo’s partner who he forgot to mention. I’m from Oleana, too-Pearl Riffle Camp, way on up the Grace. Real malice country up north there, y’know. Seems he also forgot to tell me your names…” He trailed off invitingly.

There followed an exchange of pleasantries in which Barr smoothly managed to extract the patroller girls’ names, tent-names, projected patrol schedules, family situations, the fact that the tall blonde had just returned from exchange patrol but the shorter redhead had never been beyond the territory of her home camp, and whether either had any pretty sisters-or ugly brothers. Dag would have been tolerably amused, if he hadn’t been so tired and strained.

Remo listened with growing impatience. Giving up on waiting for a natural break in the flow, he gripped Barr’s arm and overrode him: “And where would we find Maker Waterbirch?”

“Oh,” said the redhead, Tavia. She swung around and waved her arm toward the lake. “If you follow this road down and take the right-hand fork along the shoreline, you’ll pass the medicine tent about half a mile in. Old Arkady’s is the third tent after that, set apart. There’s these two big magnolia trees flanking his front path, you can’t miss them.” She glanced up at the listening Fawn, collected a nudge from her blond partner Neeta, and added, “If you follow this side road off east here, back down the slope, there’s a shelter and camp for farmers who come here to trade. Has its own well and all. Your farmer friend can wait there.”

“She’s with me,” said Dag.

Tavia gave him a politely embarrassed smile; her blond partner frowned.

“Farmers aren’t allowed in camp,” said Neeta. “The shelter’s not bad, and there should be a stack of firewood for the hearth. Nobody else is there just now.”

Dag’s jaw set. “We go in together or not at all.”

Remo and Barr exchanged alarmed looks. “Dag,” said Remo uneasily, “we just walked two days to get here.”

“If Fawn isn’t allowed in, neither this place nor its people are any use to me. If we start now, we can be halfway home to the Fetch by nightfall.”

“Wait, wait!” said Barr as Dag made to turn away. But when Dag paused and raised his eyebrows, he could not immediately come up with a counter.

Fawn, who’d listened to this exchange with her fist stuffed in her mouth, took it away to say placatingly, “It’s all right, Dag. Doesn’t sound like anybody would bother me at that shelter, and I could build a fire. I could wait out there for a while, anyhow, while you go in and talk to the man. And then we’d see.”

“No,” said Dag.

“Um… who is she, to you?” asked Tavia.

“My wife,” said Dag.

The two patroller women looked at each other; the blonde rolled her eyes. The alarm in Barr’s eyes was shading over into panic. Blight it, boy, I don’t know what bur is getting under your saddle. I’m closed down as tight as that walnut. I can’t possibly be leaking any mood. Vile as that mood was growing…

Tavia glanced at Dag and addressed herself prudently to Remo.

“What did he want to see Arkady for, anyway?”

“It’s… complicated,” said Remo helplessly.

“A complicated problem with groundwork,” Fawn put in. “And medicine making. Likely not something to discuss in the middle of the road. You two aren’t either of you makers, are you?”

The blonde looked offended, but Barr added hastily, “Yes, probably this Arkady fellow should be the one to decide. A couple of patrollers really aren’t fit to guess what a maker would want. I know I’m not! That’s why we’re here!” He blinked and smiled winningly at the women. “I thought it was important enough to walk two days for, and in bad boots at that. It seems crazy to stop just half a mile short. If you can’t let Fawn in, and believe me I know how stuffy patrol leaders can be about camp rules, couldn’t one of you go in and ask him to come out here and talk? And then whatever got decided would be off you and on him, where it belongs.” Barr blinked eyes gone liquid as a soulful puppy’s; Dag could have sworn his blond queue grew fluffier even as his smile brightened to near blinding. Remo pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed.

Tavia’s brow wrinkled, but a crooked smile was drawn unwillingly from her in response. “Well…” she said weakly.

“All,” growled Dag, “or none.”

Barr made pleading hand gestures and kept smiling in a way that reminded Dag of Bo’s story about the fellow who grinned a bear out of a tree. Some forms of persuasion, it seemed, had nothing to do with illicit groundwork, because Tavia rubbed her neck and repeated, “Well… I suppose I could walk down quick and ask him, sure. Mind, after that it’ll be up to him.”

“Tavia, you are a jewel among gate guards!” cried Barr.

“Barr, it’s just the sensible thing to do,” said Remo quellingly. He gave Tavia a respectful salute of thanks. She strode off with a saucy glance over her shoulder that seemed equally divided between the two patroller boys. Neeta shook her head.

Silence fell for a time as Neeta retreated to a more firm-chinned patrol stance, and Remo rubbed his chapped hands and stole glances at her. At length Fawn said, “I suppose we could go water the horses at that well while we wait. Take a look around.”

Dag grunted, but didn’t balk when she reined her mare around and led off. Barr followed, grabbing Remo and bringing him along. The farmer trade camp proved to be a large clearing, the shelter three log walls with a fieldstone hearth, snugly roofed, all tidy and in reasonable repair. Remo and Barr drew up several buckets of water and emptied them into a trough, where Copperhead and Magpie gulped enough to make it seem worthwhile.

When they returned to the gate, Tavia was just turning onto the bottom of the road, a tall man striding at her shoulder.

“Blight, Barr,” muttered Remo. “This is the first time I’ve seen your talents have a use.”

“Yeah?” Barr muttered back. “I find them useful. This is just the first time you’ve ever appreciated them.”

As the pair climbed nearer, Dag studied the groundsetter warily.

Arkady Waterbirch wore clean trousers, shirt, and an undyed wool coat to the knees, open in this moderate chill. His hair was blond streaked with gray, pulled back in a neat mourning knot at his nape; in the pale light of this winter noon, it shone silver gilt. His hairline was not thinning yet, but seemed to be thinking about it. As he drew nearer still, Dag eyed his tawny skin, with fine lines at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth, and found himself unable to guess the man’s age; his silvering hair said older, his unweathered skin suggested younger; in any case, he was likely not far off from Dag’s own generation. His hands, too, were smooth, with the cleanest fingernails Dag had ever seen even on a medicine maker. His eyes were bright copper shot with gold. The general effect was a trifle blinding.

What the man’s ground was like Dag could not tell until he opened his own, shuttered most of the time since… since Crane, really. As the maker’s gaze swept him in turn, Dag grew conscious of his own travel-worn appearance. Two days of trudging through the mire and sleeping rough last night had returned him to his patrol look: clothing shabby and sweat-stained-although, thanks to Fawn, neatly mended; cropped hair uncombed; jaw unshaved, because they’d all been eager to leave last night’s damp camp and move along. Most of his old scars were covered by his clothing, but for the first time in a while Dag felt an impulse to hold his maimed left arm behind his back.

The boys were tidy enough, for patrollers; their youth, Dag thought with an inward sigh, could have made rags look good on them, though they did not know it. Fawn, still atop Magpie, was her own fair, small, strong self, brown eyes bright with hope and worry, every scant inch a farmer girl. He was reminded of the day she’d told the formidable Captain Fairbolt Crow to go take a jump in Hickory Lake, during another not-altogether-easy introduction, and almost smiled.

As the maker came to a halt and took in the folks awaiting him, he seemed more and more nonplussed. After a second sweeping look over the party, pausing on Remo, he addressed himself to Dag: “Tavia’s tale seems a trifle confused. But if that’s your boy, there, I can tell you right now he hasn’t the ground to apprentice for a medicine maker. He’s a patroller born. If you’ve come all this way for a different answer than you had at home, I’m sorry for it, because I can’t give it to you.”

Remo looked taken aback. “No, sir,” he said hastily, “that’s not what we’re here for. And Dag’s not my father, he’s my… um. Captain, I guess.”

Captain No-Camp, the ill-fated Crane had dubbed Dag; the name seemed to be sticking, along with a few more unwanted gifts.

The copper-gilt eyes narrowed on Dag’s hook. Arkady said more gently, “Ah. You may have been misled by rumor. On a day with the right wind at my back, I can do some useful things, but I don’t make miracles. I’m afraid there’s not much I can do for your arm. That injury’s far too old.”

Dag unlocked his voice. “I’m not here about my missing hand, sir.”

I’m here about the hand that came back. So bluntly confronted, Dag found it hard to explain his needs. “It’s not Remo who’s interested in training for medicine maker. It’s me.”

Arkady’s eyes flew wide. “Surely not. Maker’s talents, if you have them, should have shown by age twenty. Even a groundsetter’s potential should be starting to show by age forty.”

“I was long gone for patroller by then, and no one much could have stopped me. My maker’s calling was… delayed. But everything changed for me this year, from my name to my ground.” Dag swallowed.

“Anyhow,” Fawn put in, “Dag doesn’t just think he can be a medicine maker, he’s been healing folks, all down the Grace and Gray valleys. He fixed Hod’s busted kneecap where the horse kicked him, and Cress’s infected gut, and Chicory’s busted skull and that other fellow’s cut throat after the fight at the bandit cave, and who knows what all else there, and he healed Bo’s stab to his stomach that we all thought sure was going to kill him. And he made a sharing knife. Before that, he did patrol healing on the trail I guess, but since last summer all this other has come roaring out. I don’t know why now, but talent he has. He needs instruction.

So as not to make bad mistakes from not knowing things, which is a regret I could tell you all about.”

Arkady’s head rocked back. His eyes narrowed at Dag, then fixed on Remo. “Have you seen this?” he demanded.

“Yes, sir,” said Remo. “Well, the kneecap I saw later, after it was part healed, and I wasn’t there for the woman at Pearl Riffle, but all the rest, yes.”

“And more,” said Barr, his lips twisting.

“If so, why wasn’t he invited-snatched up!-by the makers at one of those camps along the river?”

“All the folks he healed were farmers,” said Fawn.

Arkady recoiled; he wheeled on Dag. In a voice of suppressed fury, he said, “You unspeakable fool! You went and left all those poor people mad with beguilement?”

Dag’s lips curled up. “No, sir. Because between Fawn, Remo, Hod, and me, we cracked unbeguilement as well. I could see it was the first thing had to be done, if I meant to be a medicine maker to farmers. Which I did and do.”

All three New Moon folks were staring at Dag openmouthed. And seeing… not much; he still held his ground veiling tight-furled. None could tell if he was concealing lies or truth, only that he was concealing himself.

“You’re raving,” said Arkady abruptly. “And I can’t be dealing with a renegade.”

“I’m no renegade!” said Dag, stung on the raw. Are you so sure, old patroller? He was going to have to unveil, open himself to those coppergold eyes and whatever lay behind them, which he hadn’t wanted to do at this gate. Or at all, he admitted to himself.

“Deserter?” said Neeta suspiciously. She glanced at Fawn, and her voice grew edged with scorn. “Oh, of course. It’s obvious. Banished for farmer loving, back in Oleana.”

“No!” Although the latter had come too close to being true. “I resigned from the patrol in good order. My old camp captain knows where I went and why.” The problem was huge, complex, with snarled strings running down into the most intimate aspects of his ground and up and out into the whole wide green world. Blight, it’s impossible to speak this tangle plain. But Fawn’s eyes were urgent on him. He must not disappoint her appalling trust.

“Renegade, deserter, banished, or just plain mad, it’s clear you’re unfit to be a medicine maker,” said Arkady coldly. “Off with you. Get out of this camp.” He began to veer away. Fawn’s hand went out in pleading; he did not glance at her.

We pretend to save farmers, thought Dag, but in truth we turn our backs…

Opening his ground here, now, felt like tearing off a bandage stuck to a half-healed wound. Dag nearly expected to see blood and pus flying.

For the first time in weeks, he extended his ghost hand in its full power.

And ground-ripped a strip from the back of the maker’s left hand, right down to the matter. Blood burst from it like a cat scratch. Arkady hissed and wheeled back.

Open at last to the man, Dag bent before the density of his ground, a subdued brilliance like the sun behind a cloud. What Arkady would make of the dark mess that was presently Dag, there was no guessing.

The maker’s face worked with ripples of emotion: shock, outrage, chilling anger.

Arkady touched the bleeding scratch with the finger of his other hand; the blood stopped flowing. Some floating part of Dag’s mind marveled: Ah! He can do groundwork on himself!

Dag said, in a dead-level voice, “Open as you were, I could have reached in and done that to the artery from your heart just as easily. At your first heartbeat, it would have burst, and you’d have been dead in the next. And I’m walkin’ around loose out here. If I’m not to turn into a real renegade, a man who just needs killin’, I need some kind of a pathfinder. Because right now I’m almost as lost as I’ve ever been.” Save for after Wolf Ridge, and the death of Kauneo. Nothing would ever be as dark as that again; the realization was oddly consoling.

The two gate guards both had their knives out, tense with alarm, but Arkady waved them back. He was plainly shaken; his lips moved on a-name?-Sutaw. He straightened himself, fastidiously flicked the trailing red drops from his fingers, inhaled, and said coldly, “That was an inexcusably clumsy piece of groundsetting. If you were an apprentice of mine, I’d have your hide for groundwork that ripped into a patient like that.”

All the blood seemed to drain from Dag’s head, so deep was his relief. He’s seen this. He knows what it is. It looks normal to him. It’s a known groundsetting technique. Not malice magic. I’m not turning into a malice…

Dag only realized he’d fallen to his knees when Fawn appeared at his side, her voice anxious. “Dag? Are you all right? Are you laughing, or crying? ” She pulled his hand away from his face. His shoulders shook.

“I’m not sure, Spark,” he groaned. “Both, I think.” Only now, when it was so abruptly removed, did he realize just how much that secret terror had been riding him, sapping his strength. Had he been a fool?

Maybe not.

Arkady rubbed his chiseled chin. And, at length, sighed. “You all had better come down to my place. I don’t think I can deal with this in the middle of the road.”

“All of them, sir? ” said Neeta, with a dubious look at Fawn.

“They seem to come as a set. Yes, all. Tavia, tell the women I’ll be having four guests for lunch today.” He walked over and extended his right hand to Dag.

Indeed, I need a hand.

Dag took it, hauling himself upright again.