Horizon

4

A half-mile walk, leading the horses, brought them all to Arkady’s place, and Fawn stared in astonishment. After her experience at Hickory Lake Camp she’d thought she knew what Lakewalker tents were like: crude, deliberately temporary log cabins, usually with an open side protected by hide awnings, clustered in kin groups around a dock space or central fire pit. The dwellings she’d glimpsed at Pearl Riffle had been similar. This… this was a house.

Two huge trees laden with dark green leaves like drooping tongues- but not a blossom in sight at this season-bracketed a stone-paved walk.

Atop a foundation cut into the slope and lined with fitted stones, several rooms rambled, built of silvery-gray weathered cedar planks, roofed with split-wood shingles, and connected by a long porch. The windows gleamed with real glass. Barr and Remo, Fawn was consoled to note, also stared openmouthed; by camp standards, it was practically a palace.

Dag seemed less surprised, but then, Fawn wasn’t exactly sure if he was paying attention. After his brief, scary breakdown at the gate, he’d recovered himself and was looking awfully closed. Again.

They tied the horses to the porch rail and followed Arkady into what appeared to be a main room, pausing to wipe their feet after him twice, once on a mat outside and again on a rag rug just inside the door. The far wall had a whole row of glass windows and a door onto an unroofed porch overlooking the lake. A large hearth to the right was fitted up for cooking, which Fawn suspected might include cooking up medicines. By the hearth stood a sturdy table, waist height for working, but near the windows was a lower, round one that seemed just for eating. It boasted real lathe-made chairs, with stuffed cloth cushions tied on. At Hickory Lake, folks had mostly made do with trestle tables and upended logs.

“You can wash your hands at the sink,” Arkady directed, and busied himself with his water kettle and a teapot, of all things. Fawn guessed that he was buying time to think about what to do next; he’d said almost nothing on the walk from the gate, beyond laconically pointing out patrol headquarters and the medicine tent, bracketing the entry road.

Those, too, had been plank-built and houselike.

Beneath a lakeside window, the tin-lined sink had a water barrel with a wooden tap to its right, a drain board to the left. Fawn filled the washbasin and took her turn with a cake of fine white soap, watching while Dag did his one-handed trick with the soap and water after her. Arkady, she noticed, paused to covertly watch that, too. The patroller boys followed suit; the very dirty water was dumped down a drain, where it gurgled through a wooden pipe leading outside. It was all as handy as a well-furbished farm kitchen, and as hard to shift. Fawn fancied she could almost hear Dag thinking, Sessile! and not in a tone of approval.

They sat five around the table and watched while Arkady poured out tea into fired clay mugs, and offered a pitcher of honey. Fawn sipped the sweet brew gratefully, wondering who was supposed to start, and if it would be up to her. To her relief, Arkady began.

“So-ex-patroller-how have you come to me? New Moon Cutoff seems a long way from Oleana.” He took a swallow and settled back, watching Dag narrowly.

It was a-deliberately?-broadly worded question. Dag looked somewhat desperately at Fawn. “Where to begin, Spark? ” he asked.

She bit her lip. “The beginning? Which would be Glassforge, I guess.”

“That far back? All of it? You sure? ”

“If we don’t explain how your knife got primed at Glassforge, you won’t be able to explain what you did with it at Bonemarsh, and Hoharie herself said she thought that was magery.”

Arkady’s eyes widened slightly at the word. “Who is Hoharie? ”

“Hickory Lake’s chief medicine maker,” Dag explained.

“Ah.” Arkady went still, taking this in. “Do go on.”

“How about if I start? ” said Fawn. Their tale had to convince the groundsetter to take Dag seriously, despite Dag’s running off to mix with farmers. Because if they could be let into the camp on this man’s bare word, they could surely be thrown out the same way. Plain and true.

Nothing else would do. Just as well; Fawn didn’t think she could tell fancy lies to that penetrating coppery stare.

“It was coming on strawberry season last summer in Oleana, and I was going to Glassforge to look for work on account of-” She took a breath for courage. The intimate parts of this tale would be new to Barr and Remo, too; it was almost harder to speak it in front of them than this shiny stranger. “On account of as I’d got pregnant with a farm boy who didn’t care to marry me, and I didn’t care to stay around and deal with what my life would be at home once it came out. So, the road. Dag’s patrol was called down there to help search for a malice that was running a bandit gang in the hills. A couple of the bandits-a mud-man and a beguiled fellow-snatched me off the road because I was pregnant, it seems.”

Remo’s eyes widened, and Barr blinked, but both kept their mouths shut tight. Arkady’s hand touched his lips. “So it’s true that malices need pregnant women for their molts? ”

“Yes,” said Dag. “Though they’ll also use pregnant animals if they can’t get humans. It’s not actually the women they crave, it’s the fastgrowing ground of the youngsters they bear, and the, the template of bearing. To teach them how, see. I arrived… almost in time. There was this cave. The malice ripped the ground from Fawn’s child about the time I hit its mud-man guards. I was carrying a pouch with two sharing knives in it, one primed and one bonded to me. I tossed the pouch to Fawn, who was closer, and she put both knives in the malice, one after the other.”

“Wrong one first,” confessed Fawn. “The unprimed one. I didn’t know.”

“You couldn’t have,” Dag assured her. He stared rather fiercely at Arkady, who in fact showed no signs of wanting to criticize this.

“It had me by the neck at the time, which is where these came from,” Fawn went on, touching the deep red dents marring the sides of her throat, four on one side and one on the other.

“So that’s what those are!” said Arkady, startled into leaning forward and peering. He drew his hand back before actually touching her. “I didn’t think to find blight scars on a farmer. Those are the freshest I’ve ever seen. That sort of ground injury doesn’t often come our way down here.”

Barr leaned back, his brow wrinkling; belatedly figuring out just how close to a malice Fawn had come, she thought. If I have malice fingerprints on me, the malice couldn’t have been more than an arm’s length off, you know.

“Count yourselves lucky,” said Dag dryly. With this start, he seemed willing to take up the tale. “In any case, my bonded knife ended up primed with the ground of Fawn’s child. Hickory Lake’s chief knife maker and I each have different ideas as to why, but they don’t matter now. Anyway, on the way to take the knife to my camp and see about the puzzle, we stopped at West Blue-Fawn’s kinfolk have a farm just up that river valley-I thought they’d want to know she was still alive. We were married there. Twice over, once by farmer customs and once by ours. Here. Roll up your sleeve, Spark.”

He shrugged awkwardly out of his jacket and rolled up his own left sleeve, revealing the arm harness that held his wrist cap in place, and above it, his wedding cord that Fawn had braided. He normally kept his sleeve rolled down in front of strangers, but Fawn supposed this maker, like a farmer midwife, had to see what was going on in order to do his work, so you just had to get past the shyness. Almost as reluctantly, Fawn pushed up her left cuff to reveal her cord that Dag had braided.

Dag hitched his shoulder forward. “Does your groundsense say these are valid cords? ” he asked. Growled, more like.

“Yes,” said Arkady cautiously. Fawn sighed with relief.

“Thank you for your honesty, sir.” Dag sat back with a satisfied nod.

“We had some blighted stupid argumentation about that at Hickory Lake, later.”

Arkady cleared his throat. “Your tent-kin did not welcome your new bride, I take it? ” Your very young bride, Fawn fancied his glance at her added, but he had the prudence not to say it aloud.

“Your aunt Mari and uncle Cattagus were pretty nice to me, I thought,” said Fawn, in what defense she could muster of Dag’s home.

“Wait, Dag, you left out the glass bowl. That has to be important. It was the first time your ghost hand came out.” She turned to Arkady. “That’s what Dag called it at first, because it spooked him something awful, but Hoharie said it was a ground projection. You’d better tell that part, Dag, because to me it just looked like magic.”

“There was this glass bowl.” Dag waved his hand. “Back at West Blue, just before we were wed. It meant a lot to Fawn-she’d brought it back from Glassforge as a gift for her mama. My tent-mother, now. It fell and broke.”

“Three big pieces and about a hundred shards,” Fawn added in support. “All over the parlor floor.” She was grateful that he left out the surrounding family uproar. Angry as she sometimes was with her kin, she would not have wanted to see them held up as fools before this Arkady.

“I…” Dag made a gesture with his hook. “This came out, and I sort of swirled the glass all back together through its ground. I’d seen bowls like it being made back in Glassforge, you see. Its ground had a hum to it…” His lips shaped, but did not blow, a note.

Arkady, Barr, and Remo were all staring at his hook-no, not the hook, Fawn realized. At the invisible, elusive ground projection that took the place of his lost left hand. Which she would never see, but could sometimes-she suppressed a smile-feel. Dag eased back, as did the other three Lakewalkers, and she guessed he’d let the projection go in again.

“First I heard about that bowl,” muttered Barr to Remo. “Ye gods. Did you know about it?” Remo shook his head and motioned his partner to shush.

“Before things came to the point at Hickory Lake,” Dag went on, “there was that big malice outbreak over in Raintree. Did you hear much about it, way down here? ”

“A little,” said Arkady. “I confess, the patrollers here follow the news from the north more closely than I do. There always seems to be some excitement going on, up your way.”

“Raintree malice was more than that. It promised to be every bit as bad as the Wolf War in Luthlia twenty years back. Worse, because it was fixing to tear across thickly settled farmer country. Malice food on a platter.”

Arkady shrugged. “But you were from Oleana-you said? ”

Dag’s lips thinned. Fawn put in quickly, “Raintree sent out riders for help. Hickory Lake’s sort of next door, being in the far northwest of the hinterland. Fairbolt Crow-camp captain at Hickory Lake-chose Dag to be company captain of the force they sent out. Explain about groundripping the malice, Dag.”

Dag drew breath and twisted his left arm, turning his hook. Ghost hand displayed again, or just referred to? “That thing I did to you at the gate, sir. For which I apologize, but I had to… anyway. What did you make it out to be? ”

Arkady, reminded, touched the back of his hand, now scabbed, and frowned at Dag. “A projection for groundsetting, applied too powerfully and damaging the overlying tissue. Deliberately, I take it. Although there are occasions when such tearing is a valuable tool-used rather more precisely, I must say.”

“Used vastly more powerfully and not at all precisely, it’s the same as the ground-ripping a malice does,” said Dag.

Arkady’s brows flew up. “Surely not.” His eyes flicked toward Fawn’s throat.

“Surely is,” said Dag. “I’ve seen it coming and going, and there’s no mistake-I can show you the old malice scars on my legs, later. Like that glass bowl, the first time I did it I was pretty upset-we had closed on the malice, and it was trying to ground-rip one of my patrollers. I just reached out…” Dag drew breath. “Free advice, boys, bought at the usual cost. Don’t ever try to ground-rip a malice. Its ground sticks to yours, and is deadly poisonous. That’s how I got these scars…” He gestured to his left side generally. He wasn’t pointing to his body, Fawn realized, but to its ground.

“Oh,” said Arkady, in an odd voice. “I couldn’t imagine what had caused those dark ripples.”

Dag hesitated. “You’ve never seen a malice, have you, sir? ”

Arkady shook his head.

“Ever patrolled at all? ”

“When I was a boy, they had me out a few times with the others my age. But I showed for a maker very young.”

“Ah, the camping trips with the kiddies,” muttered Barr. “I hate those.” The riveted Remo poked him to silence.

“So you’ve never seen a live mud-man,” sighed Dag.

“Ah… no.” Arkady added after a moment, “The medicine maker who trained me at Moss River Camp had a dead one that he kept on display. Dried, though, which made it hard to make out any distinguishing details. It fell apart after a short while. Pity, I thought.”

“And you’ve never seen a mud-man nursery, either. That’s going to make what came next hard to explain.”

Arkady paused for a long moment with a peculiar look on his face, swallowed some first response, and said instead, “Try.”

“All right. We found all this out bit by bit, mind. The malice, before we did for it, had taken a place called Bonemarsh Camp. Most of the Lakewalkers got away”-Dag’s swift glance around Arkady’s house whispered sessile again to Fawn-“but it captured half a dozen makers. It ground-locked them together-”

Arkady gave a little flinching hiss.

“Oh, there’s worse to come. It anchored this huge, complicated involution in their grounds to slave them to make up a batch of about fifty mud-men, which the malice had growing from local animals. A half-formed mud-man is about the most gut-wrenching thing you’ve ever seen, by the way. You want to kill it quick just for the pity of it. When my company got back to Bonemarsh, we found the groundlock still holding, the makers seeming unconscious. I’d thought the lock would break when the malice died, y’see, but I was wrong. Worse, when anyone opened their grounds to try to reach in and break the lock, they were sucked into the array as well. Lost three patrollers finding that out.”

“That’s… astonishing,” said Arkady. Fawn’s first fear, that Arkady would toss them out before they got their tale half told, eased. Beneath his quelling reserve, she thought he was growing quite engrossed. He likes the parts about groundwork.

Dag nodded shortly. “This was a very advanced malice, the most fully developed I’ve ever seen.”

“And ah… how many have you seen? ”

Dag shrugged. “I lost count years back. That I’ve slain with a knife in my own hand, twenty-six or so. That’s counting the sessiles, which I do. Anyway, back at Bonemarsh-I stupidly tried to match grounds to steady the heartbeat of a dying maker in the array. And I got sucked in, too. Which is how I found out about the involution-I saw it from the inside. And after that the story has to go to Fawn, because the next few days were all a gray fog for me.”

Fawn decided on a simplified version. “I came to Bonemarsh with Hoharie, because Dag had sent back for her help with this horrible groundlock thing. None of the Lakewalkers seemed to know what to do about it, which made me about half crazy, watching and waiting. Then Hoharie tried some experiment-I never did find out what, though I think she suspected about the involution.”

“She did.” Dag nodded.

“Anyhow, then she was drawn in, and Mari, who was in charge by then, said, no more experiments. But that night, I thought of one more. If an involution is a cut-off piece of a maker or a malice, which it seems to be, maybe this leftover piece of malice just needed a separate dose of mortality in order to destroy it. So I took my sharing knife”-she gulped in memory-“and stuck it in Dag’s leg. Because when I slew the malice back in Glassforge, he’d said I could stick it in anywhere.”

Dag smiled, and murmured, “Sharp end first.” Fawn smiled back.

“I think it worked to give it into Dag’s ghost hand, the way his arm jerked up, but he’ll have to tell that part,” Fawn concluded.

Dag frowned and scratched his head. “Strangest experience I ever did have. We all know what it feels like to have a body and no ground, from being youngsters before our groundsense comes in, or in veiling. While I was slaved in the malice’s groundlock, it seemed like I was my ground-but not my body. I felt the knife come into me, and I knew it at once-it had been bonded to me, and still had affinity with my blood. But Fawn’s child’s ground lacked affinity with the malice-very strange and pure, it was-so there was no resonance, no, no… calling, to break open the knife’s involution and release the dying ground.

So I broke open the involution myself, and added some affinity from my ghost hand. It was like unmaking a knife, all backward. It tore up my ghost hand something fierce, but it destroyed the malice’s groundwork, and cleaned out those poison spatters as well. Fawn’s sacrifice-well, with that little extra groundwork from me-got all ten of us out of the lock alive.” He blinked at Arkady, who was staring with his hand before his parted lips as if to stifle an exclamation, and added apologetically, “It wasn’t like I saw it, and figured it out, and did it. It was more like I saw it, and did it, and figured it all out much later.”

Remo said, in downright peeved tones, “You never told me about all that, Dag! You only told me about Greenspring!”

“Greenspring was the important part, seemed to me.”

Fawn shivered in memory; Dag, grimacing, reached across the table to briefly grip her shoulder as he might console a young patroller.

Arkady took his hand from his mouth and said, “So what was Greenspring?”

Dag sighed. “When I’d recovered enough to ride, we all went home by way of the blighted farmer village that malice had emerged under. When we arrived, we found some folks had come back and were having a mass burial of those who hadn’t got out. Which was about half, of a thousand people. That first feast was the secret of how that malice had grown so quick, so strong.”

He shared a look of understanding with Fawn, who picked up the thread: “They’d finished planting the grown-ups, mostly women and old folks, and were just starting on the children.” She took a breath, measured Arkady, and dared to say, “I’m told New Moon Camp lost a youngster a couple of months back. There were-how many children, in the row in front of that trench, Dag?” Laid out all stiff and wan, there had seemed no end to them.

“One hundred sixty-two,” Dag said flatly.

“The ground-ripping had kept them from rotting in the heat,” explained Fawn, and swallowed hard. Pale ice-children. “It didn’t help as much as you’d think.”

Arkady shut his ground just then, Fawn thought; he went something more than expressionless, at any rate.

“It took me some thinking, after,” said Dag. “How Greenspring was let to happen, and what could keep it from happening again. It’s an Oleana problem; in the south there’s nearly no malices, and in the far north there’s nearly no farmers. Where there’s both…” He held up hand and hook, but was frustrated in a gesture of interlacing fingers;

Fawn thought everyone could imagine it, though. “It was plain something needed done, and it was plainer no one was doing it. And that we were running out of time to wait for someone smarter than me to try to figure out what. That’s why I broke with my kin and camp and quit the patrol. They thought it was over Fawn, and it was, but it was Fawn led me to Greenspring. Roundaboutly.” Dag gave a sharp nod, and fell silent.

“I… see,” said Arkady slowly.

He glanced toward his front door; annoyance flashed across his face, but then shifted to a shrewder look. He rose and was halfway to it when a knock sounded. Sticking his head out, Arkady exchanged murmurs with his caller; Fawn caught a glimpse of a middle-aged woman, who craned her neck in turn, but did not enter. Arkady turned back holding a large basket covered with a cloth, which he thumped down upon the table. “Some lunch all around would be as well just now, I think.”

Fawn, Remo, and Barr all jumped up to help Arkady set out tools and plates; Dag sat more wearily, and let them. The break from the tension was welcomed by everyone, Fawn suspected, even Arkady. The basket yielded a big lidded clay pot full of a thick stew, two kinds of bread wrapped in cloths, and, almost to Fawn’s greater astonishment than this farmer-style fare, what were identifiably a couple of plunkins, spheres half the size of her head with brown husks. Cut open, they revealed a solid fruit both redder in color and sweeter than the plunkin she’d encountered at Hickory Lake.

“Why don’t you have this kind up north, Dag? ” she asked around a mouthful.

“Longer growing season, I think,” he answered, also around a mouthful. Judging from the munching, all the northern Lakewalkers at the table plainly thought it was a treat. Arkady explained that these were grown in the shallow ends of the crescent lake.

Arkady did not pursue his interrogation while they ate-thinking, or did he just have medical notions about guarding digestion? Nor did Dag volunteer anything further. The boys, Fawn thought, wouldn’t have dared to say boo. But Arkady wouldn’t be feeding us this good if he wasn’t at least thinking of keeping us, would he? Or maybe he just reckoned wild patrollers, like wild animals, could be tamed with vittles.

Finally growing replete, Fawn thought to ask Arkady, “Where did all this food come from? Who should we thank? ”

He looked a trifle surprised at the question. “My neighboring tents take it in turns to send over my lunches and suppers. Breakfasts I do for myself. Tea, usually.”

“Are you sick? ” she asked diffidently.

His brows went up. “No.”

He busied himself making another pot of tea while Fawn and Remo repacked the basket and set it outside the front door at Arkady’s direction.

He washed his hands again, sat, poured, frowned at Dag. Dag frowned back.

“Your wife,” said Arkady delicately, “does not appear to be beguiled.”

“She never has been,” Dag said.

“Have you not done any groundwork on her? ”

“Quite a bit, time to time,” said Dag, “but she never grew beguiled with me. That was half the key to unlocking unbeguilement. Hod was the other half.”

A sweep of Arkady’s clean hand invited Dag to continue. Maybe this subject would be less fraught than Greenspring?

“You know beguilement can be erratic,” said Dag.

“Painfully aware.” Arkady grimaced. “Like most young and foolish medicine makers, I once tried to heal farmers. The results were disastrous. Lesson learned.”

Fawn wanted to hear more of this, but Arkady waved Dag on again.

Dag sighed, as if steeling himself for this next confession. “Hod was a teamster’s helper out of Glassforge-we hitched a ride with his wagon down to Pearl Riffle. My horse kicked him in the knee, which made me feel sort of responsible. I remembered what I’d done with that glass bowl, and set myself to try a real healing. Which I did do-pulled his broken kneecap back together good. But it left him beguiled to the eyebrows, which we found out when he made to follow us on our flatboat. And Fawn said, Take him along and maybe you can figure out why, but if you leave him you never will. And she was right. Come to it, me, Fawn, Hod, and Remo all sat in a circle and traded around little ground reinforcements till we figured it out. I don’t think anyone who didn’t have both a beguiled and an unbeguiled farmer to compare at the same time could have seen it.”

Remo said, “Even I could see it, once Dag showed me. I can’t quite do the unbeguiling trick yet, though.”

Arkady’s glance went in surprise to Remo. “And what did you see? ” he asked.

“Don’t tell him, Dag,” said Fawn. “Show him.” She felt uncomfortable volunteering to be the Demonstration Farmer, but from his expression she suspected Arkady had some pretty stiff-set ideas on the subject that mere assertion would not shift.

“Elbows again? ” said Remo.

“That’d do,” agreed Dag. “Watch close, Arkady, as the ground transfers.”

Remo reached across the table and touched Fawn’s left elbow; she felt the spreading warmth of a tiny ground reinforcement. She tried to decide if it also made her feel any friendlier toward the boy, or made him look finer to her eyes; since she already liked him well, it was hard to tell.

Arkady looked across at Dag in some puzzlement. “So? ”

“Now watch again. Watch for a little backflow of ground from Fawn to me, almost as it flows from me to her. It’s like it flows back through the reinforcement.”

Dag smiled and reached his left arm toward her right elbow. As before, she saw nothing; but Arkady swore-the first she’d heard him do so, she realized.

“Absent gods. That explains it!”

“Yes. You just saw an unbeguilement. The farmer ground tries to rebalance itself through a ground exchange, the way it happens when two Lakewalkers trade ground, but if the Lakewalker is closed-rejects it-it bounces back and sets up this odd, um… imbalance in the farmer ground, which the farmer experiences as longing for another reinforcement. Obsession, if the imbalance is bad enough.”

“No, yes…” Arkady reached up and almost mussed his carefully tied hair. “Yes, I see, but not that alone. Is this why your ground is such a ghastly mess? How many of these have you been doing?” His voice wasn’t quite a shriek. Fawn stared at him with disappointment. She felt Dag’s discovery should be due much more applause.

“I unbeguiled every farmer I did healing groundwork on, of course. Once I’d figured it out, that is,” Dag added a bit guiltily. Fawn wondered how Cress was getting along.

“And then there were the oats,” Fawn put in. “And the pie. And the mosquito, don’t forget that, that started it all. Your poor arm swelled up so bad you couldn’t get your arm harness on after you ground-ripped that mosquito, remember? ”

“You took in ground from all those things? ” said Arkady in horror.

“It’s a miracle you’re still alive! Absent gods, man, you could have killed yourself!”

“Aha!” said Fawn in triumph. “I told you ripping that thorny tree would be a bad idea, Dag!”

Dag smiled wearily. “I sort of figured that out for myself, sir. Well… Fawn and I did. After a bit.”

“A properly supervised apprentice,” said Arkady, somewhat through his teeth, “would never have been permitted to contaminate himself with such dreadful experiments!”

“Groundsetter’s apprentice, you mean? ”

“Of course,” said Arkady impatiently. “No one else would be capable of the idiocy.”

Dag scratched his stubbled chin, and said mildly, “Then he wouldn’t ever have been able to discover unbeguilement. Would he. Might be a good thing I started out unsupervised.”

“Is it still? ” asked Arkady.

Dag lost his glint of humor. “No,” he admitted. “Because then came Crane.”

Arkady, leaning forward to vent something irate, sat back more slowly. In a suddenly neutral voice, he said, “Tell me about Crane.”

“The boys were there for that one,” Dag said, with a tired nod at Barr and Remo.

Remo said, “Crane was a real Lakewalker renegade. Nastiest piece of work I ever did see. Which is why, sir, you shouldn’t ought to call Dag one.” Awed till now by the groundsetter, quiet Remo flashed genuine anger with this; Arkady’s head went back a fraction.

Barr put in, “Crane was an Oleana man, banished from a camp up there for theft and, um, keeping a farmer woman. He’d set himself up as leader to this bandit gang on the lower Grace River, taking and burning boats and murdering their crews-horrible stuff. If it wasn’t for us Lakewalkers being aboard, our flatboat would have been tricked like the others, I think.”

Remo went on, “Dag set us to gathering all the other boats and men that came down the river that day to make an attack on the camp and clean it out. Which we did. Dag, um, captured Crane himself. Barr and I were up the hill dealing with another bandit just then, so I didn’t exactly witness…” He trailed off with a beseeching look at Dag.

Dag said, in an expressionless voice, “I dropped him by ground-ripping a slice out of his spinal cord, just below the neck. Once saw a man fall from a horse and break his neck about there, so I had a pretty good guess what it would do.”

“That… seems extreme,” said Arkady, in a nearly matching voice.

He regarded Dag steadily.

“He was holding a knife to my throat at the time,” Fawn put in, nervous lest Arkady go picturing Dag as some cold-blooded killer, “and his men were about to get away with our boat. I don’t think Dag had much choice.”

“If I had it to do over,” said Dag, “… well, if I had it all to do over, I’d leave more men to guard the boats, regardless of how shorthanded it made us at the cave. But if it were all the same again, I’d do it again. I don’t regret it. But it left me stuck with this last mess in my ground…”

A general gesture at his torso.

Arkady frowned judiciously. “I see.”

“Aren’t you going to tell about the sharing knife? ” said Remo anxiously.

“Oh.” Dag shrugged. “We found an unprimed sharing knife in the bandits’ spoils, that they’d apparently taken off a murdered Lakewalker woman. Crane was due to be hanged with the rest, so I gave him the choice of sharing, instead. Which he chose. Surprised me, a little. I boiled the old bonding off the knife and reset the involution, and bonded it to Crane. And used it to execute him, which was dodgy, but everything else about the man was dodgy, so I figured it fit. First knife I ever made. I’d like to have your camp’s knife maker look it over for soundness, if I get a chance, though I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as a half-made knife. It either primes or it doesn’t.”

“And,” said Arkady, “you thought you could do this… why? ”

Dag shrugged once more. “My brother is a knife maker at Hickory Lake, so I’ve been around the process off and on. But mostly I learned how from taking apart the groundwork of my knife at Bonemarsh.”

“And, ah…” Arkady said, “the other kind of why? ”

What gave Dag the right, does he mean? Fawn wondered.

Dag regarded him steadily back. “I needed a knife. I hate walking bare.”

A little silence fell, all around the table.

“You know, Dag,” said Fawn slowly, “we’ve spent since last spring being knocked from pillar to post so bad it’s a wonder we’ve had time to breathe. But when you lay it all out in a row like this… don’t you see a kind of pattern to things? ”

“No,” said Dag.

She looked up at Arkady. “Do you, sir? ”

She thought his face said yes, but he pushed back his chair instead of answering. He said, “You folks look as though you all slept in a ditch last night.”

“Pretty near,” Fawn admitted. Infested with scary swamp lizards, at that.

“I’d think you’d all enjoy a hot bath, then,” said Arkady.

This won blank looks from all three patrollers. Fawn, appalled by a vision of heating pots and pots of water on the hearth, said hastily, “Oh, we couldn’t put you to so much trouble, sir!”

“It’s no trouble. I’ll show you.”

A little… smugly? Arkady led them outside and down some stairs from the lakeside porch to an area of flagged pavement. At the far side was a remarkable setup: a shower bucket with a pull rope on a post, made private by a cloth-hung screen, and a big barrel, its bottom lined with copper, over a fire pit. Coals still glowed underneath.

“You can take the path down to the lake to get more water, all you want”-Arkady pointed to a pair of buckets on a yoke-“and heat it in the barrel. More wood’s in the stack behind those forsythia bushes. Put the hot water in the shower bucket, soap up and rinse down, soak in the barrel after. Take your time. I need to go talk with some folks, but I’ll be back in a while.” He paused and studied Dag. “Er… do you shave? ”

“Now and then,” said Dag dryly.

“Now, then.”

Arkady went back in, popped out a few moments later with a stack of towels and a new cake of soap, and disappeared again, this time for good. Fawn stared after him, bewildered by this turn, though not ungrateful.

“Do we stink that bad? ” asked Remo, sniffing his shirt. Barr was too busy delightedly examining the mechanism of the shower to answer.

“We aren’t too pretty, compared to Arkady,” Fawn allowed.

“And this keeps us occupied here for as long as he wants to talk to… folks. How many folks, I wonder? ” said Dag, sounding less impressed.

Oh. Of course. Fawn’s gratitude faded in new worry. How many people in the camp had more authority than this groundsetter, that he needed to consult them? It answered Dag’s question, if in an unsettling fashion: not many.

But Dag assisted Fawn to take the first turn, and then took one himself with apparent enjoyment. She thought Barr very gallant to volunteer for the last turn, till he refused to come out again. Granted, soaking in the barrel, which steamed in the chill air, was blissful. He was still pickling in there when Arkady returned, to find the rest of them dressed and clustered around the hearth drying their hair. Dag’s system was to run a towel over his head once, but Remo fussed more over his than Fawn did over hers.

Arkady put his hands on his hips and looked Dag over. “Better,” he allowed. “I can’t have you following me around the camp looking like some starveling vagabond, after all.”

“Am I to do so? ” asked Dag warily. “Why? ”

“It’s how apprenticing is done, normally.”

Fawn almost whooped with joy, but Dag merely rubbed his newshaved chin. “I take your offer kindly, sir, but I’m not sure how long we can stay. My work is up north, not down here.” He glanced at Fawn.

Arkady answered the question beneath the question. “You can all stay here at my place for the moment. Including your farmer bride, though it’s asked that she not wander around the camp unescorted.”

Fawn nodded glad acceptance of the rule, though Dag frowned a trifle, which made Fawn wonder belatedly, Asked by who?

“You’ll just be watching and listening at first, you understand,” said Arkady, “at least till I can figure out some way to cleanse your dirty ground. If I can.”

Dag flicked an eyebrow upward. “I’m good at listenin’. So am I to be your apprentice-or your patient? ”

“A bit of both,” Arkady admitted. “You asked-no, she asked,” he corrected under his breath, “if I saw a pattern in your tale. I did. I saw a man coming late and abruptly into groundsetter powers, totally unsupervised, making the wildest mess of himself.”

“You know, sir, you don’t sound too approving, but my two top notions were that I was going mad, or that I was turning into a malice. I like your version better.”

Arkady snorted. “Normally, the development you’ve experienced would have unfolded over five or six years, not five or six months. Naturally you found it confusing. And-how old are you? Mid-fifties? ”

Dag nodded.

“Well, your talent’s around fifteen years late showing, to boot. I don’t know what you were doing all that time-”

“Patrolling,” said Dag briefly.

“Or why it’s all released now,” Arkady continued.

Dag smiled across at Fawn.

“Do you think your farmer girl has something to do with it? ” demanded Arkady. “I admit, I don’t see how.”

Dag’s smile deepened. “My tent-brother Whit, who I grant has a mouth on him that’s going to get his teeth busted one of these days, once said he didn’t know if I was robbin’ cradles or if Fawn was robbin’ graves. I think it was the second. I’d pretty much lain down in mine just waiting for someone to come along and throw the dirt in on top. Instead, she came along and yanked me out of it. I will say, sir, it was a lot more restful than what I’ve been doing since, but it was pinching narrow. I don’t hanker to go back in.”

Fawn’s heart lifted.

Arkady just shook his head. He turned toward the door, took two steps, then turned back. “Oh, Dag?” He held up both his hands.

Fawn saw it only by reflection, but well enough at that; Barr and Remo looked startled and impressed and Dag-Dag’s face lit right up.

Arkady has ghost hands, too!

“We’ll have to see what we can do about your little asymmetry problem, later,” said Arkady. “Among other things.” He jerked his chin at Remo. “Come along, patroller boy. I’ll show you where to take your horses.”