Legacy

11

A nother night attack—without the aid of groundsense this time. Gods, I’m as blind in the dark as any farmer. Dag had feared the flare of their grounds would alert the malice’s outlying pickets to his patrol, but blundering bodily into sentries in the murk now seemed as likely a risk. A misshapen moon was well up. When they cleared these trees, he might get a better look at what lay ahead. He glanced right and left at the shadows that were his flankers, Mari and Dirla, and Codo and Hann, and was reassured; if his dark-adapted eyes could scarcely make them out, neither could an enemy’s.

He dared another deerlike step forward, and another, trying not to think, Blight it, we’ve done this once today already. His patrol had come up on signs of the malice’s massed forces soon after midnight, and again left their horses in favor of this stealthy approach. Through terrain for which, unlike Bonemarsh, they had no maps or plan or prior knowledge. If his own exhaustion was a measure of everyone else’s, Dag distrusted his decision to strike at once, without allowing a breather; but it was impossible to rest here, and every delay risked discovery. They had come into a level country, with little farms carved out of the woods becoming more and more common, not unlike the region above West Blue. Little abandoned farms. Dag hoped all the people hereabouts had been warned by the refugees from Bonemarsh and fled to Farmer’s Flats.

The open fields allowed a glimpse ahead but equally denied cover. As they reached the scrubby edge of what had been a broad stand of wheat, now flattened and dying, Dirla stole over to him. “See that?” she breathed, pointing.

“Aye.”

On the field’s other side, wooded land rose—as much as any land rose in these parts—angling up to a low ridge. The red glimmer of a few bobbing torches shone through the trees, then vanished again. Silvered by the sickly moon, a narrow triangular structure crowned the crest. A crude timber tower perhaps twenty feet high, built of logs hastily felled and notched to lock across one another, was briefly silhouetted against a distant milky cloud. Whatever shapes crouched on the plank platform at its top were too far away for Dag to make out with his eyes; but despite his tight closure, the threat of the malice beat in his belly with his every pulse.

“Lookout post?” Dirla whispered.

Dag shook his head. “Worse.” Absent gods help us. This malice was advanced enough to start building towers. Even the Wolf Ridge malice had not developed enough for that compulsion. “Can you see how many on the platform…?” Dirla’s younger eyes might be sharper than his own.

“Just one, I think.”

“It’s up there, then. That’s where we’re headed. Pass the word.”

She nodded and silently withdrew.

Now they had to get next to that tower without being spotted. So near—across a trampled field and up a wooded hillside—so far. Dag guessed that the bulk of the malice’s mud-men and mind-slaves were camped on the ridge’s far side, probably along a stream. Smoke from hidden campfires rose in thin gray wisps into a high haze, confirming his speculation. There was almost no wind, and he regretted the absence of covering rustles from the branches overhead, but what faint breeze there was moved the haze toward him. He hardly needed his eyes now; he could smell the enemy: smoke, manure, piss, the cooking of he-dared-not-guess-what meats.

Dag pushed through clutching blackberry brambles, setting his teeth against the gouge and scrape of sturdy thorns, and crouched by a fieldstone wall lining the high side of the wheatfield. He half crawled forward along its shadowed western side until he reached brambles again, then risked a look back. The moon emerged from a cloud, but the tight shapes of the patrollers following him did not once edge into the thin light. Good, you folks are so good. Half the distance down. He slid through more dying brambles into the black shade of the woods at the base of the ridge, the patrol too spreading out to ease from shadow to shadow.

To his horror, a muffled grunt and some thumps sounded from his left. He made his way hastily toward the sound. Codo and Hann were crouching over something half-concealed in a crackling deadfall. Hann had drawn his war knife, but glanced up and froze when Dag’s hand fell on his arm.

Codo squatted across the chest of a grizzled man—farmer-slave, guard? — both his hands tight around the struggling fellow’s throat. “Hann, hurry!” Codo hissed.

Dag touched Codo’s shoulder, eased in, and studied their threat-and-victim. Farmer-slave, yes, clothes ragged, eyes wild and mad. Maybe from this farm, or else picked up along the way to add to the malice’s straggling, growing army. He wasn’t a big man, or young; he reminded Dag uncomfortably of Sorrel Bluefield. Dag took aim and landed several hard blows to the man’s head, until his eyes rolled back and he stopped bucking. The meaty thumps sounded as loud as drumbeats in Dag’s ears.

“Blight it, throat slitting’s quieter,” muttered Codo, cautiously rising. “Surer.”

Dag shook his head and pointed uphill. This was no place for an argument, and the pair did not give him one, but turned to continue the silent climb. Dag could roll the issues over in his head without need of words—Hann’s glare, burning through the dark, was enough to make the point. A throat-slit guard couldn’t claw his way back to consciousness in a few minutes and raise the alarm.

I hate fighting humans. Of all the vileness in this long struggle, the malices’ mind-theft of people who should be the Lakewalkers’ friends and allies was the worst. Even when the patrollers won, they lost, in clashes that left farmer corpses in their wake. We all lose. Dag shook out his throbbing hand. That might have been Sorrel. Somebody’s husband, father, father-in-law, friend.

I hate fighting. Oh, Fawn, I’m so tired of this.

The farmer’s mad eyes were sign enough of his enslaved state, with no need for Dag’s groundsense to trace the malice’s grip in his mind. Even though they hadn’t slit his throat, his brief alarm could have given little warning, surely? Indeed, Dag decided, the malice would be more likely to notice the shock of a death in its growing web of slaves than what might be mistaken for a sort of sleep. Much depended on how many individuals this malice controlled, at what distance, attempting what tasks. Please, let it be stretched to its limits. Whatever it was now doing at the top of that tower, ground was flowing toward it in a great sucking drain; Dag could feel the mortal throb of it passing under his boot soles. He had a wild vision of gripping the streaming power with his ghost hand and just letting it tow him right up the slope.

The patrol reached the edge of the clearing, bristling with stumps from the trees felled to build the tower—within the last day, Dag guessed from the still-pungent smell of the sap. In the faint moonlight he could make out the hulking shapes of at least four mud-man guards at the tower’s base. Maybe bear-men or even bull-men; big, lithe, stinking. Without need for orders, he could sense his pairs moving to the front. His stomach clenched, and he fought down a wave of nausea. Time to clear the path.

At some faint clink or whisper of a weapon drawn from a sheath, a guardian’s head turned toward them; it lifted its snout, sniffing suspiciously.

Now.

Dag did not cry his command, just yanked out his war knife and plunged forward, weaving around stumps. His thoughts narrowed to his task: slay the mud-men, get his knife-wielders past them and up the tower as fast as death. Faster. Dag took on the nearest mud-man to hand, ducking as it brought up a rusted sword stolen from who-knew-where and swung violently at his head. Dag’s return stroke tore out the creature’s throat, and he didn’t even bother dodging the spray of blood. Arrows from patrol’s archers whispered fiercely past his head to sink into the chest of a mud-man beyond, although the shafts didn’t drop it; the mud-man staggered forward, roaring. Mari, her sharing knife clenched between her teeth, reached the tower and began to climb. Codo darted past her around the tower’s corner and swung himself upward too. Another patroller reached the tower, and another, all in that same intent silence. The rest turned to protect their climbing comrades. Dag could hear them engaging new mud-men reaching the clearing, as yet more came crashing up the hill yowling in alarm.

The dark shape at the top of the tower moved, standing up against a cobalt sky scattered with stars and luminous with moon-washed cloud. The four climbers had almost reached the top. Suddenly the figure crouched, leaped—descended as if floating the full twenty feet to land upon its folding legs and spring again upright. As if it were light as a dancer, and not seven solid feet of corded muscle, sinew, and bone. It wheeled, coming face-to-face with Dag.

This malice was lean, almost graceful, and Dag was shocked by its beauty in the moonlight. Fair skin moved naturally over a face of sculpted bone; hair swept back from its high brow to flow like a river of night down its back. Its androgynous body was clothed in stolen oddments—trousers, a shirt, boots, a Lakewalker leather vest—which it somehow endowed with the air of some ancient high lord’s attire. How many molts must it have gone through, how quickly, to have achieved such a human—no, superhuman—form? Its glamour wrenched Dag’s gaze, and he could feel his ground ripple—he snapped himself closed, tight and hard.

And open again as Utau, sharing knife out, staggered with a sudden cry. Dag could sense the strain in Utau’s ground as the malice turned and gripped it, starting to rip it away. Frantic, Dag extended his left arm and stretched out his ghost hand to snatch at the malice’s ground in turn. Out of the corner of his eye, Dag saw Mari, clinging to the tower side, drop her sharing knife down in a pale spinning arc to Dirla, who had temporarily broken free of mud-men.

As a fragment of its ground came away in Dag’s ghost hand, the malice turned back to him with an astonished scream. Dag recalled that moment in the medicine tent when he’d snatched ground from Hoharie’s apprentice, but this time it felt like clutching a live coal. Pain and terror reverberated up his left arm. He tried to cast the fragment into the earth, but it clung to his ground like burning honey. The malice reached two-handed toward Dag, its dark eyes wide and furious. Dag tried again to close himself against it, and failed. He could feel the malice’s grip upon his ground tighten, and his breath locked at the surge of astounding pain that seemed to start from his marrow and strike outward to his skin, as if all his bones were being shattered in place simultaneously.

And Dirla lunged forward onto a stump and plunged Mari’s sharing knife into the malice’s back.

Dag felt the dying enter his own shredding ground, cloudy and turbulent as blood poured into roiling water. For a moment, he shared the malice’s full awareness. The world’s ground stretched away from their center for miles, glowing like fire, with slaves and mud-men moving across it in scattered, blazing ranks. The confusing din of their several hundred, no, thousand anguished minds battered his failing consciousness. The malice’s vast will seemed to drain from them as Dag watched, leaving blackness and dismay. The irrational intelligence of the great being snatched at his own mind, hungry above all for understanding of its plight, and Dag knew that if this malice took him in, it would have nearly all it needed, and yet still not be saved from its own cravings and desires. It is quite mad. And the more intelligent it grows, the more agonizing its own madness becomes to it. It seemed a curious but useless insight to gain, here at the end of breath and light.

The malice screamed again, its voice rising strangely like a song, wavering upward into unexpected purity. Its beautiful body ruptured, caught by its clothing, and it fell in a welter of blood and fluid.

The earth rose up and struck Dag cruelly in the back. Stars spun overhead, and went out.

Fawn shot awake in the dark and sat up in her lonely bedroll with a gasp. Shock shuddered through her body, then a wash of fear. A noise, a nightmare? No echoes pulsed in her ears, no visions faded in her mind. Her heart pounding unaccountably, she slapped her right hand over her left wrist. This panic was surely the opposite of relaxed persuasion and openness, but beneath her marriage cord her whole arm was throbbing.

Something’s happened to Dag. Hurt? Hurt bad…?

She scrambled up and pushed through her tent flap into the milky light of a partial moon, seeming bright compared to the inky shadows inside. Not stopping to throw anything over her sleeping shift, she picked her way across the clearing, wincing at the twigs and stones that bit her bare feet. It was all that kept her from breaking into a run.

She hesitated outside Cattagus and Mari’s tent. The night was cool after the recent rains, and Cattagus had dropped the porch flap down. She slapped it as Utau had theirs on the dark morning he’d come to wake Dag. She tried to guess the time from the moon passing over the lake—two hours after midnight, maybe? There was no sound from within, and she pounded the leather again, then shifted from foot to foot, trying to gather the nerve to go inside and shake the old man by the shoulder.

Before she did, the flap moved on Sarri’s tent, and the dark-haired woman emerged. She had paused for sandals, but no robe either, and her feet slapped quickly across the stretch between the two tent-cabins.

“Did you feel that?” Fawn asked her anxiously, keeping her voice low for fear of waking the children. And then felt utterly stupid, for of course Sarri would not feel anything from a marriage cord wrapped around someone else’s wrist. “Did you feel anything just now?”

Sarri shook her head. “Something woke me. Whatever it was, was gone by the time I’d gathered my wits.” Her right hand too gripped her left wrist, kneading.

“Razi and Utau…?”

“Alive. Alive. At least that.” She shot Fawn a curious look. “Did you feel something? Surely you couldn’t have…”

She was interrupted by a grunt from the tent. Cattagus shouldered through the flap, tying up his shorts around his stout middle and scowling. “What’s all this too-roo in the moonlight, girlies?”

“Fawn says she felt something in her cord. Woke her up.” Sarri added, as if reluctant to endorse this, “I woke up too, but there wasn’t…anything. Mari?”

The same gesture, right hand over left, although by putting on an expression of exasperation Cattagus tried, unsuccessfully, to make it not look anxious. He shook his head. “Mari’s all right.” He added after a moment of reflection, “Alive, at least. What in the wide green world can all those galloping fools be about over there at this time of night?” He glanced west, as if his eyes could somehow penetrate a hundred and more miles and see the answer, but that feat was beyond even his Lakewalker powers, a fact his dry snort seemed to acknowledge.

The two women followed his stare uneasily.

“Look, now,” he said, as if in persuasion, “if Utau, Razi, Mari, and Dag are all still alive, the company can’t be in that much trouble. Because you know that bunch’d find the manure pile first.”

Sarri blew out her breath in not quite a laugh, accepting the thin reassurance as much, Fawn guessed, for his sake as her own.

“’Specially Dag,” Cattagus added under his breath. “You wonder what Fairbolt thought he was about, to put…”

“Cattagus.” Fawn took a deep breath and thrust out her arm. “My cord feels funny. Can you figure out anything from it?”

His gray brows rose. “Not likely.” But he took her wrist gently in his hand anyway. His lips moved briefly as if in surprise, but then schooled away a scowl to some more guarded line. “Well, he’s alive. There’s that. Can’t have got himself ground-ripped if he’s alive.”

More Lakewalker secrets no one had bothered to mention? “What’s ground-ripped?”

Cattagus exchanged a look with Sarri, but before Fawn could grit her teeth in frustration, relented, and said, “Same as what that malice down in Glassforge did to your childie, I take it. ’Cept Lakewalkers-grown can resist, close their grounds against it. If the malice is a sessile, or is not too strong yet.”

“What if it is strong?” Fawn asked in worry.

“Well…they say it’s a quick death. No chance to share, though.” Cattagus frowned sternly. “But, see here, girlie, don’t you go imagining things all night. Your boy’s alive, isn’t he now, eh?”

Fawn had trouble thinking of Dag as a boy, but the your part she clutched hard to her heart, her wrists crossed over her chest. Dag’s mine, yes. Not some blighting malice’s.

“Maybe it’s over,” said Sarri in a low voice. “I hope it’s over.”

“When would we know?” asked Fawn.

Cattagus shrugged his ropy shoulders. “From the middle of Raintree, good news could get here in three days. Bad news in two. Very bad news…well, we won’t worry about that. Ah, go back to bed, girlies!” He shook his head and set the example by ducking back inside, wheezing. Pointedly, Fawn thought.

Sarri shook her head in unwitting echo of her testy uncle, sighed deeply, and made her way back to her tent and her sleeping children. Fawn picked her way slowly back to little Tent Bluefield.

She dutifully lay down, but returning to sleep was beyond futile. After tossing for a time, she rose again and took out her drop spindle and a bundle of plunkin flax, and went out in the moonlight to clamber up on her favorite tall spinning-stump. At least she might have something to show for her night-restlessness. The tap of the gold beads flicking on her wrist as she spun was normally cheerful and soothing, but tonight felt more like fingers drumming. Flick, spin, shape.

She wished she could put spells for protection into her trouser cloth, the way a Lakewalker wife likely could. She could spin her thread strong, weave it tight, sew it soundly, double-stitched and secure. She could make with all her heart, but it would only give the ordinary expected armoring of cloth on skin. Not enough. Flick, spin, shape.

Three days till any news, huh. I don’t like this waiting part. Not one bit. The helpless anxiety was worse than she’d expected it to be, and she felt pushed off-balance. No more do Sarri or Cattagus like it, either, that’s plain enough, but you don’t catch them carrying on about it, do you? Her own unease wasn’t special just for being new to her. She felt she suddenly had more insight into Lakewalker moodiness. Her assurances to Dag before he’d ridden off seemed in retrospect unduly blithe and—well, if not stupid, a word he’d tried to forbid her, certainly ignorant. I’m learning now. Again. Flick, spin, shape.

If Dag died on patrol—her eyes went to her wrist cord, still alive, yes, it was a safely theoretical thought. She could dare to think it. If something happened to him out there, what would become of me? Despite Hickory Lake’s fascinations, without Dag she knew she had no roots here. While these Lakewalkers seemed unlikely to cast her out naked, she had no doubt Fairbolt would whisk her back to West Blue in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, likely with a patroller to make sure she arrived. Seemed like his idea of responsible. But she had no roots in West Blue now either; she’d cut them off, if not without a pang, without compunction. Twice. Cutting them a third time wasn’t a task she wished to face. If she couldn’t stay here, and she wouldn’t go back…

It was a measure, perhaps, of what this sometimes-horrendous year had done for her that she found this thought curiously undaunting. There was Glassforge. There was Silver Shoals, beyond on the Grace River, an even finer town by Dag’s descriptions. There was a world of possibility for an un—grass widow with determination and her wits held close about her. She was practical. She knew how to walk down strange roads, now. She’d come this far. She didn’t have to cling to Dag like a drowning woman clutching the only branch in the torrent.

Everybody, it seemed, wanted Dag for something. Fairbolt Crow wanted him for a patroller. His mother wanted him to demonstrate the high value of her bloodline, maybe, to prove her worth through his. His brother Dar wanted him to not make a fuss or be a distraction—to stay quiet, safe inside the rules, ignorable. Fawn wasn’t sure but what she should add herself into that tally, because she certainly wanted Dag for the father of her children someday, except Dag seemed to be thinking along those lines himself, so maybe that one was mutual and didn’t count. Didn’t anyone want Dag just for Dag? Without justification, like a milkweed or a water lily or, or…a summer night with fireflies.

Because later, in some very dry places, the memory of that hour was enough for going on with.

She had to stop spinning then, because she couldn’t see through the silver light blurring in her eyes. She dashed her hand against her hot eyelids to clear her vision. Twice. Then just let the tears run down, sitting bent to her knees with her wrist cord pressed to her forehead. It took a long time to make her breathing stop hitching.

My heart’s prize my best friend my true consolation…what trouble have you gone and found this time?

Her arm was still throbbing, though more faintly. Alive, yes, but…she might be just a farmer girl, without a speck of groundsense in her body, she might be any one of a hundred kinds of fool. She might be ignorant of a thousand Lakewalkerish things, but of this she was increasingly certain. This is not good. This is something very wrong.

The insides of his eyelids were red. Not black. There was light out there somewhere, warm dawn or warm fire. His curiosity as to which was not enough to make him drag open the heavy weights his lids had become.

He remembered panicked voices, and thinking he should get up and fix the cause, whatever it was. He should. Someone had been shouting about Utau, and Razi—of course it would be Razi—trying to match grounds. Mari’s voice, sharp and scared, Try to get in! Blight it, I’m not losing our captain after all that! Fairbolt was here? When had that happened? Someone else, I can’t! His ground’s too tight! and later, Can’t, oh gods that hurts! And, So if it does that to you, what do you figure it’s doing to him? — Mari’s tart voice at its least sympathetic; Dag felt for her victim, whoever he was. More gasping, I can’t, I can’t, I’m sorry… The panicked voices had faded then, and Dag had been glad. Maybe they would all go away and leave him be. I’m so tired…

He breathed, twitched; his gluey eyes opened on their own. Half-dead tree branches laced the paling blue of a new dawn. On one side, orange flames crackled up from a roaring campfire, deliciously warm. Dawn and fire both, ah, that solved the mystery. On his other side, Mari’s face wavered into view between him and the sky.

Her dry voice spoke: “’Bout time you reported for duty again, patroller.”

He tried to move his lips.

Her hand pressed his brow. “That was a joke, Dag. You just lie there.” Her hand went to his, under blankets it seemed. “Finally warming up, too. Good.”

He swallowed and found his lost voice. “How many?”

“Eh?”

“How many died? Last night?” Assuming the malice kill was last night. He had mislaid days before, under unpleasantly similar conditions.

“Now you’ve seen fit to grace us with your gloomy face again—none.”

That couldn’t be right. Saun, what of Saun, left with the horses? Dag pictured the youth attacked in the dark by mud-men, alone, bloodied, overwhelmed…“Saun!”

“Here, Captain.” Saun’s anxiously smiling face loomed over Mari’s shoulder.

That must have been a dream or a hallucination. Or this was. Did he get to pick which? He drew breath enough to get out, “What’s happened?”

“Dirla took the malice—” Mari began.

“I got that far. Saw you drop your knife to her.” Mari’s son’s bone. He managed to moisten his lips. “Didn’t think you’d ever let that out of your hand.”

“Aye, well, I remembered your tale of how you and the little farmer girl got the Glassforge malice. Dirla was closer, and the malice was intent on Utau. I saw the chance and took it.”

“Utau?” he repeated urgently. Yes, the malice had been about to rip the ground from his body…

Mari gripped his shoulder through the blankets. “Malice grazed him, no question, but Razi brought him home. You, now—that’s the closest I’ve ever heard tell of anyone getting his ground ripped without actually dying. Never seen a man look more like a corpse and still breathe.”

“Drink?” said Saun, putting an arm under Dag’s shoulders to lift him a bit.

Oh, good idea. It was only stale water from a skin, but it was wonderfully wet water. Wettest he’d ever drunk, Dag decided. “Thankee’.” And after a moment, “How many of us lost…?”

“None, Dag,” said Saun eagerly. Mari frowned.

“Go on.”

“Eh, after that, it was all over but the shoutin’, of which there was the usual,” said Mari. “Sent two pairs to retrieve Saun and the horses, and kept the rest close to guard our camp from hazard. Let four off to sleep a bit ago.” She nodded across the fire toward some sodden unmoving bundles stretched on bedrolls. Dag raised his head to look. Beside one of them, Razi sat cross-legged; he smiled tiredly at Dag and sent him a vague salute.

“What of the farmer-slaves?”

“There weren’t as many right by here as we’d thought. Seems the malice had sent most of its slaves and mud-men marching off through the woods for some dawn attack on a town just northwest of Farmer’s Flats. I imagine they’re having a right mess down there this morning. Gods know what those poor farmers thought when the malice fog lifted from their minds and their mud-men scampered. I haven’t much tried to herd the folks we found here, though we did check out their camp, and suggest no one try to travel home alone. Most of ’em have gone off by now to try and find friends and family.”

Understandable; welcome, even. It might be cowardice, but Dag didn’t want to try to deal with distraught farmers this morning, atop everything else. Let the Raintree Lakewalkers take care of their own.

Dag’s brow wrinkled. “How many did we lose last night?”

Mari drew a long breath and leaned forward to peer into his face. “Dag, are you tracking me at all?”

“’Course I’m tracking you.” Dag unwound his left arm from his blankets and waved his hook at her. “How many fingers am I holding up?” Except it occurred to him that, on some very disturbing level, he did not know the answer.

Mari rolled her eyes in exasperation. Saun, bless him, looked adorably confused.

“Well, we still don’t know about those makers we left at Bonemarsh,” Saun offered hesitantly.

Mari turned to glare at him. “Saun, don’t you dare start that up again with him now.”

Yes, that was his missing piece, the thing he’d been trying so desperately to remember. Dag sighed, if not exactly in satisfaction.

“We haven’t heard from Obio and the company yet,” said Mari, “but there’s scarcely been time. They might have reached there hours ago.”

“They might have taken some other route,” said Saun stubbornly.

It looked to turn into a bright day. People tied up outdoors in such heat without drink or food could die of exposure in a surprisingly short time, even without the added stress of whatever the malice’s groundlock—or ground link—had done to them. If even one prisoner could release himself, he’d surely free the rest, but suppose none could…? The throbbing headache of nightmare crept back up the base of Dag’s skull. “We have to go back to Bonemarsh.”

Saun nodded in eagerness. “I’ll ride ahead.”

“Not alone you won’t!” said Mari sharply.

Dag got out, “I left them…yesterday. Because I could count. But today I can go back.” Yes, as quickly as might be. “There was something wrong, and I knew it, but there was no time, and I knew that too. I have to get back there.” Enough human sacrifice for one malice, enough.

Mari sat back, dubious. “Make you a deal, Dag. If you can get your fool self up on your fool horse all by yourself, I’ll let you ride it. If not, you’re staying right here.”

Dag grinned wanly. “You’ll lose that bet. Saun, help me sit up.”

The boy slid an arm under his shoulders again. Dag’s head drained nearly to blackness as he came upright, but he kept his blinking eyes open somehow. “See, Mari? I wager there’s not a mark on me.”

“Your ground’s so tight it’s cramping. You can’t tell me you didn’t take hurt under there.”

“What does it feel like?” asked Saun diffidently. “A ground rip, that is?”

Dag squinted, deciding Saun was due an honest answer. “Right now, a lot like blood loss, truth to tell. It doesn’t hurt anywhere in particular”—just everywhere generally—“but I admit I’m not my best.”

Mari snorted.

If he ate, perhaps he would gain strength enough to…eat. Hm.

Mari went off to deal with less intractable people, and Saun, as anxious for the Bonemarsh makers as Dag, made it his business to get Dag ready to ride. While Saun fed him, Dag took counsel with Mari and Codo to split the patrol, sending six south to find the Raintree Lakewalkers and report on the malice kill, and the rest north with him to, with luck, rendezvous with the rest of the company at Bonemarsh.

In the event, Dag half cheated and used a stump to mount Copperhead. Mari, mounting from another stump, eyed him narrowly but let it pass. The horse was too tired to fight him, which was fortunate, because he was way too tired to fight back. He let Saun take the lead in the ride back north, swifter for the daylight, the lack of need for stealth, and the knowing where they were going, but slower for everyone’s exhaustion. Dag sat his horse and wavered in and out of awareness, pretending to be dozing while riding like any good old patroller. Utau, slumping in his saddle and closely shepherded by Razi, looked almost as laid waste as Dag felt.

Dag let his groundsense stay shut, as it seemed to want; it reminded him of the way a man might walk tilted to guard a wound. Maybe, as for blood loss, time and rest would provide the remedy. He tried once to sneak out his ghost hand, but nothing occurred.

The thought of the tree-bound makers he had so ruthlessly abandoned yesterday haunted his hazy thoughts. He searched the memory of his glimpse of the malice’s mind for a hint of them, but could recover only a sense of overwhelming confusion. The makers’ fate seemed to hang in the air like some absent god’s cruel revenge upon his wild hope, scarcely admitted even to himself. If only…

If only I could get through this captaincy without losing anyone, I could stop.

If only he could balance the long weight of Wolf Ridge? Would it? Dag was dubious of his mortal arithmetic. In the long run no one gets out alive, you know that.

They passed into, and out of, a slate-lined ravine, letting the horses drink as they crossed the creek. He could swear they’d passed this same ford not twelve hours ago, pointed the other way. Dizzied, he pressed Copperhead forward into the hot summer morning.