Legacy

12

D ag knew they were approaching Bonemarsh again by the growing dampness of the soil and air, and a brightening in the corner of his eye as the flat woods opened out into flatter water meadows. He had been staring at nothing but the coarse rusty hairs of Copperhead’s mane for the past hour, but looked up as Saun muffled an oath and kicked his tired horse into a canter. Above the Bonemarsh shore, life of a sort had returned: a flock of turkey vultures, the fingerlike fringes of their wing tips unmistakable on their black silhouettes as they wheeled. His impulse to canter after Saun was easily resisted, as neither he nor Copperhead was capable of more than a trot right now, the jolting of which would have tormented his sagging back. And…he didn’t want to look. He let his horse walk on.

As they neared the south margin of the marsh, Dag straightened, squinting in guarded hope. The vultures were circling over the woods back behind the village, not over the boggy patch along the shore. Maybe they’d merely found the unburied carcasses from the mud-men’s feast. Maybe…

The rest of his veiled patrol turned onto the shore track, and Dag craned his neck, heart thumping. There were several horses tethered around the scrubby trees, Saun’s now among them. The rest of the company had made it, good! Some of them, at least. Enough. Dag could see figures moving in the shade, then his heart clenched again at the glimpse of several long lumps on the ground. He couldn’t tell if the faces were covered or not. Bedrolls, please, let it be bedrolls and not shrouds… Had the company only just arrived? Because surely the next task would be to move the rescued makers off this half-blighted ground to some healthier campsite. But Obio was here, thank all the absent gods, striding out to wave greeting as they rode up.

“Dag!” Obio cried. “You’re here—absent gods be praised!” His voice seemed to hold more than just relief to see Dag alive. It had the shaken timbre of a man with a crisis desperately seeking someone else to hand it to. One of us is thanking the absent gods too soon, I think.

Dag tried to get both eyes open at once and brace his spine. At least enough to dismount, after which he was determined not to climb back into that saddle again for a long, long time. He slid down and clung to his stirrup leather for a moment, partly for support as he woozily adjusted to standing again, partly because he could barely remember what he was trying to do.

Saun’s anxious voice brought him back to the moment. “You have to see this, Captain!”

He turned, moistened his lips. Got out, “How many? Did we lose.” He felt too close to weeping, and he feared frightening Saun with his fragility. He wanted to explain, reassure: Fellows get like this after, sometimes. You’ll see it, if you’re around long enough.

But Saun was babbling on: “Everyone’s alive that was yesterday. Except now there’s a new problem.”

In a dim effort to fend it all off for just a moment longer, like a man pulling his blanket over his head when called from his bedroll by raucous comrades, Dag blinked at Obio, and asked in a voice raspy with fatigue, “When did you get here?”

“Last night.”

“Where is everyone?”

“We’ve set up a camp about a mile east, just off the blight.” Obio waved toward a distant, greener tree line. “I rested the company yesterday morning, then sent scouts out after you. I started us all toward here at midafternoon, closing up the distance in case, you know. We were getting pretty worried toward dusk, when my scouts hadn’t come back and my flankers ran into a couple of mud-men. They did for them pretty quick, but it was plain you hadn’t got the malice when you’d planned.”

“No. Later. Couple hours after midnight, about twenty miles south.”

“So Saun just said. But if—well, here’s Griff, my scout who found this. Let him tell.”

A worried-looking fellow of about Dirla’s age came up and gave Dag a nod. Griff had been walking for ten years, and in Dag’s experience was levelheaded and reliable. Which made his current rumpled, wild-eyed appearance just that much more disturbing.

“Gods, Dag, I’m so glad you’re here!”

Dag controlled a wince, leaning his arm along Copperhead’s back for secret support. “What happened?” And added prudently, as Griff’s distraught look deepened, “From the beginning.”

Griff gulped and nodded. “The two pairs of us scouts came down here to Bonemarsh late yesterday afternoon. We could track where your veiled patrol had passed through, right enough. We figured—well, hoped—that the malice had moved off and you all had moved after it. Then we found these makers tied to the trees”—he glanced over his shoulder—“and then we thought maybe you must have been captured, instead.”

Because good patrollers don’t abandon their own? Charitable, Griff. “No. We left them tied, passed them by,” Dag admitted.

Griff straightened; to Dag’s surprise, the look on his face was not horror or contempt, but respect. He asked earnestly, “How did you know it was a trap?”

Trap? What? Dag shook his head. “I didn’t. They were a sacrifice to pure tactics. I didn’t want to chance warning the malice there were patrollers coming up this close behind it.”

“You said there was something really wrong,” Saun corrected this, frowning. “And to keep our grounds shut tight when we were touching them.”

“That wasn’t exactly a stretch of my wits by that point, Saun. Go on, Griff.”

“We could see they were groundlocked. Seemed to be. So Mallora did what you do to someone groundlocked, reached in and bumped grounds to break them out of the trance. Except—instead of her waking them up, the groundlock just seemed to, to reach out and suck her in. Her eyes rolled back, and she crumpled up in a heap. The mud-puppies all out in their pots over there”—Griff waved toward the bog—“made these strange bubbling noises and flopped around when it happened. Made us jump, in the dusk. I didn’t notice how silent it all really was, till then. Mallora’s partner Bryn panicked, I think—she reached out for her, tried to drag her back. And she got sucked in after. I grabbed my partner Ornig before he could reach for Bryn.”

Dag nodded, provisionally, but Griff’s face was tightening in something like despair. Dag murmured, “It used to happen up in Luthlia sometimes in the winter, someone would fall through rotten ice. And their friends or their kin would try to pull them out, and instead be pulled in after. One after another. Instead of running for help or a rope—though the smart patrollers there always wore a length of rope wrapped around their waists in the cold season. Except if someone’s slipped under the ice—well, never mind. The hardest thing…the hardest thing in such a string of tragedy was to be the one who stopped. But you bet the older folks understood.”

Griff blinked back tears, ducking his head in thanks. He swallowed for control of his voice, and went on, “Ornig and I agreed he would stay, and I would go for help. And I rode hard! But I think I should have stayed, because when we made it back”—he swallowed again—“the makers were all cut down from the trees, as if Ornig had tried to make them more comfortable, but Ornig was all in a heap. He must have…tried something.” He added after a moment, “He’s sweet on Bryn, see.”

Dag nodded understanding, and stepped away from Copperhead to get a closer look at what was going on in the grove. If only he could find a tree to lean against—not that honey locust, bole and branches bristling with clusters of nasty triple-headed spines—his hand found a low branch from a young wild cherry, and he gripped it and peered. Three or four patrollers, at least one of whom Dag recognized as one of the company’s better medicine makers, moved among bedrolls laid out where space permitted. He counted eight. More and more at risk. Someone had a campfire going, though, and something heating in pots—drinking water, medicine?

All good, but there was something deeply wrong with the picture…oh. “Why haven’t you moved them off this blighted ground?”

Mari, Dirla, and Razi had dismounted during Griff’s recitation, moving closer to listen. Razi still held the reins of Utau’s horse; Utau drooped over his saddlebow, squinting. Dag wasn’t sure how much of this he was taking in.

“We tried,” said Obio. “Soon as you carry someone more than about a hundred paces away, they stop breathing.”

“Must have been a thrill finding that out,” Mari said.

“Oh, aye,” agreed Obio, fervent. “In the middle of the night last night.”

“And if you kill one of the mud-men in their mudholes,” Griff added morosely, “the people scream in their sleep. It’s pretty blighted unnerving. So we stopped that, too.”

“I figured,” said Obio, “that if—when—someone caught up with the malice, the groundlock would break on its own. I intended to detail a few folks to look after them and take the company on, as soon as enough scouts came back to give me a guess what we ought to try next. Except…you say you all did for the malice, but that ugly groundlock’s still holding tight.”

“Dirla did,” said Dag. “With Mari’s sharing knife. Your first personal kill, I believe, Dirla?” It was a shame that the congratulations and celebration that should have been hers were being overwhelmed in this new crisis.

Dirla nodded absently. She frowned past Dag at the unmoving figures in the shaded bedrolls. “Could there be more than one malice? And that’s why this link didn’t break last night?”

Dag tried to think this utterly horrible idea through logically, but his brains seemed to be slowly turning to porridge. His gut said no, right enough, but he couldn’t for the life of him say why, not in words.

Mari came to his rescue: “No. Because our malice would have turned all it had toward fighting the second, instead of chasing after farmers and Lakewalkers. Malices don’t team up—they eat each other.”

Well, that was true, too. But that’s not it.

“That’s what I thought,” said Dirla. “But then why didn’t this stop when the malice died, like what it does to the farmers and the mud-men?”

Maddening question. Lakewalkers, it must have to do with Lake-walkers…“All right,” sighed Dag. “I’m thinking…we got water down those folks yesterday. If we can get more water and some sort of food—gruel, soup, I don’t know—down them again, we can buy a little time, maybe.”

“Been doing that,” said Obio.

Bless your wits. Dag nodded. “Buy time to think. Keep a close eye, wait for the scouts—then decide. Depending, I’m thinking we might split the company—send some volunteers to help the Raintree folks with the cleanup, and the rest home maybe as early as tomorrow morning.” So that Oleana might not, due to Fairbolt’s robbed pegboard, find itself facing a similar runaway malice war next season.

The creeping alarm of this unnatural groundlock upon a bunch of already-nervy patrollers was clearly contagious. At this point, Dag could scarcely tell if his own sick unease was from the makers or their distraught caretakers. “Blight it, I wish I had Hoharie here. She works with people’s grounds all the time. Maybe she’d have an idea.” He might as well wish for that flock of turkey vultures to spiral down, grab him, and fly him away home, while he was at it. He sighed and cast an eye over his exhausted, bleary comrades. “Everyone who was with my veiled patrol is now off duty. Ride on over to the camp—get food, sleep, a wash, whatever you want. Utau, you’re on the sick list till I say otherwise.” Speaking of reasons to wish for the medicine maker.

Utau roused himself enough to growl, “I like that! If that malice scored me, it scored you a lot worse. I know what I feel like. Why are you still walking around?”

A question Dag didn’t care to probe just now, even if his wits had been working. Utau, it occurred to him, had been the only other patroller with his groundsense open, if involuntarily, in those moments of confused terror last night when Dag and the malice had closed on each other. What had he perceived? Evidently not Dag’s disastrous attempt to rip the malice in return. Dag temporized, “Until Razi says otherwise, then.” Razi grinned and cast him an appreciative half salute; Utau snorted. Dag added, “I’m going to lay me a bedroll down here, shortly.”

“On this blight?” said Saun doubtfully.

“I don’t want to be a mile away if something changes suddenly.”

Mari tugged Saun’s sleeve, and murmured, “If that one’s actually volunteerin’ for a bedroll, don’t argue the details.” She gave him a significant jerk of her head, and his eyes widened in enlightenment; he stepped over to Dirla.

“I had more sleep last night than you did, Mari,” said Dag.

“Dag, I don’t know what that was last night after you went down, but it sure wasn’t sleep. Sleeping men can be waked up, for one.”

“Wait, what’s all this?” said Obio.

Utau pushed up on his saddlebow and looked down at Dag a tad ironically. “Malice nearly ripped my ground last night. Dag jumped in and persuaded it to go after him, instead.”

“Did it rip you?” Obio asked Dag, eyebrows climbing.

“A little bit,” Dag admitted.

“Isn’t that something like being a little bit dead?”

“Seemingly.”

Obio smiled uncertainly, making Dag wonder just how corpselike he did look at the moment. He was not lovely, that was certain. Would he make Spark’s eyes happy all the same? I bet so. A bright picture came into his head of the thrill that would flower in her face when he walked into their campsite, when this was all over. Would she drop her handwork and run to his arms? It was the first heartening thought he’d had for hours. Days.

Dag wondered if he’d started to fall asleep standing when a voice broke up this vision, which ran away like water though his hands. He almost cried to have the dream back. Instead, he forced himself to breathe deeply and pay attention.

“…can send couriers with the news, now,” Obio was saying. “I’d like to catch Fairbolt before he sends off the next round of reinforcements.”

“Yes, of course,” murmured Dag.

Dirla had been talking closely with Mari; at this, she lifted her face, and called, “I’d like to volunteer for that, sir.”

You’re off duty, Dag started to object, then realized this task would certainly get Dirla home first. Better—she was eyewitness to the malice kill, none closer. If he sent her, Dag wouldn’t have to try to pen a report in his present groggy state. She could just tell Fairbolt all about it. “You took the malice. You can do any blighted thing you please, Dirla.”

She nodded cheerfully. “Then I will.”

Obio, his eyes narrowing, said, “In that case, I’ve a fellow in mind to send with her for partner. His wife was about to have a baby when we left. Absent gods willing, she might still be about to.”

Which would cover events from the other part of the company for Fairbolt, too. Good.

“Excellent,” agreed Mari. “That’s a courier who won’t dawdle, eh?” “You’ll need to trade out for fresher horses—” Dag began.

“We’ll take care of it, Dag,” Razi promised.

“Right. Right.” This was all routine. “Dirla. Tell Spark—tell everyone we’ll be home soon, eh?”

“Sure thing, Captain.”

Obio boosted Mari back on her horse, and she led the rest of the patrol, save Saun and Dirla, off east toward the promised camp. To reassure Obio and Griff, Dag pretended to make an inspection tour of the grove and the bog, for as much good as his eyes could do with his groundsense still clamped down tight.

“There was a dead woman, yesterday,” Dag began to Obio.

Obio grunted understanding. “We cut her down and wrapped her, and put her in one of the tents in the village. I’m hoping some of the Bonemarsh folk might come back and identify her before we have to bury her. In this heat, that’ll have to be by tomorrow, though.”

Dag nodded and trudged on.

The distorting animals trapped in their mud pots were much the same repellent sight as yesterday. The five surviving makers and three patrollers, more inexplicably trapped, were at least physically supported now, as comfortable as they might be made in bedrolls on the ground in the warm summer shade. The other patrollers taking turns to lift them and spoon liquids into them must also be ground-closed and walking blind, Dag realized.

Even apart from the hazard of this peculiar sticky ground-snare, he had the irrational apprehension that opening his ground would be like a man pulling a dressing from a gut wound; that all his insides might spill out. He found that while his back was turned, Saun and Dirla had unsaddled Copperhead and set up Dag’s possessions and bedroll in a flat, dry spot raked clear of debris. They’d been awake as long as he had, blight it, why were they so blighted perky? Blighted children…The moment his haunches hit his blanket, Dag knew he wasn’t getting up again. He sat staring blankly at his bootlaces, transported in memory back to the night after his last malice kill, with Spark on the feather tick in that farmhouse kitchen.

He was still staring when Saun knelt to undo one boot, and Dirla the other. It was surely a measure of…something, that he let them.

“Can I bring you anything to eat? Drink?” asked Dirla.

Dag shook his head. While riding he had gnawed down a number of leathery strips of dried plunkin, on the theory that he might so dispose of two tedious chores at the same time. He wasn’t hungry. He wasn’t anything.

Saun set his boots aside and squinted out into the afternoon light upon the silent, wasted marsh. “How long do you suppose till this place recovers? Centuries?”

“It looks bad now,” said Dag, “but the malice was only here a few days, and the blight’s not deep. Decades at most. Maybe not in my life, but in yours, I’d say.”

Saun’s eyes pinched, and he traded an unreadable look with Dirla. “Can I get—do you want anything at all, Captain?”

I want Spark. A mistake to allow himself the thought, because it bloomed instantly into a near-physical ache. In his heart, yes—as if there were any part of him not hurting already. Instead, he said, “Why am I captain all at once, here? You call me Dag, I call you Hey, you, boy. It’s always worked before.”

Saun grinned sheepishly, but didn’t answer. He and Dirla scrambled up; Dag was asleep before the pair left the grove.

Fawn, who hadn’t been able to fall to sleep till nearly dawn, woke in the midmorning feeling as though she had been beaten with sticks. Mint tea and plunkin did little to revive her. She turned to her next hand task, weaving string from her spun plunkin flax to make wicks for a batch of beeswax candles Sarri was planning. An hour into it her eyes were blurring, and the throbbing in her left hand and arm was a maddening distraction that matched the throbbing in her head. Was it her heartbeat or Dag’s that kept the time? At least his heart’s still beating. She set down her work, walked up the road to where the path to Dar’s bone shack led off, and stood in doubt.

Dag’s his brother. Dar has to care. Fawn considered this proposition in light of her own brothers. No matter how furious she might be with them, would she drop her gripe if they were hurt and needed help? Yes. Because that’s what family was all about, in her experience. They pulled together in a crisis; it was just too bad about the rest of the time. She set her shoulders and walked down the path into the green shade.

She hesitated again at the edge of the sun-dappled glade. If she was truly parading about ground-naked, as Cumbia accused, Dar must know she was here. Voices carried around the corner of the shack. He wasn’t, then, deep in concentration upon some necromantic spell. She continued around to find Dar sitting on the top porch step with an older woman dressed in the usual summer shift, her hair in a knot. Dar was holding a sharing knife. He drew a peeved breath and looked up, reluctantly acknowledging Fawn.

Fawn clenched her left wrist protectively to her breast. “Mornin’, Dar. I had a question for you.”

Dar grunted and rose; the woman, with a curious glance at Fawn, rose too.

“So what is it?” Dar asked.

“It’s kind of private. I can come back.”

“We were just finishing. Wait, then.” He turned to the woman and hefted the knife. “I can deconsecrate this in the afternoon. Do you want to come back tonight?”

“Could. Or tomorrow morning.”

“I have another binding tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll make it tonight, then. After supper?”

“That would do.”

The woman nodded briskly and started away, then paused by Fawn, looking her up and down. Her brows rose. “So you’re the famous farmer bride, eh?”

Fawn, unable to figure her tone, gave a safe little knee-dip.

She shook her head. “Well, Dar. Your brother.” With this opaque pronouncement, she strode off up the path.

By the bitter twisting of Dar’s lips, he drew more information from this than Fawn could. Fawn let it go; she had much more urgent worries right now. She approached Dar cautiously, as if he might bite. He set the knife on the porch boards and eyed her ironically.

Too nervous to plunge straight in, Fawn said instead, “What was that woman here for?”

“Her grandfather died unexpectedly in his sleep a few weeks ago, without getting the chance to share. She brought his knife back to be rededicated.”

“Oh.” Yes, that had to happen now and then. She wondered how Dar did that, took an old knife and bound it to the heart of someone new. She wished he and she could have been friends—or even relatives—then she could have asked.

Never mind that now. She gulped and stuck out her left arm. “Before Dag rode off to Raintree, I asked him if he couldn’t fix it so’s I could feel him through my marriage cord the way he feels me. And he did.” She prayed Dar would not ask how. “Last night about two hours after midnight, I woke up—there was this hurting all up my arm. Sarri, she woke up about the same time, but all she said was that Razi and Utau were still alive. Mari, too, Cattagus says. It didn’t do this before—I was afraid that—I think Dag’s hurt. Can you tell? Anything more?”

Dar’s face was not especially revealing, but Fawn thought a flash of alarm did flicker through his eyes. In any case, he did not snipe at her, but merely took her arm and let his fingers drift up and down it. His lips moved, tightened. He shook his head, not, seemingly, in defeat, but in a kind of exasperation. “Gods, Dag,” he murmured. “Can you do worse?”

“Well?” said Fawn apprehensively.

Dar dropped her arm; she clutched it to herself again. “Well…yes, I think Dag has probably taken some injury. No, I can’t be sure how much.”

Offended by his level tone, Fawn said, “Don’t you care?”

Dar turned his hands out. “If it’s so, it won’t be the first time he’s been brought home on a plank. I’ve been down this road with Dag too many times. I admit, the fact that he’s company captain is a bit…”

“Worrisome?”

“If you like. I can’t figure what Fairbolt…eh. But you say the others are all right, so they must be taking care of him. The patrol looks after its own.”

“If he’s not lost or separated or something.” Fawn could imagine a hundred somethings, each more dire than the last. “He’s my husband. If he’s hurt, I should be lookin’ after him.”

“What are you going to do? Jump on your horse and ride off into a war zone? To lose yourself in the woods, drown in a bog or a river, be eaten by the first wolf—or malice—whose path you cross? Come to think, maybe I should have Omba saddle up your horse and put you on it. It would certainly solve my brother’s problems for him.”

And it was extremely aggravating that just such panicked thoughts had been galloping through her mind all morning. She scowled. “Maybe I wouldn’t be as lost as all that. When Dag fixed my cord, he fixed it so’s I can tell where he is. Generally, anyhow,” she added scrupulously.

Dar squinted down at her for a long, silent, unnerving moment; his frown deepened. “It has nothing to do with your marriage cord. Dag has enslaved some of your ground to his.” He seemed about to say more, but then fell silent, his face drawn in doubt. He added after a moment, “I had no idea that he…it’s potent groundwork, I admit, but it’s not a good kind.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Naturally not.”

Fawn clenched her teeth. “That means, you have to explain more.”

“Do I?” The ironic look returned.

“Yes,” said Fawn, very definitely.

A little to her surprise, he shrugged acquiescence. “It’s malice magic. Forbidden to Lakewalkers for very good reasons. Malices mind-enslave farmers through their grounds. It’s part of what makes farmers as useless on patrol as dogs—a powerful enough malice can take them away and use them against us.”

“So why doesn’t that happen to Lakewalkers?” she shot back.

“Because we can close our grounds against the attack.”

Reluctantly, she decided Dar was telling the truth. So would the Glassforge malice have stolen her mind and will from her if it had been given a bit more time? Or would it simply have ripped out her ground on the spot as it had her child’s? No telling now. It did cast a disturbing new light on what she had assumed to be farmer slander against Lakewalkers and their beguilements. But if—

Cattagus’s oblique warning about the camp council returned to her mind with a jerk. “How, forbidden?” How fiercely forbidden, with what penalties? Had she just handed Dag’s brotherly enemy another weapon against him? Oh, gods, I can’t do anything right with these people!

“Well, it’s discouraged, certainly. A Lakewalker couldn’t use the technique on another Lakewalker, but farmers are wide-open, to a sufficiently powerful”—he hesitated—“maker,” he finished, puzzlement suddenly tingeing his voice. He shook it off. His eyes narrowed; Fawn suddenly did not like his sly smile. “It does rather explain how Dag has you following him around like a motherless puppy, eh?”

Dismay shook her, but she narrowed her eyes right back. “What does that mean?” she demanded.

“I should think it was obvious. If not, alas, to my brother’s credit.”

She strove to quell her temper. “If you’re tryin’ to say you think your brother put some kind of love spell on me, well, it won’t wash. Dag didn’t fix my cord, or my ground, or whatever, till the night before he left with his company.”

Dar tilted his head, and asked dryly, “How would you know?”

It was a horrible question. Was he reading her ground the way Cumbia had, to so narrowly target her most appalling possible fears? Doubt swept through her like a torrent, to smack to a sudden stop against another memory—Sunny Sawman, and his vile threats to slander her about that night at his sister’s wedding. That ploy had worked admirably well to stampede Fawn. Once. I may be just a little farmer girl, but blight it, I do learn. Dag says so. She raised her face to meet Dar’s eye square, and suddenly the look of doubt was reversed from her to him.

She drew a long breath. “I don’t know which of you is using malice magic. I do know which of you is the most malicious.”

His head jerked back.

Yeah, that stings, doesn’t it, Dar? Fawn tossed her head, whirled, and stalked out of the clearing. She didn’t give him the satisfaction of looking back, either.

Out on the road again, Fawn first turned right, then, in sudden decision, left. In the time it took her to walk the mile down the shore to patroller headquarters, her courage chilled. The building appeared quiet, although there was a deal of activity across the road at the stables and in the paddocks, some patrol either coming in or going out, or maybe folks getting ready to send the next company west to the war. Maybe Fairbolt won’t be here, she told herself, and climbed the porch.

A strange patroller at the writing table pointed with his free hand without looking up from his scratching quill. “If the door’s open, anyone can go in.”

Fawn swallowed her rehearsed greetings, nodded, and scuttled past. Blight this naked-ground business. She peeked around the doorjamb to the inner chamber.

Fairbolt was sitting across from his pegboard with his feet up on another chair and a shallow wooden box in his lap, stirrings its contents with one thick finger and frowning. A couple more chairs pulled up beside him held more such trays. He squinted up at his board, sighed, and said, “Come in, Fawn.”

Emboldened, she stepped to his side. The trays, unsurprisingly, held pegs. He looked, she thought, very much like a man trying to figure out how to fill eight hundred holes with four hundred pegs. “I don’t mean to interrupt.”

“You’re not interrupting much.” He looked up at last and gave her a grimace that was possibly intended to be a smile.

“I had a question.”

“There’s a surprise.” He caught her faint wince and shook his head in apology. “Sorry. To answer you: no, I’ve had no courier from Dag since his company left. I wouldn’t expect one yet. It’s still early days for any news.”

“I figured that. I have a different question.”

She didn’t think she’d let her voice quaver, but his brows went up, and his feet came down. “Oh?”

“Married Lakewalkers feel each other through their wedding cords—if they’re alive, anyhow. Stands to reason you’d be listenin’ out for any such news from your patrollers—if any strings went dead—and folks would know to pass it on to you right quick.”

He looked at her in some bemusement. “That’s true. Dag tell you this?” “No, I figured it. What I want to know is, couriers or no couriers, have you gotten any such mortal news from Dag’s company?”

“No.” His gaze sharpened. “Why do you ask?”

This was where it got scary. Fairbolt was the camp council, in a way. But I think he’s patrol first. “Before he left, Dag did some groundwork on my cord, or on me, so’s I could feel if he was alive. Same as any other married Lakewalker, just a little different route, I guess.” Almost as briefly as she had for Dar, she described waking up hurting last night, and her moonlit talk with Sarri and Cattagus. “So just now I took my cord to Dar, because he’s the strongest maker I know of. And he allowed as how I was right, my cord spoke true, Dag was hurt somehow last night.” She hardly needed to add, she thought, that for Dar to grant his brother’s farmer bride to be right about anything, it had to be pretty inarguable.

All the intent, controlled alarm she’d missed from Dar shone now in Fairbolt’s eyes. His hand shot out; he jerked it to a stop. “Excuse me. May I touch?”

Fawn mustered her nerve and held out her left arm. “Yes.”

Fairbolt’s warm fingers slid up and down her skin and traced her cord. His face tensed in doubt and dismay. “Well, something’s there, yes, but…” Abruptly, he rose, strode to the doorway, and stuck his head through. His voice had an edge Fawn had not heard before. “Vion. Run over to the medicine tent, see if Hoharie’s there. If she’s not doing groundwork, ask her step down here. There’s something I need her to see. Right now.”

The scrape of a chair, some mumble of assent; the outer door banged before Fairbolt turned back. He said to Fawn, somewhat apologetically, “There’s reasons I went for patroller and not maker. Hoharie will be able to tell a lot more than I can. Maybe even more than Dar could.”

Fawn nodded.

Fairbolt drummed his fingers on his chair back. “Sarri and Cattagus said their spouses were all right, yes?”

“Yes. Well, Sarri wasn’t quite sure about Utau, I thought. But all alive.”

Fairbolt walked over to the larger table and stared down; Fawn followed. A map of north Raintree was laid out atop an untidy stack of other charts. Fairbolt’s finger traced a loop across it. “Dag planned to circle Bonemarsh and drop down on it from the north. My guess was that the earliest they could arrive there was today. I don’t know how much that storm might have slowed them. Really, they could be anywhere within fifty miles of Bonemarsh right now.”

Fawn let her left hand follow his tracing. The directional urge of her cord, alas, did not seem to respond to marks on maps, only to the live Dag. But she stared down with sudden new interest.

Maps. Maps could keep you from getting lost even in places you’d never been before. This one was thick with a veining of roads, trails, rivers, and streams, and cluttered with jotted remarks about landmarks, fords, and more rarely, bridges. Dar might be right that if she just jumped on her horse and rode west, she would likely plunge into disaster. But if she jumped on her horse with an aid like this…she would still be running headlong into a war zone. A mere pair of bandits had been enough to overcome her, before. I would be more wary, now. The map was something to think hard about, though.

“What could have happened to Dag, do you think?” she asked Fairbolt. “Dag alone, and no one else?”

He shrugged. “If you want to start with most likely chances, maybe that fool horse of his finally managed to bash him into a tree. The possibilities for freak accidents after that are endless. But they can’t have closed in for the malice kill yet.”

“Why not?”

His voice went strangely soft. “Because there would be more dead. Dag and I figured, based on Wolf Ridge, to lose up to half the company in this. That’s how I expect to know, when…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “Obio Grayheron will take command. He’s good, even if he doesn’t have that edge that…ah, gods, I hate this helpless waiting.”

“You, too?” said Fawn, her eyes widening.

He nodded simply.

A knock sounded on the doorjamb, and a quiet voice. “Problems, Fairbolt?”

Fairbolt looked up in relief. “Hoharie! Thank you for stopping over. Come on in.”

The medicine maker entered, giving Fairbolt a vague wave and Fawn a curious look. Fawn had been introduced to her by Dag and shown the medicine tent, which to Fawn’s mind nearly qualified as a building, but they had barely spoken then. Hoharie was an indeterminate age to Fawn’s eyes, not as tall as most Lakewalker women. Her summer shift did not flatter a figure like a board, but the protuberant eyes in her bony face were shrewd and not unkind. Like Dag’s eyes, they shifted colors in the light, from silver-gilt in the sun to, now, a fine gray.

Fairbolt hastened to set her a chair by the map table, and moved boxes of pegs to free two more. Fawn directed an uncertain knee-dip at her and sat where Fairbolt pointed, just around the table’s corner.

“Tell your tale, Fawn,” said Fairbolt, settling on her other side.

Fawn gulped. “Sir. Ma’am.” Fighting an urge to gabble, Fawn repeated her story, her right hand kneading her left as she spoke. She finished, “Dar accused Dag of making malice magic, but I swear it isn’t so! It wasn’t Dag’s fault—I asked him to fix my cord. Dar puts it in the worst possible light on purpose, and it makes me so mad I could spit.”

Hoharie had listened to the spate with her head cocked, not interrupting. She said mildly, “Well, let’s have a look then, Fawn.”

At her encouraging nod, Fawn laid her left arm out on the table for Hoharie’s inspection. The medicine maker’s lips twisted thoughtfully as she gazed down at it. Her fingers were thin and dry and hardly seemed to press the skin, but Fawn’s arm twinged deep inside as they drifted along. Fairbolt watched closely, occasionally remembering to breathe. Hoharie sat back at last with a hard-to-read expression.

“Well. That’s a right powerful piece of groundwork for a patroller. You been hoarding talent over here, Fairbolt?”

Fairbolt scratched his head. “If it’s so, Dag’s been hoarding himself.”

“Did he mention that thing about the glass bowl and the ghost hand to you?”

Fairbolt’s eyebrows shot up. “No…?”

“Huh.”

“Is it”—Fawn swallowed—“what Dar said? Bad magic?”

Hoharie shook her head, not so much in negation as caution. “Now, mind you, I’ve never seen a malice’s mind-slave up close. I’ve just heard about them. Though I have dissected mud-men, and there’s a tale. This almost reminds me more of matching grounds for healing, truth to tell. Which is like a dance between two grounds that push on each other. As contrasted with a shaped or unshaped ground reinforcement, where the medicine maker actually gives ground away. Could be when a malice matches ground, it’s just so powerful it compels rather than dances, pushing the other right over. Though there is a disparity in this as well…I wouldn’t be able to tell how much unless I had Dag right here.”

Fawn sighed wistfully at the notion of having Dag right here, safe.

Fairbolt said in a somewhat choked voice, “Isn’t a hundred miles away a bit far for matching grounds, Hoharie? It’s usually done skin to skin, in my experience.”

“That’s where the almost comes in. This has both, mixed. Dag’s put a bit of worked—rather delicately worked—ground reinforcement into Fawn’s left arm and hand, which is what she feels dancing with his ground in the cord. It’s all very, um…impulsive.”

Perhaps taking in the confusion in Fawn’s face, Hoharie went on: “It’s like this, child. What you farmers call magic, Lakewalker or malice, it’s all just groundwork of some kind. A maker draws the ground he works with out of himself, and has to recover by growing it back at the speed of life, no more. A malice steals ground from the world around it, insatiably, and puts nothing back. Think of a rivulet and a river in flood. The one’ll give you a nice drink on a hot day. The other will wash away your house and drown you. They’re both water. But no one sane has any trouble telling one from the other. See?”

Fawn nodded, if a bit uncertainly, to show willing.

“So is my company captain hurt or not?” said Fairbolt, shifting in impatience. “What’s going on over there in Raintree, Hoharie?”

Hoharie shook her head again. “You’re asking me to tell you what something looks like from a glimpse in a piece of broken mirror held around a corner. In the dark. Am I looking at all of it, or just a fragment? Does it correspond to anything?” She turned to Fawn. “What hurts, exactly?”

Fawn stretched and clenched her fingers. “My left hand, mostly. Up the arm it fades. Except I feel a little shivery all over.”

Fairbolt muttered, “But Dag hasn’t got a…” His face screwed up, and he scowled in a confusion briefly greater than Fawn’s.

“It’s…how shall I put this,” said Hoharie in some reluctance. “If the rest of his ground is as stressed as the bit I feel, his body must be in a pretty bad way.”

“How bad, how?” snapped Fairbolt. Which made Fawn rather glad, because she was much too frightened to yell at the medicine maker herself.

Hoharie opened her hands in a wide, frustrated shrug. “Well, not quite enough to kill him, evidently.”

Fairbolt bared his teeth at her, but then sat back in a glum slump. “If I get any sleep at all tonight, Hoharie, it won’t be your doing.”

Fawn leaned forward and stared at her hand. “I was kind of hoping you would tell me I was a stupid little farmer girl imagining things. Everybody else used to, but now that I want it…” She looked up, and added uneasily, “Dag’s not going to get in some kind of trouble for this making, is he?”

“Well, if—when he gets back I guarantee I’ll be asking him a few questions,” said Hoharie fervently. “But they won’t have anything to do with this argument before the camp council.”

“It was all my fault, truly,” said Fawn. “Dar made me afraid to tell. But I thought—I thought Fairbolt had a need and a right to know, on account of the company.”

Fairbolt pulled himself together, and said gravely, “Thank you, Fawn. You did the right thing. If you feel any changes in this, please tell me or Hoharie, will you?”

Fawn nodded earnestly. “So what do we do now?”

“What we generally have to do, farmer girl,” Fairbolt sighed. “We wait.”