Legacy

16

F or the next couple of days Dag seemed willing to rest as instructed, to Fawn’s approval, although she noticed he seemed less fidgety and fretful when she sat by him. Saun had stayed on, with Griff for his partner; Varleen replaced Dirla as Mari’s partner. There were not too many camp chores for Fawn’s hands, everyone having pretty much caught up with their cleaning and mending in the prior days, though she did spend some time out with the younger patrollers working on, or playing with, the horses. Grace hadn’t gone lame, though Fawn thought it had been a near thing. The mare was certainly recovering faster than Dag. Fawn suspected Lakewalkers used their healing magic on their horses; if not officially, certainly on the sly.

On the third day, the heavy heat was pushed on east by a cracking thunderstorm. The tree branches bent and groaned menacingly overhead, and leaves turned inside out and flashed silver. The patrollers ended up combining their tent covers—except for the one hide that blew off into the woods like a mad bat—on Dag and Fawn’s sapling frame, and clustering underneath. The nearby creek rose and ran mud-brown and foam-yellow as the blow subsided into a steady vertical downpour. By unspoken mutual assent, they all eased back and just watched it, passing around odd bits of cold food while their cook-fire pit turned into an opaque gray puddle.

Griff produced a wooden flute and instructed Saun on it for a time. Fawn recognized maybe half of the sprightly tunes. In due course Griff took it back and played a long, eerie duet with the rain, Varleen and Saun supplying muted percussion with sticks and whatever pots they had to hand. Dag and Mari seemed satisfied to listen.

Everyone went back to nibbling. Dag, who had been lying slumped against his saddlebags with his eyes closed, pushed himself slightly more upright, adjusted his left leg, and asked Saun suddenly, “You know the name of that farmer town the malice was supposed to have come up under?”

“Greenspring,” Saun replied absently, craning his neck through the open, leeward side of their shelter to look, in vain, for a break in the clouds.

“Do you know where it is? Ever been there?”

“Yeah, couple of times. It’s about twenty-five miles northwest of Bonemarsh.” He sat back on his saddlecloth and gestured vaguely at the opposite shelter wall.

Dag pursed his lips. “That must be, what, pretty nearly fifty miles above the old cleared line?”

“Nearly.”

“How was it ever let get started, up so far? It wasn’t there in my day.”

Saun shrugged. “Some settlement’s been there for as long as I’ve been alive. Three roads meet, and a river. There were a couple of mills, if I remember rightly. Sawmill first. Later, when there got to be more farms around it, they built one for grain. Blacksmith, forge, more. We’d stopped in at the blacksmith a few times, though they weren’t too friendly to patrollers.”

“Why not?” asked Fawn, willing to be indignant on Saun’s behalf.

“Old history. First few times farmers tried to settle up there, the Raintree patrollers ran them off, but they snuck back. Worse than pulling stumps, to try and get farmers off cleared land. On account of all the stumps they had to pull to clear it, I guess. There finally got to be so many of them, and so stubborn, it would have taken bloodshed to shift ’em, and folks gave up and let ’em stay on.”

Dag frowned.

Saun pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around them in the damp chill. “Fellow up there once told me Lakewalkers were just greedy, to keep such prime farming country for a hunting reserve. That his people could win more food from it with a plow than we ever could with bows and traps.”

“What we hunt, they could not eat,” growled Mari.

“That’s the same fellow who told me blight bogles were a fright story made up by Lakewalkers to keep farmers off,” Saun added a bit grimly. “You wonder where he is now.”

Griff and Varleen shook their heads. Fawn bit her lip.

Dag wound a finger in his hair, pulling gently on a strand. He was overdue for another cut, Fawn thought, unless he meant to grow it out like his comrades. “I want to look at the place before we head home.”

Griff’s brow furrowed. “That’d be a good three days out of our way, Dag.”

“Maybe only two, if we jog up and catch the northern road again.” He added after a moment, “We could leave here two days early and be home on schedule all the same.”

Mari gave him a fishy look. “Thought it was about time for you to start gettin’ resty. Hoharie said, seven days off it for that leg. We all heard her.”

“Come on, you know she padded that.”

Mari did not exactly deny this, but she did say, “And why would you want to, anyway? You know what blight looks like, without having to go look at more. It’s all the same. That’s what makes it blight.”

“Company captain’s duty. Fairbolt will want a report on how this all got started.”

“Not his territory, Dag. It’s some Raintree camp captain’s job to look into it.”

Dag’s eyelids lowered and rose, in that peculiar I-am-not-arguing-about-this look; his gaze met Fawn’s curious one. “Nonetheless, I need to see whatever can be seen. I’m not calling for a debate on this, in case any of you were confused.” A faint, rare tinge of iron entered his voice. Not arguing, apparently, but not giving way, either.

Mari’s face screwed up. “Why? I could likely give you a tolerably accurate description of it all from right where I sit, and so could you. Depressing, but accurate. What answers are you lookin’ for?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t have to go look.” More hair-twisting. “I don’t think I’m even looking for answers. I’m think I’m looking for new questions.” He gave Fawn a slow nod.

The next morning dawned bright blue, and everyone spent it getting their gear spread out in the sun or up on branches to dry out. By noon, Dag judged this task well along, and floated the notion of starting out today—in gentle, easy stages, to counter Mari’s exasperated look and mutter of Told you so. But since Mari was as sick of this place as everyone else, Dag soon had his way.

With the promise of home dangling in the distance, however round-aboutly, the youngsters had the camp broken down and bundled up in an hour, and Saun led their six mounts and the packhorse northwest. They skirted wide around the dead marsh, flat and dun in a crystalline light that still could not make it sparkle, for all that a shortcut across the blight would have saved several miles.

Halfway around, Mari drew her horse to a halt and turned her face to a vagrant moist breeze.

“What?” Saun called back, alert.

“Smell that?” said Mari.

“Right whiffy,” said Varleen, wrinkling her nose.

“Something’s starting to rot,” Dag explained to Fawn, who rode up beside him and looked anxiously inquiring. “That’s good.”

She shook her head. “You people.”

“Hope is where you find it.” He smiled down at her, then pushed Copperhead along. He could feel his weary patrol’s mood lighten just a shade.

As he’d promised Mari, they weaved through the woodlands of Raintree at a sedate walk. They rode with groundsenses open, like people trailing their hands through the weeds as they strolled, not formally patrolling, but as routine precaution. You never knew. Dag himself had once found and done for a very early sessile that way, when he was riding courier all alone in the far northeast hinterland of Seagate. Still, their amble put a good twelve miles between them and the Bonemarsh blight by the time they stopped in the early evening. Dag thought everyone slept a bit better that night; even he did, despite the throbbing ache in his healing thigh.

They started off the next day earlier, but no faster. Varleen spotted two mud-man corpses off the trail that appeared to have died naturally, running down at the end of the stolen strength the malice had given them, suggesting the hazard from the rest of their cohort was now much reduced. Even at this slow pace, the little patrol came up on the first noxious pinching of the blight around Greenspring by midafternoon.

In the shade of the last live trees before the trail opened out into cleared fields, Dag held up his hook, and everyone pulled their mounts to a halt.

“We don’t all have to go in. We could set up a camp here. You could stay with Varleen and Griff, Fawn. Blight this deep will be draining, even if you can’t feel it. Bad for you. And…it could be ugly.” Will be ugly.

Fawn leaned on her pommel and gave him a sharp look. “If it’s bad for me, won’t it be worse for you? Convalescing as you aren’t—at least not any too fast, that I can see.”

Mari vented a sour chuckle. “She’s got you there.”

Fawn took a breath and sat up. “This place—it’s something like West Blue, right?”

“Maybe,” Dag allowed.

“Then—I need to see it, too.” She gave a firm little nod.

They exchanged a long look; her resolve rang true. Should I be surprised? “Soonest begun, soonest done, then. We won’t linger long.” Dag braced himself and waved Saun onward.

They rode first past deserted farms: sickly, then dying, then dead, then dead with a peculiar gray tinge that was quite distinctive. Dag knew it well and furled his groundsense in tight around him, as did the other patrollers. It didn’t help quite enough.

“What are we looking for?” asked Griff, as the first buildings of a little town hove into view past a screen of bare and broken buckthorn bushes, someone’s scraggly attempt at a hedge.

“I’d like to find the lair, to start,” said Dag. “See where the malice started out, try to figure why it wasn’t spotted.”

It wasn’t that hard; they just followed the gradient of blight deeper and deeper. It felt like riding into a dark hollow, for all that the land here was as level as the rest of Raintree. The flattened vegetation grew grayer, and even the clapboard houses, with their fences leaning drunkenly, seemed drained of all color. It all smelled as dry and odorless as cave dust. The town was maybe twice the size of West Blue, Dag gauged. It had three or four streets. A sturdy wharf jutted into a river worthy of the name and not just a jumped-up creek, which seemed to flow deeply enough to float small keelboats up from the Grace, and certainly rafts and flatboats down. A square for a day market; alehouse and smithy and forge; perhaps two hundred houses. A thousand people, formerly. None now.

The pit of the blight seemed to lie in a woodlot at the edge of the town. The horses snorted uneasily as their riders forced them forward. A shallow, shale-lined ravine with a small creek running through it shadowed a near cave partway up one side, not unlike the one they’d seen near Glassforge, if much smaller. It was quite empty now, the shale slumping in a slide to half block the water. Alongside the creek the earth was pocked with man-wide, man-deep pits, so thickly clustered in places as to seem like a wasp nest broken open. The malice’s first mud-man nursery, likely.

“With all these people around,” said Griff, “it’s hard to believe that no one spotted any of the early malice signs.”

“Maybe someone did,” said Fawn, “and no one paid them any mind. Being too young and short. The woodlot is common for the whole town. You bet the youngsters here played in that creek all the time, and in these woods.”

Dag hunched over his saddlebow and inhaled carefully, steadying his shuddering stomach. Yes. Malice food indeed, of the richest sort. Delivered up. This was how the malice had started so fast. He remembered its beauty in the silver light. How many molts…? As many as it liked.

“Did no one know to run?” asked Varleen. “Or did it just come up too quick?”

“It came up fast, sure, but not that fast,” opined Mari. She frowned at Dag’s huddle. “Some were killed by ill luck, but I expect more were killed by ignorance.”

“Why were—” Fawn began, and stopped.

Dag turned his head and raised his brows at her.

“I was going to say, why were they so ignorant,” she said in a lower voice. “But I was just as ignorant myself, not long back. So I guess I know why.”

Dag, still wordless with the nightmare images running through his mind, just shook his head and turned Copperhead around. They rode up from the ravine on the widest beaten path.

As they returned down the main street near the wharf, Saun’s head suddenly came up. “I swear I hear voices.”

Dag eased his groundsense open slightly, snapping it back again almost at once, cringing at the searing sensation. But he’d caught the life-sparks. “Over that way.”

They rode on, turning down a side street lined with bare trees and empty houses, some new clapboard, the older ones log-sided. A few had broken glass windows; most still made do with old-fashioned parchment and summer netting, though also split or ripped. The street became a rutted lane, beyond which lay a broad field, its trampled grass and weeds gray-dun. A score or so of human figures milled about on its far end along what used to be a tree line. A few carts with dispirited horses hitched to them stood by.

“They can’t be back trying to farm this!” said Saun in dismay.

“No,” said Dag, rising in his stirrups and squinting, “it’s no crop they’re planting today.”

“They’re digging graves,” said Mari quietly. “Must be some refugees who’ve come back to try and find their kin, same as at Bonemarsh.”

Griff shook his head in regret.

Dag hitched his reins into his hook, for all that his left arm was still very weak, to free his hand. He waved the patrol forward, but with a cautioning gesture brought them to a halt again at a little distance from the Greenspring survivors.

The townsmen formed up in a ragged rank, clutching shovels and mattocks in a way that reminded Dag a lot of the Horsefords’ first fearful approach to him, sitting so meekly on their porch. If the Horsefords had suffered reason to be nervy, these folks had cause to be half-crazed. Or maybe all-the-way crazed.

After an exchange of looks and low mutters, a single spokesman stepped out of the pack and moved cautiously toward the patrol, stopping a few prudent paces off, but within reasonable hearing distance. Good. Reassurances might work better delivered in a soothing tone, rather than bellowed. Dag touched his temple. “How de’.”

The man returned a short, grudging nod. He was middle-aged, careworn, dressed in work clothes due for mending that hadn’t been washed for weeks, an almost welcome whiff of something human in this odorless place. His face was so gray with fatigue as to look blighted while alive. Dag thought, unwillingly, of Sorrel Bluefield again.

“You folks shouldn’t be on this sick ground,” Dag began.

“It’s our ground,” the man returned, his stare distant.

“It’s been poisoned by the blight bogle. It’ll go on poisoning you if you linger on it.”

The man snorted. “I don’t need some Lakewalker corpse-eater to tell me that.”

Dag tried a brief, acknowledging nod. “You can bury your dead here if you like, though I wouldn’t advise it, but you should not camp here at night, leastways.”

“There’s shelter still standing.” The townsman raised his chin and scowled, and added in a tone of warning, “We’ll be guarding this ground tonight. In case you all were thinking of sneaking back.”

What did the fellow imagine? That Dag’s patrol had come around to try to steal the bodies of their dead? Infuriated protests rose in his mind: We would not do such a foul thing. We have plenty of corpses of our own just now, thank you all the same. Farmer bones are of no use to us, ground-ripped bones are no use to us, and as for ground-ripped farmer bones…! Teeth tight, he let nothing escape but a flat, “You do that.”

Perhaps uneasily realizing he’d given offense, the townsman did not apologize, but at least slid sideways: “And how else will we find each other, if any more come back? The bogle cursed us and marched us off all over the place…”

Had he been one of the bewildered mind-slaves? It seemed so. “Did no one know to run for help, when the bogle first came up? To spread a warning?”

“What help?” The man huffed again. “You Lakewalkers on your high horses rode us down. I was there.” His voice fell. “We were all mad with the bogle spells, yes, but…”

“They had to defend—” Dag began, and stopped. The cluster of nervous townsmen had not put down their tool-weapons, nor dispersed back to their forlorn task. He glanced aside at Fawn, watching in concern from atop Grace, and rubbed his aching forehead. He said instead, abruptly, “How about if I get down from this high horse? Will you step away and talk with me?”

A pause, a stare. A nod.

Dag steeled himself to dismount. Varleen, watching closely, slid down and went to Copperhead’s bridle, and Saun dropped from his own mount, unshipped the hickory staff that he’d carted along slotted under his saddle flap, and stepped to Dag’s stirrup. Dag’s leg did not quite turn under him as he landed on it, and he exchanged an almost-smile with Saun as the youth carefully unhanded his arm, both, he thought, thrown back in memory to their night attack on the bandit camp, ages ago. He gripped the staff and turned to the townsman, who was blinking as if he was just now taking in the details of his interrogator’s ragged condition.

Dag pointed to a lone dead tree, blown or fallen down in the field, and the townsman nodded again. As Dag swung the staff and limped toward it, he found Fawn at his left side. Her hand slipped around his arm, not yet in support, but ready if his leg folded again. He wondered if he should chase her back to Grace, spare her what promised to be some grim details. He dismissed his doubts—too late anyway—as they arrived at the thick trunk. She speaks farmer. With that thought, Dag guided Fawn around to sit between them. Both men could see over her head better than she could see around Dag, and…if this fellow’s most recent view of a Lakewalker patroller had been looking up the wrong end of a spear, he could likely use a spacer. We both could.

Dag breathed a little easier as the mob of townsmen went back to their digging. Now it was the Lakewalkers’ turn to stand in a tight cluster, holding their horses and watching Dag uneasily.

“This bogle was bad for everyone,” Dag began again. “Raintree Lakewalkers lost folks, too, and homes. Bonemarsh Camp’s been blighted—it’ll have to be abandoned for the next thirty or more years, I reckon. This place, longer.”

The man grunted, whether in agreement or disagreement was hard to tell. Maybe just in pain.

“Have very many people come back? To find each other?” Fawn put in.

The man shrugged. “Some. Most of us here knew we’d be coming as a burial party, but…some. I found my wife,” he added after a moment.

“That’s good, then,” said Fawn in a tone of encouragement.

“She’s buried over there,” the townsman added, pointing to a long mound of turned earth along the tree line. Mass grave, Dag thought.

“Oh,” said Fawn, more quietly.

“They waited for us to come back,” the man continued. “All the wives and daughters. All the boys. The old folks. It was like there was something strange and holy happened to their bodies, because they didn’t rot, not even in the heat. It’s like they were waiting for us to come back and find them.”

Dag swallowed, and decided this was not the moment to explain the more arcane features of deep blight.

“I’m so sorry,” said Fawn softly.

The man shrugged. “Could have been worse. Daisy and Cooper over there, they found each other alive just an hour ago.” He nodded toward a man and one of the few women, who were both sitting on the tail of a wagon. Staring blankly, with their backs to each other.

Fawn’s little hand touched the man’s knee; he flinched. “And…why worse?” Fawn could ask such things; Dag would not have dared. He was glad she was here.

“Daisy, she’d thought Coop had their youngsters with him. Coop, he thought she’d had them with her. They’d had four.” He added after a moment, “We’re saving the children for last, see, in case more folks show up. To look.” Dag followed his glance to a line of stiff forms lying half-hidden in the distant weeds. Behind it, the men were starting to dig a trench. It was longer than the finished mound.

“Are the orphans being sheltered somewhere off the blight?” Fawn asked. Thinking absent-gods-knew-what; about someone brokering some bright arrangement to hook up the lost half families with one another, if he knew her.

The man glanced down at her. Likely she looked as young to him as she did to Dag, for he said more gently, “No orphans here, miss.”

“But…” She sucked on her lower lip, obviously thinking through the implication.

“We’ve found none alive here under twelve. Nor many over.”

Dag said quietly, as she looked up at him as if he could somehow fix this, “Next to pregnant women, children have the richest grounds for a malice building up to a molt. It goes for them first, preferentially. When Bonemarsh was evacuated, the young women would have grabbed up all the youngsters and run at once. The others following as they could, with what animals and supplies they could get at fast, with the off-duty patrollers as rear guard. The children would have been got out in the first quarter hour, and the whole camp in as little more. They did lose folks beyond the range of warning—some of those makers we freed from the groundlock had stayed to try and reach a party of youngsters who’d gone out gathering that day.”

Fawn frowned. “I hadn’t heard that part of the tale. Did they find them in time?”

Dag sighed. “No. Some of the Bonemarsh folk who came back later recovered the bodies, finally. For a burial not so different than this.” He nodded toward the mounds; the townsman, listening, stared down and dug his boot heel into the dry soil, brows pinching in wonder. Yes, thought Dag. Witness her. Farmers can ask, and be answered. Won’t you try us?

“Did they take their—” Fawn shut up abruptly, remembering not to ask about knife-bones in front of farmers, Dag guessed. She just shook her head.

The townsman gave Dag a sidelong look. “You’re not from Bonemarsh. Are you.”

“No. My company rode over from Oleana to help out. We’re on our way home now.”

“Dag’s patrol killed your blight bogle,” Fawn put in, a little proudly. “When the malice’s—bogle’s curse lifted from your mind, that was when.”

“Huh,” said the man. And then, after a bleak silence, “Could have been sooner.”

Stung to brusqueness, Dag said, “If any of you had owned the wits to run and give warning at the first, it could have been a lot sooner. We did all we could with what we had, as soon as we knew.”

A stubborn silence stretched between them. There was too much grief and strain here, thick as mire, for argument or apology today. Dag had pretty much pieced together the picture he’d come for. It was maybe time to go.

A trio of townsmen came out of the barren woods, back from some errand there—pissing, searching? — and stopped to gape at the newcomers. One grizzled head came up sharply; staring, the man began to walk toward the fallen tree, faster and faster. His stride turned into a jog, then a run; his face grew wild, and he waved frantically, crying, “Sassy! Sassy!”

Dag stiffened, his hand drifting to his knife haft. The townsman beside Fawn straightened up with a moan and held out his palm in a gesture of negation, shaking his head. The runner slowed as he neared, gasping for breath, rubbing his red-rimmed eyes and peering at Fawn. In a voice gone gray, he said, “You aren’t my Sassy.”

“No, sir,” said Fawn, looking up apologetically. “I’m Dag’s Fawn.”

He continued to peer. “Are you one of ours? Did those patrollers bring you back?” He waved toward the Lakewalkers still standing warily with their horses. “We can try and find your folks…”

“No, sir, I’m from Oleana.”

“Why are you with them?”

“I’m married to one.”

Taken aback, the man turned his head to squint; his gaze narrowed on Saun, who was standing holding Copperhead’s reins, watching them alertly. The man’s mouth turned down in a scowl. “If that’s what that boy told you, missie, I’m afraid he was lying.”

“He’s not—” She broke off as Dag covered and squeezed her hand in warning.

The grizzled man took a breath. “If you want to stay here, missie, we could find you, find you…” He trailed off, looking around dolefully.

“Shelter?” muttered his comrade. “Not hardly.” He stood up and squeezed his friend’s shoulder. “Give it over. She’s not our business. Not today.”

With a disappointed glance over his shoulder, the grizzled man dragged off.

“I hope he finds his Sassy,” said Fawn. “Who was—is she? His daughter?”

“Granddaughter,” replied the townsman.

“Ah.”

“We need to get off this blight, Fawn,” said Dag, wondering if, had it been some other day, the townsmen would have made Fawn their business. Disquieting thought, but the dangerous moment, if that had been one, was past.

“Oh, of course.” She jumped up at once. “You’ve got to be feeling it. How’s your leg doing?”

“It’ll be well enough once I’m in the saddle again.” He grounded the butt of the hickory stick and levered himself up. He was starting to ache all over, like a fever. The townsman trailed along after them as Dag hobbled back to his horse.

It took Saun and Varleen both to heave Dag aboard Copperhead, this time. He settled with a sigh, and even let Saun find his left stirrup for him and take away his stick. Varleen gave Fawn a neat boost up on Grace, and Fawn smiled thanks.

“You ready, Dag?” Saun asked, patting the leg.

“As I’ll ever be,” Dag responded.

As Saun went around to his horse, the townsman’s eyebrows rose. “You’re her Dag?” Surprise and deep disapproval edged his voice.

“Yes,” said Dag. They stared mutely at each other. Dag started to add, “Next time, don’t—” but then broke off. This was not the hour, the place, or the man. So when, where, and who will be?

The townsman’s lips tightened. “I doubt you and I have anything much to say to each other, patroller.”

“Likely not.” Dag raised his hand to his temple and clucked to urge Copperhead forward.

Fawn wheeled Grace around. Dag was afraid she’d caught the darker undercurrents after all, because the struggle was plain in her face between respect for bereavement and a goaded anger. She leaned down, and growled at the townsman, “You might try thank you. Somebody should say it, at least once before the end of the world.”

Disconcerted, the townsman dropped his eyes before her hot frown, then looked after her with an unsettled expression on his face.

As they left the blighted town and struck east up a wagon road alongside the river, Mari asked dryly, “Satisfied with your look-see, Dag?”

He grunted in response.

Her voice softened. “You can’t fix everything in the whole wide green world by yourself, you know.”

“Evidently not.” And, after a moment, more quietly, “Maybe no one can.”

Fawn eyed him with worry as he slumped in his saddle, but he did not suggest stopping. He wanted a lot more miles between him and what lay behind him. Greenspring. Should it be renamed Deadspring on the charts, now? Mari had been right; he’d had no need for a new crop of nightmares, let alone to have gone looking for them. He was justly served. Even Fawn had grown quiet. No answers, no questions, just silence.

He rode in it as they turned north across the river, looking for the road home.