Legacy

6

D ag returned from the medicine tent reluctant to speak of the unsettling incident with the maker’s apprentice, but in any case, no one asked; instead, five persons took the chance to tell him that he needed to teach his wife to swim. Dag thought the idea fine, but Fawn seemed to find the fact that he still wore splints and a sling to be a great relief to her mind.

“Well, you certainly can’t go swimming with that rig on,” she said firmly. “When will you have it off, did they say?”

“Soon.”

She relaxed, and he did not clarify that soon could well mean tomorrow.

Sarri’s little boy, having been coaxed earlier into hauling rocks for their fire pit and warmly praised for his efforts by his fathers, had crept back to the task, toddling across the clearing with stones as big as his little fingers could clutch and flinging them in with great determination. It set off a small crisis when his excess offerings were removed. His outraged tears were diverted by a treat from Fawn’s dwindling store of farm fare, and Dag, grinning, hauled him back to his assorted parents. That evening, Dag and Fawn boiled tea water on their first home fire, even if supper was cold plunkin again. Fawn looked as though she was finally beginning to understand all the plunkin jokes.

They burned the rinds and sat together by the crackling flames, watching through the trees as the sunset light faded on the farther shore. For all his weary unease, Dag still found it a pleasure just to look at the play of light and shadow across Fawn’s features, the shine and spring of her hair, the gleam of her dark eyes. He wondered if gazing upon her face through time would be like watching sunsets, never quite the same twice yet unfailing in joy.

As the shadows deepened, the tree frogs in the woods piped a raucous descant to the deep croaking of bullfrogs hidden in the rushes. At last it was time to wave good night across the campsite at the others turning in, and drop the tent flap. By the light of a good beeswax candle, a gift from Sarri, they undressed and lay down in their bedroll. A few hours in Fawn’s company had soothed Dag’s strained nerves, but he must still have looked tense and absent, for she ran her hand along his face, and said, “You look tired. Do you…want to…?”

“I could grow less tired.” He kissed her curls away from her face and let his ground ease open a trifle. “Hm.”

“Hm?”

“Your ground is very pretty tonight. Glittery. I think your days of fertility are starting up.”

“Oh!” She sat up on one elbow. “Am I getting better, then?”

“Yes, but…” He sat half-up as well. “From what Mari said, you should be healing up inside at about the same rate as outside. Ground and flesh are still deep-damaged, and will recover slowly. From these”—he touched his lips to the carmine dimples in her neck—“my guess is your womb’s not ready to risk a child yet, nor will be for some months.”

“No. Nor is the rest of me, really.” She rolled back and stared up at their hide roof. “I never thought to have a baby in a tent, though I suppose Lakewalker ladies do. We’re not prepared for winter or anything, really. Not enough”—her hands waved uncertainly—“things.”

“We travel lighter than farmers.”

“I saw the inside of Sarri’s cabin. Tent. She doesn’t travel all that light. Not with children.”

“Well, that’s so. When all of Dar and Omba’s children were home, shifting camp in season was a major undertaking. I usually tried to be out on patrol,” he admitted ruefully.

Fawn sighed in uncertainty, and continued, “It’s past midsummer. Time to be making and saving. Getting ready for the cold and the dark.”

“Believe me, there is a steady stream of plunkins on their way to winter stores in Bearsford even as we speak. I used to ride that route as a horse boy in the summers, before I was old enough to go for patroller. Though in this season, it’s easier to move the folks to the food than the food to the folks.”

“Only plunkin?”

“The fruit and nuts will be coming on soon. A lot of the pigs we eat here. One per tent per season, so with four tents on this site, that makes four pig-roasts. Fish. Turkey, of course, and the hunters bring in venison from the woods on the mainland. I used to do that as a boy, too, and sometimes I go out with them between patrols. I’ll show you how Stores works tomorrow.”

She glanced up at him, catching her lower lip with her white teeth. “Dag—what’s our plan, here?” One small hand reached out to trace over his splinted arm. “What happens to me when you go back out on patrol? Because Mari and Razi and Utau—everyone I know—will all be gone then, too.”

He hardly needed groundsense to feel the apprehension in her. “By then, I figure, you’ll be better acquainted with Sarri and Cattagus and Mari’s daughter and her family. Cattagus is Sarri’s uncle, by the way—he’s an Otter by birth, as if you couldn’t tell. My plan is to lie up quiet, get folks used to the idea of you. They will in time, I figure, like they grew used to Sarri’s having two husbands.”

And yet…normally, when patrollers went out, they could be sure their spouses would be looked after in their absences, first by their families, then by their patrol comrades, then by the whole community. It was a trust Dag had always taken for granted, as solid as rock under his feet. It was deeply disturbing to imagine that trust instead cracking like misjudged ice.

He went on in a casual voice, “I think I might skip the next patrol going out and take some of my unused camp time. Plenty to do here. Sometimes, between patrols, I help Omba train her young horses, get them used to a big man up. She mostly has a flock of girls for apprentices, see.”

Fawn looked unconvinced. “Do you suppose Dar and your mama will be speaking to you again by then?”

Dag shrugged. “The next move is up to them. It’s plain Dar doesn’t like this marriage, but he detests rows. He’ll let it pass unless he’s pressed to act. Mama…had her warning. She has ways of making me crazy, and I suppose the reverse is true, but she’s not stupid. And she’d be the last person on the lake to invite the camp council to tell her what to do. She’ll keep it in the family. All we need do is let time go by and not borrow trouble.”

She eased back in reassurance, but there remained a dark streak in her spirit, interlaced with the fresh brightness from her recovering body. Dag suspected the strangeness of it all was beginning to accumulate. He’d seen homesickness devastate young patrollers far less dislocated than Fawn, and he resolved to find familiar tasks for her hands tomorrow. Yes, let her be as busy as she was used to being, till her balance grew steadier.

Meanwhile—here inside Tent Bluefield—the task to hand was surely growing less frantic and more familiar, but no less enchanting for all of that. Back to taking turns. He sought her tender lips in a kiss, opening his heart to all the intricacy of her ground, dark and light together.

Dag vanished for a couple of hours the next morning, but returned for lunch—plunkin again, but he didn’t seem to mind. Then, as promised, he took Fawn to the mysterious Stores. This proved to be a set of long sheds tucked into the woods, down the road past the patroller headquarters. Inside one, they found what appeared to be a woman clerk; at any rate, she sat at a table scratching in a ledger with a quill, surrounded by shelves crammed with more ledgers. A toddler lay asleep in a sort of wooden pen next to her. More sets of shelves, ceiling-high, marched back in rows the length of the building. The dim air smelled of leather and herbs and less-identifiable things.

While Fawn walked up and down the rows of shelves, staring at the goods with which they were crammed, Dag engaged the woman in a low-voiced consultation, which involved dragging out several more ledgers and marking off and initialing lists therein. At one point Dag said, “You still have those?” in a voice of surprise, laughed, and dipped the quill to mark some more. His splints, Fawn noticed, hardly seemed to slow him down today, and he was constantly taking his arm out of the sling.

Dag then led Fawn up and down the rows and had her help him collect furs and other leather goods according to some scheme of his own. A half dozen beautiful dark brown pelts looking like the coats of some extraordinary ferret-shaped creature he explained as coming from mink, small woodland predators from north of the Dead Lake; an exquisite white pelt, soft as whipped cream, was from a winter fox, but it was like no fox fur Fawn had ever seen or touched. These, he said, could be bride-gifts for Mama and Aunt Nattie, and Fawn had to agree they were marvelously better than the local hides they’d rejected back at Lumpton Market.

“Every patrol usually brings back something,” Dag explained. “It varies with where they’ve been and what opportunities they’ve found. Whatever part of his or her share a patroller doesn’t want or can’t use is turned over to Stores, and the patroller gets a credit for them, either to draw the equivalent item out later or trade for something of use. Excess accumulations are taken down to farmer country to trade for other things we need. After all my years of patrolling, I have a long credit at Stores. You be thinking about what you want, Spark, and chances are we can find something like.”

“Cooking ware?” she said hopefully.

“Next building over,” he promised.

One at a time, he pulled three more folded hides from dusty back shelves, and Fawn staggered under the weight of each as they took them to the clerk’s table to be signed out. He also, after judicious study, selected a sturdy packsaddle in good condition from a rack of such horse gear. They hauled it all out through the double doors onto the end porch.

Dag prodded the three big bundles with his toe. “Now these,” he said, “are actually my own. Bit surprised to still find them here. Two were sent down from Luthlia after I came home, and the other I picked up about three years back during a winter season I spent patrolling in the far south. This one, I figure for your papa. Go ahead and unroll it.”

Fawn picked apart the stiff, dry rawhide cords and unfolded what appeared to be an enormous wolf skin. “My word, Dag! This thing must have been as big as a horse!”

“Very nearly.”

She frowned. “You can’t tell me that was a natural beast.”

“No. Mud wolf. The very one they found me under at Wolf Ridge, I’m told. My surviving tent-brothers—you’d say brothers-in-law—skinned and tanned it for me. Never had the heart to tell them I didn’t want it. I put it in Stores thinking someone would take it off, but there it’s sat ever since.”

She wondered if this same beast had savaged his left hand. “It would make a rug for our whole parlor, back in West Blue. But it would be rather horrible, knowing how you came by it.”

“I admit I’ve no desire to look at it. Depending on how your papa feels about me by now, he might wish it hadn’t stopped gnawing on me so soon, but on the whole I think I won’t explain its history. The other two are worth a look as well.”

Fawn unfolded the second big pelt, and recoiled. Heavy black leather in a shape altogether too human was scantily covered with long, ratty gray hair; the mask of the thing, which had a manlike look, still had the fanged jaw attached.

“Another mud wolf. Different version. Fast and vicious, and they moved like shadows in the dark. That one for Reed and Rush, I think,” said Dag.

“Dag, that’s evil.” Fawn thought it through. “Good choice.”

Dag chuckled. “Give them something to wonder about, I figure.”

“It’ll give them nightmares, I should imagine!” Or was that, I hope? “Did you kill it?” And for pity’s sake, how?

Dag squinted at the mummified horror. “Probably. If not that one, plenty like it.”

Fawn refolded and bound up both old hides, and undid the third. It was thinner and more supple, and hairless. She unrolled and kept unrolling, her brows rising in astonishment, until fully nine feet of…of whatever it was lay out on the porch floor. The fine leather had a beautiful pattern, almost like snakeskin magnified, and gleamed smoothly under her hand, bronze green shading to rich red-brown. For all that the animal was as long as a horse, it seemed to have had short, stubby legs; wicked black claws still dangled from their ends. The jaws of this one, too, had been set back in place after tanning, and were frankly unbelievable, like a stretched-out bear trap made of teeth.

“What kind of malice made that? And what poor creature was it made from?”

“Not a mud-man at all. It’s an alligator—a southern swamp lizard. A real, natural animal. We think. Unless one of our ancestor-mages got really drunk. Malices do not, thank all the absent gods, emerge too often so far south of the Dead Lake, but what happens when they do get hold of these fellows is scarcely to be imagined. The southern wetlands are one of the places you want to do your patrolling in winter, because cold makes the alligators, and the alligator-men, sluggish. That one we just caught on an ordinary hunting and trapping run, though.”

“Ordinary? It looks as if it could eat a man in two bites!”

“They’re a danger along the shores of the channels. They lie in the water like logs, but they can move fast when they want. They clamp onto their prey and drag it down into the water to drown, and rip it up later, after it rots a bit.” He bent and ran his fingers along the shiny hide. “I should think your papa and Whit could both get a pair of boots out of this one, and belts and something for your mama as well.”

“Dag,” said Fawn curiously, “have you ever seen the sea?”

“Oh, yeah, couple of times. The south shore, that is, around the mouth of the Gray River. I’ve not seen the eastern sea.”

“What’s it like?”

He sat back, squatting, fingers still caressing the swamp-lizard skin, and a meditative look came over his face. “First time was almost thirty years ago. Never forget it. West of the Gray, between the river and the Levels, the land is flat and mostly treeless. All mounted patrols in that wide-sky country. Our company commander had us all spread out, half a mile or more apart, in one long line—that sweep must have been fifty miles across. We rode straight south, day after day. Spring it was, the air all soft and blue, and new green coming up all around, and flowers everywhere. Best patrolling I ever did in my life. We even found one sessile, and did for it without hardly pausing. The rest was just riding along in the sunshine, dangling our feet out of the stirrups, scanning the ground, just barely keeping touch with the patrollers to the right and left. End of the week, the color of the sky changed, got all silvery and light, and we came up over these sand dunes, and there it was…” His voice trailed off. He swallowed. “The rollers were foaming in over the sand, grumbling and grumbling, never stopping. I never knew there were so many shades of blue and gray and green. The sea was as wide and flat as the Levels, but alive. You could feel with your groundsense how alive it was, as if it was the mother of the whole wide green world. I sat and stared…We all dismounted and took off our boots, and got silly for a while, running in and out of that salty water, warm as milk.”

“And then what happened?” Fawn asked, almost holding her breath.

Dag shrugged. “Camped for the night on the beach, turned the line around and shifted it fifty miles, and rode back north. It turned cold and rained on the way back, though, and we found nothing for our pains.” He added after a moment, “Wood washed up on the beach burns with the most beautiful strange colors. Never saw anything like.”

His words were simple and plain, as his words usually were; Fawn scarcely knew why she felt as though she were eavesdropping on a man at prayers, or why water blurred her eyes.

“Dag…” she said. “What’s beyond the sea?”

His brows twitched up. “No one’s sure.”

“Could there be other lands?”

“Oh, that. Yes. Or there were, once. The oldest maps show other continents, three of them. The original charts are long gone, so it’s anyone’s guess how accurate the copies are. But if any ships have gone to see what’s still there, they haven’t come back that I ever heard. People have different theories. Some say the gods have interdicted us, and that anyone who ventures out too far is destroyed by holy curses. Some guess the other lands got blighted, and are now all dead from shore to shore, and no one’s there anymore. I’m not too fond of that picture. But you’d think, if there were other folks across the seas, and they had ships, some might have got blown off course sometime in the last thousand years, and I’ve never heard tell of any such. Maybe the people over there have interdicted us, till our task is done and all’s safe again. That would be sensible.”

He paused, gazing into some time or distance Fawn could not see, and continued, “Legend has it there is, or once was, another enclave of survivors on our continent, to the west of the Levels and the great mountains that were supposed to be beyond them. Maybe we’ll find out if that’s true someday, if anyone, us or them, ever tries to sail all around the shore of this land. Wouldn’t need such grand ships for hugging the coast.”

“With silver sails,” Fawn put in.

He smiled. “I think that’s got to happen sometime. Don’t know if I’ll live to see it. If…”

“If?”

“If we can keep the malices down long enough for folks to get ahead. The river men are bold enough to try, but it would risk a lot of resources, as well as lives. You’d need a rich man, a prince or a great lord, to fund such a voyage, and they’re extinct.”

“Or a bunch of well-off men,” Fawn suggested. “Or a whole big bunch of quite ordinary men.”

“And one fast-talking lunatic to coax the money out of their pockets. Well, maybe.” He smiled thoughtfully, considering this vision, but then shook his head and rose. Fawn carefully rerolled the astonishing swamp-lizard skin.

Dag went back inside to cadge paper, ink, and quills from the clerk, then they both sat at the nearest trestle table in the dappled shade to write their letters to West Blue. Fawn didn’t miss West Blue—she’d longed to get away, and she hadn’t changed her mind on that—but she couldn’t say her feet were planted in their new soil yet. Given the way Lakewalkers kept moving around, maybe home would never be a place. It would be Dag. She watched him across the table, scribbling with his quill clutched in his right fingers and holding down the paper, lifting in the warm breeze, with his hook. She bent her head to her own task.

Dear Mama, Papa, and Aunt Nattie. We got here day before yesterday. Had it only been two days? I am fine. The lake is very… She brushed the quill over her chin, and decided she really ought to say more than wet. She wrote large, instead. We met up with Dag’s aunt Mari again. She has a nice…Fawn scratched out the start of cabin and wrote tent. Dag’s arm is getting better. And onward in that vein, till she’d filled half the page with unexceptionable remarks. Too much blank space left. She decided to describe Sarri’s children, and their campsite, which filled the rest with enough cheery word pictures to grow cramped toward the end. There.

So much left out. Patroller headquarters, and Fairbolt Crow’s peg-board. Dar, the unnerving bone shack, Dag’s angry mama, the futility of the sharing knife after all this journey. Dag’s dark, nervy mood. The threat of swimming lessons. Naked swimming lessons, at that. Some things were best left out.

Dag, finishing, handed his letter across for her to read. It was very polite and plain, almost like an inventory, making clear which gifts were for which family members. Both horses and the packsaddle were to be Mama’s, as well as some of the fine furs. The mud-man skin for the twins was blandly described, entirely without comment. Fawn grinned as she pictured the three alarming hides being unpacked at West Blue.

Dag stepped inside and returned the quills and ink to the clerk, coming out with the letters folded and sealed just in time to greet a girl who rode up, bareback, on a tall, elegant, dappled gray mare. A dark foal about four months old pranced after, flicking his fuzzy ears; he had the most beautifully shaped head and deepest liquid eyes Fawn had ever seen on a colt, and she spent the time while Dag and the girl organized the packsaddle trying to make up to him. He flirted with her in turn, yielding at last to ear scratching just there. Fawn couldn’t imagine her mother riding that mare, nor any of her family; maybe the dappled beauty could be broken to harness and pull the light cart to the village, though. That would turn a few heads.

A man dressed as a patroller came riding from the direction of the headquarters building. He turned out to be a courier on his way south, apparently a trusted comrade; exactly what old favor Dag was calling in was not clear to Fawn, but however dubiously he greeted the farmer bride or raised his brows at Dag, he had undertaken to deliver the bride-gifts. He stopped with them long enough to get a clear description of the Bluefield farm and how to find it, and then he was off, with the silvery mare following meekly on a lead and the colt capering and scampering. The horse girl, trudging back to Mare Island, looked after them with a downright heartbroken expression.

Dag then led Fawn off to the next storehouse, where they found some lightly used cooking gear—not a proper kitchen’s worth, but at least a few things to permit more elaborate meals over an open fire than sliced raw plunkin and tea. And, to Fawn’s joy, several pounds of cotton from south of the Grace River, cleaned and combed, an equally generous bag of washed wool, and three hanks of good flax. The tools Aunt Nattie had given Fawn for a wedding present would find their proper use. Despite her burdens her steps were lighter turning back toward their campsite, and she made plans for getting Dag to hold still long enough to measure his gnarly feet for socks.

The following day Dag returned from the medicine tent with no sling or splints, but with a smile on his face that would hardly go away. He flexed and stretched his hand gratefully. He reported he’d been instructed to take it easy for another week, which he interpreted liberally as no weapons practice yet. Everything else he embraced immediately, including Fawn.

To her muffled alarm, the next thing he did that afternoon was make her put down her spindle and go with him for her first swimming lesson. She was distracted from her fear of the water only by her embarrassment at their lack of clothes, but somehow Dag made both better. They picked their way past the bending cattails into water to his waist and her chest. At least the lake’s murkiness gave them a more decent cloak, its greeny-gold translucence turning opaque just a short way down. The top foot of the water was as warm in the sun as a bath; beneath that it grew cooler. The soft mud squelched between Fawn’s curling toes. They were accompanied by a dizzy escort of water bugs, flocks of little black ovals that whirled merrily like beads on a string, and agile water striders, their thin legs making dimples in the brown surface as they skated along. Dag promptly made the bead-shaped bugs an example to Fawn, inviting her to spin them down in little whirlpools with her hands and watch them bob right back to the surface.

Dag insisted she was naturally more buoyant than he, taking the opportunity to pat her most buoyant parts. Fawn thought his assertion that It doesn’t matter how deep the water is, Spark, you’re only going to use the top two feet overly optimistic, but under the influence of his confidence and unfailing good cheer, she gradually began to relax in the water. By the second day, to her own astonishment, she floated for the first time in her life; on the third afternoon, she achieved a dog paddle of several yards.

Even Dag had to admit that the lake’s muddiness made Hickory Lake residents all tend to smell a bit green by the end of the summer—sooner than that, Fawn did not say aloud—but Sarri took Fawn into the woods and showed her where a clear spring ran that not only allowed her to give lake-scrubbed clothes a final rinse, but also to draw water that didn’t need to be boiled before drinking. Fawn managed her first laundry day, and sniffed their clothes, drying on a line strung between two trees, with satisfaction at a job well done.

That afternoon, Dag came in with a small turkey to pluck. Fawn happily started a bag to save feathers, looking ahead to pillows and ticks. They roasted the bird over their fire and invited Mari and Cattagus to help eat it up. Fawn ended the evening casting on her first cotton yarn to her double-ended needle set for Dag’s socks, and feeling that this place might become home after all.

Two days later, instead of a swimming lesson, Dag took her out in one of the narrow boats. He had a specially shaped hook for his wrist cuff that allowed him to manage his paddle. Fawn, after a brief lesson on the dock, was placed in the front with a paddle of her own. She felt nervous and clumsy at first, looking over all that expanse of water with Dag out of sight behind her, but she soon fell into the rhythm of the task. Around behind Walnut Island, winking water gave way to a surface that was downright glassy, and Fawn relaxed still more. They paused to admire a dead tree reflected in the water, its bare white branches startling against the green of the woods. It was a roosting place for broad-winged hawks, a few circling gracefully overhead or perching on the branches, and Fawn smiled to remember the day they’d been startled by that big red-tail near Glassforge. Any larger predators, Fawn had gathered, were kept off the islands by Lakewalker magic.

Up the back channel, the air grew still and hot, and the water clear. Huge elderberry bushes leaned over the banks, their branches heavy with thick clusters of green fruit slowly acquiring a promising rosy blush; in another month the berries would be black and ripe, and Fawn could easily see how a boy might gather them from a boat like this one. A shiny sunfish jumped right into their boat at Dag’s feet; Dag, laughing at Fawn’s startled squeal, scooped the flopping creature gently back into the water and denied that he had enticed it by Lakewalker persuasion. “Much too small, Spark!”

Rounding a tangle of wrack and cattails where red-winged blackbirds traded barking chirps and hoarse whistles, they came at last upon a broad open space crowded with flat lily pads, their white flowers wide to the sun. Thin, iridescent blue dragonflies, and thicker scarlet ones, stitched the air above the marsh, and rows of turtles sunned themselves on logs, yellow-striped necks stretched out, brown backs gleaming like polished stones. A blue heron stalked slowly along the farther shore; it froze briefly, then darted its long yellow beak into the water. A silvery minnow flashed as the heron twisted its neck around, gulped, then stood folded for a moment looking smug. Fawn hardly knew whether it made her happier to watch the flowers or the contented look on Dag’s face. Dag sighed in satisfaction, but then frowned.

“I thought this was the same place, but it seems smaller. This water is a lot shallower, too. I remember it as being well over my head. Did I take a wrong turn somewhere?”

“It looks plenty deep to me. Um…how old were you, again, first time you found this place?”

“Eight.”

“And how tall?”

Dag began to open his mouth, then grinned sheepishly. “Shorter than you, Spark.”

“Well, then.”

“Well, indeed.” He laid his paddle across his lap and just gazed around.

The water lilies, though beautiful, were the same common variety Fawn had sometimes seen in quiet backwaters around West Blue, she decided. She had seen cattails, dragonflies, turtles, blackbirds, and herons before. There was nothing new here, and yet…this place is magical. The silence in the warm, moist air, broken only by the little noises of the marsh, seemed holy in her ears, as if she were hearing a sound beneath all sound. This is what having groundsense must be like, all the time. The thought awed her.

They sat quietly in the narrow boat, beyond all need of words, until the heat of the sun began to grow uncomfortable; with a sigh, Dag took up his paddle once more and turned them around. His stroke left a glossy whirlpool spiraling down into the clear water, and Fawn’s eye followed it. This is where his heart is anchored. I can see why.

They had almost rounded the corner into the main arm of the lake when Dag paused again. Fawn twisted around; he held his finger to his lips and grinned at her. His eyes half-lidded, he sat there with an absentminded, sleepy look on his face that didn’t reassure her a bit. So she didn’t quite fall out of the boat when a sudden splash and movement resolved into a huge black bass, twisting in the air and trailing sparkling drops. It fell into the bottom of the narrow boat with a resounding thud, flopped and flapped like mad, then at last lay still, bright gills flexing.

“There’s a better size for dinner,” said Dag in satisfaction, and thrust his paddle into the water once more.

“Now, that’s persuasion. Is that how you folks fish all the time?” asked Fawn in amazement. “I wondered why I didn’t see any poles or lines lying around.”

“Something like that. Actually, we usually use hand-nets. You ever see old Cattagus lying on the dock looking as if he’s dozing, with one hand trailing over the side, that’s what he’s likely doing.”

“It seems almost like cheating. Why are there any fish left in this lake?”

“Well, not everyone has the knack.”

As they pulled into the dock, sunburned and happy, Fawn made plans for begging some herbs from Sarri’s garden and grilling Dag’s catch worthily. She managed to clamber onto the weathered gray planks from the wobbly boat without taking an inadvertent swimming lesson, and let Dag hand her up his prize before he tied off the boat’s lines. Clutching the bass, she turned her face up to Dag for a quick kiss and hug, and they climbed the stone steps up the steep bank.

His arm around her waist gave her an abrupt squeeze, then fell away. She looked up to follow his glance.

Dar waited in the shade at the top of the bank, frowning like a bit of rainy dark detached from winter and walking around. As they crested the rise, he said to Dag, “I need to talk to you.”

“Do you? Why?” Dag inquired, but he gestured toward their tent and the log seats around their fire pit.

“Alone, if you please,” Dar said stiffly.

“Mm,” said Dag, without enthusiasm, but he gave his brother a short nod. He saw Fawn back to the tent and left her to deal with the fish. Fawn watched uneasily as the pair strolled away out of the campsite and turned onto the road, leaning a little away from each other.