Passage

11

The Fetch made thirty river miles before the dank autumn dusk, when they tied to the bank for the night in the middle of, as nearly as Fawn could tell, nowhere. Berry explained regretfully that she didn’t want to try running downriver in the dark—Whit’s appalling suggestion. In addition to the hazards of rocks, stumps, sand bars, ledges, and wrack, the river divided frequently around shifting islands. A boat choosing the wrong side might find itself stuck in a channel that petered out into impassible thatch, and its crew plagued with the arduous task of towing it up around the head of the island again, difficult enough for a keelboat, designed for such work, worse for a balky flatboat. Boats had been abandoned in such situations, Berry said. Fawn poked Whit to silence when he began to volunteer Dag for a night pilot. Even were Dag’s groundsense recovered to its full one-mile range, some of these islands were as much as five miles long. And the river was quite scary enough in daylight.

After that, Fawn was too busy fixing dinner to worry further. With the excitement of the day wearing off, everyone seemed glad to turn in early. In addition, Fawn suspected Dag was still bone-weary from healing the Pearl Bend woman, at some level underneath the mere physical. He seemed to wrap himself around Fawn in their bedroll more for comfort than anything else; from the intensity of his clutch he was feeling low on comfort tonight. She wondered if having Remo aboard bothered him. A curtain gave no privacy from groundsense. Although since farmers couldn’t veil their grounds at all, she supposed Remo must have shut himself off, as Dag often did, to spare himself the abrasion. Weary herself, her musings trickled into sleep.

They made a dawn start, and by midday, the clouds had thinned and the sun came through, if still a bit pale and watery, which Fawn thought lifted everyone’s moods. At Berry’s suggestion she experimented with the clever iron oven that fitted in the Fetch’s hearth, and was able to produce pies for lunch without stopping the boat. Or setting it on fire, a fact of which she was more proud than of the pies, which, truly, everyone ate with flattering appetites. In the afternoon, she found Dag taking a break from his oar, lounging on the bench on the front deck keeping pleasantly idle company with Copperhead, Daisy-goat, and the chickens. She leaned over the rail and eyed the smooth, brown water. The Fetch seemed to be outracing a sodden log, but that floating leaf was definitely pulling ahead.

“Dag,” she said, “do you think you could catch us enough fish for dinner?”

He opened his eyes and sat up. “What kind?”

“I don’t even know what kinds there are in this river. Bo was going on about how much he liked a good channel catfish fried up in a cornmeal crust. Do you think you could get enough of them to feed eight?”

His slow smile tucked up the edges of his mouth. “I could try, Spark.”

He rose and stretched, only to drape himself over the side of the boat just behind the pen, his left arm trailing down. His hook barely grazed the water. Fawn watched in sudden doubt. When he’d persuaded that big bass to leap so startlingly into their laps at Hickory Lake, they’d been in a much smaller boat, with lower sides. The Fetch’s rail seemed awfully high to expect any fish to jump over. Were catfish even the jumping sort? Fawn had a dim idea that they lurked about on the river bottom.

When nothing happened in about ten minutes, Fawn considered wandering back to her domain by the hearth to think about what she could do with bacon for dinner, again, except she was afraid Dag was falling asleep. Granted he would doubtless wake up when he hit the water, and he could swim better than she could, and if she grabbed for his legs he might simply pull her over with him, but still. But then he stiffened, muttering, “Ha.” She craned her neck.

And then he was jerked half over the thwart, with a startled scream of “Blight!”

Fawn lunged, managing to get her hands around his belt. She snatched one look over the side before she leaned frantically backward, feet skidding on the deck. A huge gray splashing shape seemed to have half-swallowed Dag’s hook, and was trying to yank him into the river. In order to eat him, near as Fawn could tell. She supposed turnabout was fair play, but she wasn’t willing to give up her best husband to some awful river monster. “Dag, let go of it! It doesn’t matter! I don’t want a fish dinner that much!”

“I can’t! Crap! The blighted thing’s stuck on my hook!” Dag clawed futilely at the buckles on his arm harness, then managed to get his knees down far enough to clap them to the inboard side of the hull and give a mighty heave. Fawn added what weight she had.

Several feet of flailing gray wetness rose from the brown water and arced through the air to land on the mid-deck with a thud that shook the whole boat. Dag, still attached to its mouth-end, perforce fell with it, and Fawn with them both. She scrambled back on her hands and knees. The startled Copperhead tromped his hooves in the straw of his pen, jerked his head, and whinnied, and Daisy-goat bleated in fright, whether of the plunging horse or of the river monster Fawn was unsure.

“Whit!” Dag yelled. “Bring a mallet! Quick!”

The uproar brought the entire crew of the Fetch rushing to the bow. Whit, Hod, and Hawthorn jammed up in the front hatch. Berry, Remo, and Bo peered down over the edge of the cabin roof. Whit vanished, Hawthorn fell through, and Hod, eyeing Copperhead’s antics, hung back. Fawn bounced to her feet for her first clear view of the most enormous fish—if it was a fish—she had ever seen or imagined. It was nearly as long as she was tall. Its head was huge, eyes glaring yellow, mouth wide and ugly, and Dag’s left arm was still stuck partway into its gaping gullet. Red gills flexed, and its long barbels snapped like whips as it heaved and flopped. Dag was jerked around with it.

Whit reappeared with a shiny new shovel grabbed from Berry’s stock of Tripoint goods, and proceeded to try to beat the fish to death, or at least into submission, urged on by Dag: “Hit it again, Whit! Harder! Ow! Aim for its head, blight you!”

The catfish finally stopped moving, mostly, and Dag drew a long breath, sat up, and carefully worked his hook free from inside the thing’s mouth. If the monster had succeeded in pulling him overboard, would it have taken him to the bottom and drowned him before he could get loose? Fawn felt faint. Dag shook out his arm, looked around at his riveted audience, and cleared his throat. “There, Spark. Fish dinner for eight.”

“Thank you, Dag,” Fawn choked. Which won a flash of a smile back, the strain in his face easing. He almost succeeded in looking as if he’d meant to do all this, but she thought he might be picturing that trip to the river bottom, too.

“Fish dinner for forty-eight, more like,” said Whit, measuring out the gleaming corpse. “How much does this thing weigh?”

“Looks like about a hundred, hundred-twenty pounds, to me,” drawled Bo. An expert opinion, Fawn presumed. Whit whistled.

“Well,” said Berry, looking down at Fawn and shaking her head. “You did tell me your husband could catch fish, I’ll give you that. Never seen anyone use live Lakewalker for bait, before.”

“How do you fit it in a pan?” Fawn nearly wailed. She pictured it draped across her skillet with an arm’s length hanging over each side. She wouldn’t be able to lift it. Could it be cooked on a turnspit, like a roasting pig?

“Whit and Hod will clean it and cut it up for you,” said Dag genially. He stretched his back and climbed somewhat gingerly to his feet, wiping his hook on his trousers. “I’m sure Bo will be happy to tell them how.”

Whit’s look of big-eyed enthusiasm faded a trifle, but he didn’t protest. He and Hod hauled the catch to the back deck to butcher under Bo’s amused supervision.

Briefly alone with Dag in the kitchen-and-living-quarters while he tidied himself, Fawn reached up and gripped him by the shoulders. “You do know, you don’t have to go and do any stupid fool thing just because I ask, don’t you? I rely on you to be the sensible grown-up around here!”

He slipped his arm around her back, and protested, “I didn’t think a fish dinner was an unreasonable request. Not on a river, leastways. If we were in the middle of a desert, now, that would have been a right cruel demand.” He blinked innocently at her.

Demonstrating cruelty, she poked him in his bruised stomach and scowled.

He glinted his eyes at her in a very unfair way, but said, “I admit, it did get a little out of hand.”

“If you’re saying that thing nearly swallowed your arm, I saw.” She gripped him again and shook him, or tried to. “You could have picked out a smaller one. You don’t have to prove anything to me!”

His answer was a silent laugh as he dropped a kiss on her curls. She gave up and relaxed into his offered cuddle, even though she wasn’t sure whether it was intended as apology for scaring her out of her wits or just as distraction.

She added more pensively, “I don’t mind the idea of eating a fish, though on the farm it wasn’t a dish we fixed too often. But I’m not sure I like the idea of a fish big enough to eat me.”

“Oh, there are channel cats bigger than that one. And there are sea sturgeon that come up the lower Gray that are easily ten times that size.”

“Don’t tell me!” said Fawn. “First swamp lizards with giant teeth, now fish big enough to swallow the Fetch? What parts are you taking us to, anyhow? I’m making a new rule. You don’t bring any more fish onto this boat that are bigger ’n me! You hear me, Dag Bluefield?”

All she got back was a smirk and a hug. Which had its own satisfactions, but wasn’t precisely an answer.

For dinner, Fawn fried up catfish fillets till everyone aboard was stuffed to the gills and groaning. The white flesh was sweet and succulent, but it went on forever. Breakfast was the same. Mid-river lunch was cold catfish sandwiches. And dinner. And another breakfast. After which Whit led a rebellion and sneaked the remains over the side, where they would feed its cannibal catfish cousins, Fawn supposed. Torn between indignation at the waste and profound relief, she said only, “Huh!”

To which Whit replied, “Yeah, well, be more careful what you ask Dag for, eh? That fellow scares me, some days.”

In the late afternoon, Dag asked Berry if they might pull in briefly at another Lakewalker ferry camp, this one on the south side of the Grace. Berry, Fawn knew, was anxious to ride this rise past Silver Shoals, lest the Fetch be grounded above that hazard and have to wait again for the next upstream storm. But she eyed Dag and nodded, saying only, “Make it quick, Lakewalker.”

The deserted landing was nothing but a bare patch on the bank, the camp up over the bluffs invisible from shore. This ferry served not a wagon road but merely a patrol trail, and so had few farmer customers. Dag hiked off alone, inviting neither Fawn nor Remo, not that Remo would likely have accepted.

The Pearl Riffle patroller had obeyed Berry’s boat-boss orders without comment or complaint, but had kept equally silent between work shifts. Whit’s most ham-fisted overtures of would-be friendship seemed to slide right over him. Fawn didn’t think he even talked to Dag, though she did catch him watching the older man as if he were trying to figure something out and couldn’t. Hod was skittish around Remo, but then, Hod was skittish around everyone.

Hawthorn took the goat ashore to graze for an hour. Remo volunteered to do the same for Copperhead, which surprised Fawn, till she noticed it gave him an excuse to settle down well away from the rest of the crew. Whit followed Berry around. Fawn, between chores at last, announced, “I think I’ll walk up to meet Dag.”

The path up from the shore along the hillside was slick with damp yellow leaves, in need of pruning, and unpeopled. A half-mile up it, she met Dag coming back through the gray-brown woods. From his set face, she guessed his errand had not prospered.

“No luck?” she asked quietly.

He shook his head. “I tried not to repeat my mistakes. I told ’em my name was Dag Otter Hope, and made them think I was a private courier. I might as well have spared my pride. They didn’t have any extra knives. Well, it wasn’t a big camp, no surprise.”

“That’s a pity.” Fawn turned to stroll beside him. They were not only out of earshot of the Fetch right now, they were out of groundsense range. It seemed a good chance to ask. “Your Remo doesn’t look too happy. I wondered what you were thinking of doing about him.”

“He’s not my Remo.”

“He’s following you, it seems.”

“Just because we’re on the same boat doesn’t mean I’ve adopted him.”

“Is he going to be in a whole lot of trouble back at Pearl Riffle for deserting?”

Dag sighed. “Maybe. I’m not sure he grasps the difference between banished and resigned.”

“He doesn’t say much.” Fawn considered this. “Or anything.”

“He’s listening, though.” Dag cocked his head. “Think back to when I came to West Blue, before we were wed. It was the first time in a longer life than Remo’s that I’d ever slept in a farmer house, ate at the family table. Listened to farmers talk to each other. Remo’s never even been an exchange patroller, never been away from his home camp before, any more than Whit. I think it won’t hurt to just let his new impressions accumulate for a while.”

“Mm,” said Fawn. “Yesterday afternoon while he was on break from his oar, he went and stole Hawthorn’s raccoon kit. He huddled up in a little dark hidey-hole in amongst the stores, and coaxed it to curl up on his lap. And just sat, hunched up around the one little live thing that wasn’t mad at him. Till Hawthorn finally missed it, and found him and made him give it back.”

“Nobody on this boat is mad at Remo.”

“Nobody on this boat seems real to Remo, ’cept you. And you aren’t best pleased with him.”

Dag made a noncommittal noise.

Fawn lifted her chin and went on, “I don’t think it’s good for Lakewalkers to be cut off sudden from everything they know. They get to pining.”

“I can’t argue with that,” Dag sighed.

She cast him a sharp glance. Yeah.

“Hod’s looking better,” Fawn observed after a few more paces, trying for a lighter note. “His skin’s a nicer color, and he moves brisker, now he’s getting the good of his food. He hardly uses your stick. He watches you. He watches Remo watching you, too.” She bit her lip. Maybe not as light as all that. “Jealous isn’t quite the right word. Neither is envious. But…Hod does make me think of a dog with one bone, somehow.”

Dag nodded. “It’s the beguilement. Can’t say as I’ve had any fresh ideas about that, yet.”

“You trying? Because—ow!” Fawn grimaced and stopped. The branch she’d carelessly shoved out of her face had whipped back, proving to be from a thorny honey locust. After scratching her scalp, it had snagged in her hair.

“Hold up.” Dag reached over and gently detangled her, snapped the branch, and bent it down away from the trail. “I do purely hate these evil trees. Find ’em on patrol all over Oleana. They don’t bear fruit, their wood’s not good for much, and there’s just no excuse for those thorns.”

“I suppose a hedge of them would be good for stopping unwanted visitors.”

“Better for a bonfire.” Dag hadn’t released the branch; he had an absent look on his face that made Fawn suddenly uneasy. “Nobody would miss this tree. If a malice was to ground-rip a tree like this, it would be a positive good.” He paused. “Remember that mosquito I ground-ripped back in Lumpton Market?”

“Yes. It made you very sick.”

“I’ve been wondering ever since what would happen if I tried something else.”

“Dag, I’m not sure that’s such a great idea.” Just what kind of mood was he in right now, after whatever frustrations he’d encountered up at that camp?

“Yes, but see—medicine makers. I’ve been wondering about medicine makers. The senior ones do have craft secrets. They have such dense grounds—it’s pretty much a marker of the gift. Not necessarily long groundsense ranges, mind. Hoharie would never make a patroller, but she can give ground reinforcements day after day. I always thought that was a natural ability, but what if it’s something else? I never saw…”

“No more mosquitoes,” said Fawn firmly. “No more bugs of any kind. Mind what happened to your arm?”

“Yes, but what about this here tree? It never would be missed.”

“It’s about a hundred million times bigger than a mosquito.”

“I grant you, that mosquito did make me itch. Maybe this would make me all thorny and sessile.”

“What, are you saying that no one would be able to tell?” And at his bland look, added insincerely, “Sorry.” His lips twitched.

Fawn couldn’t imagine what taking in the ground of a whole tree would do to a person. Neither could Dag, she suspected. But he was getting an alarmingly intent look on his face, eyeing the thorn-studded branches and bole. The spines were three-pronged and stuck out in jagged packs from every possible part of the repulsive thing.

“Use some sense,” she begged. “At least don’t start with a whole tree. Start with something smaller.” She scrabbled in the pocket of her skirt, found a few tiny lumps still stuck in the seams, and freed one. “Here.”

Dag held out his hand to receive the gift. “An oat?”

“I was feeding Daisy and Copperhead earlier.”

“One oat?” He stared down at his palm.

“If you ate an oat it wouldn’t make you sick, even if you ate a whole bowl of oats. Not like a big bowl of mosquitoes. Or of nasty thorns. Even Copperhead wouldn’t eat off that tree!”

“That’s…an interesting parallel. Huh. We do take in the ground of our food and convert it—everyone does. Lakewalkers, farmers, animals, every living thing. Natural ground reinforcement.” He glanced up and down the trail. They were quite alone. He closed his palm, rubbed his hook across the back of his hand, and opened it again. The oat was gone. He wiped a faint gray powder off against the seam of his trouser leg. “Huh,” he said again. His face was suddenly very sober.

“What did it do?” Fawn asked anxiously.

He rubbed his left arm. “Well, I can feel that bit of ground stuck in me. Not near as unpleasant as the mosquito’s. Got any more oats in your pocket?”

“Remember, your fever and swelling didn’t come on right away. Give that one a day. Then try another. Maybe.”

“Berry’s got a whole barrel of oats on the Fetch,” Dag said thoughtfully. “There’s a notion to test. If you can eat it safely, can you ground-rip it safely? I think I’d rather just eat my food, but I can see where this might be faster in some emergency.”

“I don’t know, Dag. I think maybe you need a Lakewalker partner for this sort of experiment.” Someone who could tell if he was doing dreadful things to his ground—and warn her, so she could put her foot down. Because, remember that catfish. “Do you think Remo would be any help?”

Dag let his breath trickle out through pursed lips. “I’m not sure I would want to try this in front of young Remo. This is a pretty disturbing sort of groundwork for any Lakewalker who’s seen a malice operate.”

“Has Remo?”

Dag’s brows twitched up. “Maybe not, Spark. There’s been no reports of malice finds in the Pearl Riffle patrol area for quite a few years. If he’s never exchanged, then no, he’s not had that chance yet.”

“So he wouldn’t know malice magic if he saw it.”

“Maybe not.”

Leaving the thorny honey locust unmolested, to her intense relief, Dag started back down the trail. He hugged Fawn close to his side as they dodged hindering branches.

“So,” said Fawn, “if dense ground marks a medicine maker, and long groundsense range marks a patroller, what do you call someone who has everything?”

“Knife maker. Sir. Or ma’am.”

“There are women knife makers?” She had only met Dar, Dag’s hostile knife maker brother. Hostile to farmer brides, anyhow.

“Oh, yes.”

“So what do you call someone who hasn’t got either density or range?”

“A farmer,” Dag replied with a twitch of his lips, then looked down. “Sorry.”

Except that he actually was, a little. Fawn tossed her head.

“Only it isn’t so,” he went on more thoughtfully. “We meet a sprinkling of farmers near the threshold of ground function—at least, we do if we get out of the camps to patrol, and are paying attention. Aunt Nattie. You, in a way.”

“Me?” said Fawn, surprised. “I’ve got no groundsense range. I’ve got no groundsense to have a range.”

“None at all,” he agreed cheerfully. She almost poked him. “But you have unusual ground…not density, though there’s that, too, but brightness. Your ground is very beautiful, you know. Why do you think I call you Spark, Spark?”

“I thought it was a pet name. For a pet,” she added provokingly.

He gave her a pained look, but said, “No, it’s pure description. As natural as it would be to call red-haired Sassa Carrot Top.”

“Carrot tops are green. I’m a farmer girl, trust me.” Still, she had to smile a little. Was beauty in the groundsense of the beholder? Evidently. Other Lakewalkers had not seemed as entranced by her ground as Dag. Maybe it was a matter of taste, as the old lady said as she kissed the cow—Fawn smiled outright in memory at Aunt Nattie’s old saw. Yet—elusive thought—what if it was so? What if it was neither flattery nor infatuation, but true report? Dag was a truthful sort of fellow, by preference. What if Dag really did see her as brighter, the way sensitive or sore eyes squinted at the sun? The way thirst saw water…? She asked abruptly, “What do I give you?”

“Breath.”

“No, seriously.” She stopped; he turned to face her.

“I was serious.” He wore his serious smile, anyhow.

“Back when Hod first came on the Fetch, you said I didn’t know what I gave you, every day. Do you?”

In that moment, she discovered the difference between stopped and stopped cold. “What?” he said.

“What do I give you in your ground?”

A slow blink. He wrapped her in a hug, bent his head, and explored her mouth in a long kiss. Not evading the question—testing it. He released her at last, his brows drawn in, and she came down off her toes.

“Balance,” he said. “You—untangle me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I.”

“Dag…” she protested. “If you can’t figure this out and tell me, who else can?”

He ducked his head in wry accord. “You make my ground disappear. No, that’s not right,” he continued, as she began to protest again. “Imagine…imagine your muscles all full of knots, pulled and sore and stiff, fighting you with every move you try to make. Now imagine your muscles when they’re working smooth and warm, effortlessly, without thought. To will is to have is to be, all one. Like a perfect shot.”

“Hm?” He wasn’t there yet, but he had hold of the tail of something, she could tell. Something elusive.

“When I make a perfect shot with my bow. Which happens from time to time, though never often enough. I don’t just mean get the arrow into the target, which I can do pretty consistently. In a perfect shot, everything’s there the same as any ordinary shot, yet not. For that fleeting moment, it’s like—my worries, my body, my bow, the target, even the arrow disappear. Only the flight is left.” His hand closed, opened.

“My left-hand groundwork is like the flight of the arrow without the arrow.”

He stared down as if his words had fallen into his palm as unexpectedly as a jeweled tooth.

He just said something important. Hang on to that, farmer girl, even if you don’t quite get it yet. “So why am I not beguiled, yet Hod is? You’ve done groundwork on us both. The why and how has to lie somewhere in the space between us three.”

His mouth slowly closed; the gold of his eyes turned flat and unreflective. But he said only, “We’re keeping Berry,” and walked on.

Fawn matched his pace, satisfied that her question had not been dismissed; his sudden abstraction only marked the wheels in his head turning creakily in unaccustomed directions. So maybe I should keep that axle grease coming, huh?