Passage

18

During an easy stretch of river in the morning, Berry took Whit topside to give him a lesson on the steering oar. Mildly inspired, Dag assembled the Lakewalkers on the front deck for a drill in ground-veiling. He’d a shrewd suspicion such groundwork had been somewhat neglected by these two partners in favor of more vigorous training in bow, knife, sword, and spear.

Dag took the bench, Barr leaned against the goat pen, and Remo settled cross-legged on the deck. Eyes closed or open, they went around the lopsided circle taking turns at that inward-furling blindness that sacrificed perception for privacy—or invisibility. Unfairly, Barr had the stronger native groundsense of the pair, though unsurprisingly, Remo was more disciplined at handling what he had.

“You can’t veil yourself any better than that, and they let you out on patrol?” said Dag to Barr. “Amma Osprey must be harder up for patrollers than I thought.”

Barr waved a hand in protest. “Going blind like this feels like being a little kid again,” he complained. “Back to before my groundsense even came in.”

“There’s a deep difference in vulnerability. But leaking like you do, you’d never get close enough to a malice to make a rush with your knife.” If you had a knife.

“At that range, it could see me, couldn’t it? I mean, they do have eyes, right?”

“Usually. But that’s not the point. A good ground-veiling also resists ground-ripping, at least by a weak sessile or early molt. Which you’d better hope is what you’ll find yourself facing.” It occurred to Dag that this could be another use for his own weak ground-ripping ability—training young patrollers to resist it. He was tempted to test the notion, except for the certainty that it would scare the crap out of these two even worse than it scared him, and then there would be all those awkward explanations. But it was a heartening realization that any patroller who could resist a malice could resist Dag, as readily as a brawler could block a blow to his face. If he saw the blow coming, leastways.

But not any farmer.

He bit his lip and pushed that troubling thought aside for later examination. “And whether you’re the patrol member who places the knife or not, the better your ground-veiling, the better the chance of not spending the week vomiting your guts out from the blight exposure, after.”

Remo eyed him. “You ever do that?”

“It was closer to two weeks,” Dag admitted. “After that, I took my ground drills a lot more seriously. Let’s go around again. My turn to veil. You two close your eyes, but leave your groundsenses open and try to watch me.”

Dag furled himself firmly, watching as the two obediently scrunched their eyes closed. Softly, he rose from his seat.

Barr grinned. “Hey, where’d you go?”

“Here,” he breathed in Barr’s ear.

The boy yelped and jumped sideways. “Blight! Don’t do that!”

“It’s how you get close to a malice. You need to learn, too.”

“I’ve heard an advanced malice can ground-rip you all the same,” said Remo dubiously.

“I’ve only tangled with two that strong, in my forty years of patrolling. The Wolf Ridge malice I didn’t see close-up, just heard about from the survivors of the actual attack on the lair. The Raintree malice I saw eye-to-eye. That malice opened up one of the best ground-veilers in my company as easy as you’d gut a trout.”

“How can you even take down a malice that strong?” asked Remo.

“Gang up on it. Go after it all at once with a lot of patrollers with a lot of knives, and hope one gets through. Worked at Wolf Ridge, worked the same at Raintree.” He added after moment, “Well-veiled patrollers. So let’s go around again.”

After a couple more circuits, Barr remarked, “So, are you saying if I stayed this lousy at my ground-veiling, I’d never be chosen for one of those suicide-rushes?”

“In Luthlia, we’d set you out for bait,” Dag said.

Remo sniggered. Barr grimaced at him.

“Again,” said Dag. Interestingly, Barr improved; but then, Barr had more room for improvement. Judging by his increased flickering, Remo was growing fatigued. Time to wind up.

“That’s enough for today,” said Dag, easing back onto the bench. “I think we’ll spend an hour a day in this drill from now on.”

Barr stretched and rolled his shoulders, squinting. “So much for the benefits of running away from home.”

“Depends on what you run into,” Dag drawled. “If we rode slap into a river malice around the next bend, would you be prepared?”

“No,” said Remo bitterly. “None of us has a primed knife.”

“Then your job would be to survive and run for help to the next camp. Which is where?”

“Blight,” said Barr. “I’m not even sure where we are.”

“Amma made us memorize the locations of all the camps in Oleana,” Remo offered.

“Good,” said Dag. “Too bad you’re in Raintree now.” And led the boys through a list of every Lakewalker ferry camp and its location in river miles from Tripoint to the Confluence, and made them each recite it back, individually and in chorus. Granted, the obscene version of the old memory-rhyme sped the process.

The cool morning was failing to warm, the climbing sun absorbed by graying skies. Dag glanced down the river valley to see dense mist advancing up it. Berry popped her head over the roof edge.

“If you can spare one of your patroller boys to pilot duty up here in a few minutes, I’d be much obliged,” she said. “Looks like we’re in for a real Grace Valley fog, and I don’t want to run up over it into some pasture half a mile inland like in Bo’s tale. The Fetch’d look funny on rollers.”

“I’ll come up,” said Dag. “I could do with a stretch.”

He joined Berry and Whit on the roof; Bo and Hod climbed down for a turn at the hearth.

“If I’m right in my reckoning,” said Berry, “we’re coming up on a big island around this next bend that I don’t want to get on the wrong side of.”

“Do we want the right- or left-hand channel?”

“Right-hand.”

“Will do, Boss.” Dag took a sweep and matched Whit’s slow sculling—just enough to give Berry’s rudder steering-way—which they had learned how to keep up for hours if necessary. The mist thickened about them, beading on Dag’s deerskin jacket, which Fawn had lately lined with quilting to help fit his scant summer gear for fall. They followed the main channel as it hurried around the wide bend; Dag extended his groundsense to its full mile range to locate the split in the current before they were swept wrongside-to.

“Hey,” he said. “There’s somebody on that island.”

“Can’t be,” said Berry, peering into the clinging damp. They could see maybe three boat-lengths ahead, now. “With this rise from the Beargrass, that island’s under three, maybe four feet of water.”

“That could explain why they don’t seem too happy.” Dag reached, opening himself as wide as he could, ignoring the familiar, and much louder, grounds close-by. “Seven men. Blight, I think they may be those same Raintree flatties who passed us by backwards last night.” He added after a moment, “And a bear. They’ve all taken refuge from the flood up in the trees!”

“Must be exciting for the one who’s sharing with the bear,” said Whit dubiously.

“Bear’s got his own private tree.” After a moment, Dag added, “No sign of their boats. Not moored within a mile, leastways. I think those fellows are in trouble over there, Boss. At least one ground shows signs of being hurt.”

Berry drew breath through her teeth. “Bo!” she bawled. “Hod! You patroller boys, git out here! We need to get the skiff in the water afore we float too far!”

The rest of the crew turned out onto the back deck, and Berry leaned over and explained the situation. After Dag confirmed the head-count of men stranded on the island, they decided to launch both the skiff and the narrow boat, in the hope of rescuing them all in one pass; also, Dag pointed out, so the two boats could partner each other in case of snags literal or figurative. Dag stayed with the Fetch to guide it down the channel. Whit and Remo each took an oar in the skiff; Barr paddled his narrow boat.

“You sure about those fellows, Dag?” Remo called up from the water, once they’d all clambered down and were ready to push off.

“Yep. Just over half a mile that way.” He pointed.

Barr’s head turned. “Oh, yeah, I’ve got ’em now! Follow me, Remo! It’ll be just like old times.” His boat shot away as his paddle dipped and surged.

Remo snorted, but trailed dutifully. Whit’s voice drifted back through the fog: “Beats shifting sheep, anyhow…”

“Sheep?” said Berry.

Dag shook his head.

Long minutes slid past as the Fetch slipped downstream. Floating with the current, the banks obscured, it felt as if they’d stopped altogether in a quiet, fog-walled harbor. Running full-tilt into a snag or a big rock at five miles an hour and opening the Fetch’s seams would cure that illusion right quick, Dag thought; he kept all his senses alert.

“Them Lakewalker boys’ll be able to find their way back to us, won’t they?” said Berry uneasily.

“That’s why we put one in each boat,” Dag assured her. “They’ve made it to the island; ah, good for the narrow boat! Barr can get it right in between the trees.”

“Just so’s he don’t catch it sidewise to the current and lean too far over. He could fill it in an eyeblink that way.”

“These Pearl Riffle patrollers are up to the river’s tricks, I expect,” said Dag. “Handier than I would be. And those narrow boats are made to float even full of water. Air boxes in the prow and stern, tarred up and sealed.”

“So that’s how they do that! I always wondered.” She added after a moment, “We thought it was magic.”

Fawn took Hod and Hawthorn below to help assemble a warming welcome for the expected influx of unhappy boatmen—or boatless men. It was nearly an hour before the narrow boat appeared out of the fog astern. Two cold, wet strangers crouched in a miserable huddle in the center, clutching the thwarts nervously, but a third sat up in the bow, helping Barr paddle. Bo and Hod gave them hands to climb stiffly out—one nearly dumped the boat over in his clumsiness, but Barr kept it upright.

“Whee-oh!” said the paddling man, straightening up and pulling off a shapeless felt hat much the worse for wear. He was a lean, strappy fellow, unshaven and shoeless; his feet were scratched and his toes purple with the cold. “We sure are glad to see you folks. We hit the top of that there island broadside in the dark last night, and it just sucked our boats down under that big towhead like the river was swallowing ’em!”

Bo leaned over the steering oar and nodded sagely. “Yep. It would.” Fawn, hovering in the rear hatch, looked on wide-eyed.

They had barely hoisted the narrow boat back aboard when the skiff, too, emerged from the mist, Remo and Whit rowing strongly. The skiff rode low in the water with the weight of the four rescued men. One was not only shoeless but shirtless, the skin of his shoulders and torso scraped bloody, some hanging in ugly strips. He handed up an ash boar spear, of all the things to have hung on to in the wreck. He groaned as he was hauled and pushed up by his anxious companions, but when he found his battered feet and gingerly straightened, clinging to the upright spear, he gazed around with a lively smile. Unbent, he proved a tallish man by farmer measures, with black hair straggling down his neck, and bright, brown eyes.

“This here’s our boat boss, Captain Ford Chicory,” the paddling man explained.

“I’m Boss Berry, and this is my boat, the Fetch,” said Berry, raking an escaped hank of hair out of her eyes. “You’re right welcome aboard.”

The skinned flattie blinked at her in frank appreciation. “Well, ma’am, you folks sure fetched us out of a heap o’ trouble! We called all night from those trees as the water was gettin’ higher, till we got so hoarse we couldn’t yell no more, but you’re the first as heard us.”

“Thank the Lakewalker, here,” said Berry, nodding to Dag. “He’s the one that spotted you. We’d have passed you right by in this soup.”

“Yeah, and if we had heard you, we’d likely’ve thought you was ghosts crying to lure us to our doom in the fog,” Hawthorn offered helpfully.

The skinned flattie’s startled eye was drawn from Dag by this; he looked down at Hawthorn in bemusement and scratched his head. “Yeah, I could see that.”

“Too many tall tales,” Berry explained, cuffing Hawthorn on the ear. “Go help Fawn.” She turned to her crew. “I want at least one of you patroller boys topside with Bo.” Both volunteered, and climbed up. “And, Bo,” Berry called after them, “this time, if Remo tells you it’s a sand bar or snag, you mind him!”

His crew herded their skinned boat boss—or former boat boss—through the back hatch; Dag ducked in after, mentally locating his medicine kit. The crowded kitchen was warm and steamy, and there he found Fawn had prepared gallons of hot tea and a huge heap of potatoes fried with onions and bacon, drenched in salt butter. A basket of apples stood ready. Warmed, if not hot, water waited for washing up. Stacks of every blanket and towel the boat carried were heating in front of the hearth. The exhausted men fell on it all with moans of gratitude. The limited supply of spare dry clothes was shared around as best as might be, with blankets making up the rest.

Hot water, soap, and Dag’s kit waited by the hearth as well. It seemed he was expected to take on the injured, which he was willing enough to do. It was mostly cuts and scrapes, which he set Hod to washing with strong soap. Whit helped bandage, with a little instruction. The flattie leader was the worst off, and Dag set him on a stool before the fire and borrowed Fawn’s hands to help clean the odd injuries on his torso.

“What in the wide green world happened to you?” Fawn asked him as she started in with rags and soap. “Did that bear claw you?”

The fellow smiled back at her the way most sane fellows did, despite his winces from her scrubbing. “Not this time, missy.”

“Why didn’t you bring back the bear, too?” demanded Hawthorn of Whit, both pausing to watch this process.

“It wasn’t a cub, Hawthorn,” Whit said impatiently. “It would’ve sunk the skiff, if it didn’t try to eat us.”

Boss-or-Captain Chicory told Hawthorn kindly, “Bears can swim fine, if they’ve a mind. It’ll get itself off that island when it gets bored.” He whispered to Fawn, “I’ve got a boy about that size at home, and his little brother to keep him in trouble in case he runs out. Which he never has yet, I admit.” He raised his voice, “No, see, how it was—ow!”

“Sorry,” said Fawn, folding a cloth to pat new blood leaks from a scrubbed scab.

“Keep on, missy, I can tell you’re doing me good. How it was, was, we’d come up shorthanded just before we reached the Grace, because three of our fellows got scared at the size of the river and run off with our skiff. So we lashed the boats together, but now I think that wasn’t such a good idea, as the rig was mighty obstinate after that. We pretty much gave up and just went with the river, figuring we’d get a chance to sort out and maybe hire on a real pilot downstream a ways.”

“Had any of you been on the river before?” asked Berry, joining the circle.

“No, not down this far. Some of my hands had worked the upper Beargrass a time or two, but boats are a new start for me. My main line is hunting—bear and wild pig mostly, though my missus keeps her garden. I’m no hand at farming. Tried it once. If things are mainly going to die on a man anyway, hunting’s a more natural trade for him, I figure.” He took a long swallow of tea, warming to his tale.

“I was sitting down by the fire last night in the trailing boat, trying to get my feet thawed and wishing I was back hunting bears on hard land, where a man can at least pick his own direction, when I heard the fellows running and yelling over my head. Then we struck that towhead, thunk! I knew right off we were getting sucked under tail-end first, because the upstream side o’ the floor tilted down like a rooftop. I bolted for the hatch, which was in the middle of the roof, but the river was already a-pouring in like a regular cataract. The only other opening was this little window in the side, which we’d mainly used for dipping up water before we’d lashed the boats together.”

Berry glanced fore and aft to the Fetch’s two exits, and its generous pair of windows. “I see. You boys make those boats yourselves?”

“Not exactly. I bought ’em from a widow woman whose man was killed in that ruckus in north Raintree this summer. Seemed a way to help her out. He’d been in my company, was how it was.” He took another swig and continued, “I scrambled over to our dipping hatch, but it was plain to see it was too small for me. But with the river pouring in, it was plainer it was go through it or be drowned, and my papa always said I was born to be hanged, so I chucked out my good ash spear, stuck my arms through, and yelled for Bearbait and the fellows to grab me and pull with all their might or I was a goner.”

The man with the battered hat—Dag trusted that Bearbait was a nickname—nodded earnestly. “We didn’t so much pull, as just hang on tight and let the boat get yanked off around you. I was mainly thinking how much I didn’t want to go back to your wife and explain how you was drownded, after all that. She being strongly not in favor of this whole scheme in the first place,” he added aside to Fawn, who nodded perfect understanding.

“That little hatch scraped off my shirt and skinned me like a rabbit, but they got me through!” Chicory beamed around at his crew, who grinned back despite their fatigue. “We all scrambled onto the towhead before the second boat went after the first, and spent part of the night clinging to the wrack like wet possums, till it started to break up, too. Then we waded back and found some trees that were right-side-up and not moving. You know, I suppose I should have been glum, having lost my boats and lading and all my trouble, not to mention my clothes and skin, but I felt prime, up in that fine tree. Every once in a while I’d break out chuckling. Couldn’t help it. It felt so good to be breathing air and not river.” He sighed. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever see my poor boats again.”

“You never know,” said Berry. “If they weren’t busted to pieces when they went under the towhead, sometimes they come up again all waterlogged and get picked up downstream by folks. What was your cargo?”

“Barrel staves, mostly, and bear and pig hides. Kegs of bear grease and lard. I don’t care for the staves, but I regret the other. A passel of bears and pigs, those were, and not easily come by.” He glanced at his ash spear, leaning in a corner.

“Your staves would likely be too warped to be anything but firewood, later, and the hides, well, it’ll depend on how long they soak, and if they can be dried again without going moldy. Some of your kegs might make it, if they’re good and tight.”

Chicory brightened at this news; his partner Bearbait looked less enthusiastic.

Fawn finished washing and drying the wounds, then traded places with Dag, who bent in for a close inspection with both eye and ground-sense. Dag reported, “You’re well gouged and scraped, and your joints are wrenched sore, but nothing’s dislocated or broken. Bleed pretty freely last night, did you?”

“He was a sight,” confirmed Bearbait. “I was ready to bust him in the jaw for laughing like that while looking like that.”

“But the bleeding’s mostly stopped on its own, now.” Dag gently worked out a few deep splinters with his ghost hand and tweezers. “The rips are too ragged to make stitching you up worthwhile, I think.” He fingered a hanging ribbon of skin, considered whether to detach it with knife or scissors, then, on impulse, ripped its ground crossways in a slice as thin as paper. The strip fell away into his hand; he pitched it into the fire. “Did that hurt?”

“What?” said Chicory, trying to crane his sore neck to see over his shoulder.

The tiny bit of the Raintree man’s ground in his own felt little different than a normal ground reinforcement; not even as odd as a mosquito or an oat. Dag removed the other two bad strips the same way, trying for as fine a slice as he could. They did not bleed. Better stop here and think about this one, eh? “You’re going to have scars there.”

Chicory snorted indifference. “I’ve done worse to myself.”

Dag didn’t doubt it. “Give me your say-so, and I’ll put a little Lakewalker-style ground reinforcement in the deepest gouges to fight infection, which is the biggest danger left. Then have Fawn put some ointment on and wrap them up so the scabs don’t crack when you move. In a few days, a clean shirt should be enough to protect them while they finish healing.”

Chicory’s brows arched wryly. “If I had a shirt, I could wash it, sure, if I had a bucket. And soap.” He hesitated. “What’s that thing you say you want to put in me?”

Fawn translated, “A touch of Lakewalker magic healing.”

“Oh.” Chicory looked both impressed and alarmed. “That’d be a new start, for sure. All right…” He craned suspiciously as Dag laid in lines of ground, but his lips parted as his hurts eased. “How de’! That’s a strange thing. Never had a Lakewalker offer me anything like that before!”

“I aim to be a medicine maker to farmers, once I learn more of the trade,” Dag explained. “It isn’t anything anyone’s done before.”

“Mighty strange place, this big river,” sighed Chicory.

Plans were made to deliver the boatwrecked men to a town two days down the river, where Chicory hoped to find an old friend who would help them to shoes, clothes, and enough gear to commence walking home. Meanwhile, Berry undertook to watch for signs of their lost boats. The exhausted men slept in piles and didn’t wake again until the Fetch tied to the bank for the night and Fawn had to clear the decks of her kitchen to start supper.

Dag wasn’t sure if he wanted to wrap a cloak of husbandly protection around Fawn, or clutch her to him like a talisman against such a concentration of strange farmers. Just who was supposed to be protecting whom? But with fifteen people crammed aboard the Fetch, privacy—not to mention private conversation—was out of the question.

Dag quickly learned that Chicory’s crew were mainly his friends and neighbors from a small town on a feeder creek to the lower Beargrass, southwest of Farmer’s Flats and so not in the direct path of last summer’s horrors, news both Dag and Fawn took in with relief—his covert, hers warmly expressed. Chicory had acquired his tag of Captain by getting up a troop of local volunteers to go help out when the troubles began, when the malice had grown advanced enough to kidnap and mind-slave Raintree farmers, marching them to attack other settlements in turn. By the looks they exchanged, Barr and Remo were inclined to mock this self-appointed rank; Dag, the more he listened, was not.

Ford Chicory proved to be an excellent tale-teller. He was no blowhard like Boss Wain; his place at the center of his tales was as often as the butt of the joke as the hero, but he had a knack for holding his listeners in thrall either way. After dinner, aware of his audience and perhaps in return for the boat’s hospitality, he even told a creepy ghost story that had both Hawthorn and Hod bug-eyed and half of the crew pretending not to be.

Tales now being as readily exchanged as coins in a dice game, everyone clustered around the hearth as Chicory and his crew learned in turn about Berry’s quest, Dag and Fawn’s West Blue marriage, and—inevitably, Dag supposed—Dag’s place in the campaign against the Raintree malice. Dag did not willingly volunteer his words, but with Fawn, Whit, the crew of the Fetch, and once in a while even Barr and Remo chiming in, he didn’t need to do much more than adjust their Dag-tales for overenthusiasm. As the Raintree men’s picture of him shifted from itinerant medicine maker to ex—patrol captain, they grew warier—Dag could not decide if this was a relief or an annoyance—but Chicory’s attention sharpened.

“I’d seen old blight bogle lairs when I was out hunting, from time to time,” Chicory told Dag. Dag wondered how often the man had ventured into forbidden territory above the old cleared line, but now did not seem the time to ask. Chicory went on, “Gray patches, all nasty and dead. It didn’t take no high-nosed patrollers to convince me to stay off ’em, no sir!”

Dag let his groundsense flick out. A successful hunter like Chicory might well possess a rudimentary groundsense like Aunt Nattie’s, if some passing Lakewalker had climbed his family tree a few generations back. It was impolite to inquire, though, and since Chicory seemed to have led an irregular wandering life far from his birth kin, he might not know himself.

The Raintree man continued, “I’ve met your patrols, run across your camps—they never invited me in, mind, more like invited me to move along—but I’d never seen Lakewalkers run before.”

“They went streaming past us like rabbits, when we got up north of the Flats,” said a crewman in a faintly scornful tone.

“Now, that was the women and their young shavers, mostly,” said Chicory in a fair-minded way.

“Malices snatch the youngsters first, by preference,” Dag said. “When a malice goes on the move, Lakewalkers have learned to get the little ones out of the path as fast as they can, with the rest—off-duty patrollers, other adults—for rearguard. Likely you didn’t get far enough north to meet the rearguard, or the malice might have taken you, too.”

“We met plenty of them mud-men,” Bearbait put in, face darkening in memory. “Both before and after they lost their wits. Ugly mugs, they were.”

“The malice makes them up out of animals it catches, you know,” Fawn said. “By groundwork.” She went on to describe the grotesqueries of the mud-man nursery she’d seen at Bonemarsh Camp, with such simple directness that she seemed unaware of how thoroughly she was topping Chicory’s ghost story for keeping folks awake in their bedrolls later.

Upon reflection, Dag was not surprised to learn that Chicory’s troop had acquitted itself well upon the mud-men—hunting and killing bears and wild pigs would have trained them in both methods and daring. But Chicory’s face grew graver when he remarked, “Ugly as they was, they didn’t bother me near as much as those bogle-maddened farmers we met up with. Because they weren’t driven witless. It took you a little to realize they weren’t right in the head, because they walked and talked as if what they was doing was sensible, and they looked just like anybody else, too. You couldn’t hardly tell who was on what side, till they jumped on you, and then it could be too late. What we did find, though”—he rubbed his chin and frowned at Dag in the lantern glow and firelight—“was that if we rode in and grabbed up a few, and took ’em back south far enough, they’d come to their senses. We first found that out trying to capture one to make him talk. Got him far enough away and he talked, all right—not that you could make much sense of it through the crying. After that, we tried to catch as many as we could, and carry ’em away till they found their lost minds again. Wouldn’t any of them join us to go fight, after, though.”

Dag’s brows rose in increased respect. “I didn’t realize farmers could do that, on the edge of a malice war. Huh. That would be…good. Draw down the malice’s forces.”

“You took a chance,” said Remo in disapproval. “If you’d got too close to the malice, it might have caught your minds in turn, and then the malice’s forces would have been up, not down.”

Chicory said stiffly, “Seems to me such a chance would’ve overtaken a man sitting still, just the same.” He eyed Dag sidelong, and added, “I was never too fond of Lakewalkers, and the ones I’ve met have pretty much returned the favor—but I do admit, after last summer I don’t like blight bogles a whole lot more.”

The lead-in could not be spurned; Dag set Fawn to describing Greenspring again, as he did not think he could bear to. Fawn and Whit together managed a creditable explanation of groundsense and sharing knives. Barr and Remo listened with troubled faces to these deep Lakewalker secrets being bandied around; the boatmen, with expressions ranging from disturbed to disbelieving. Chicory, though, just grew quiet and intent.

Chicory seemed a village leader of sorts—if a terrible boatman—with initiative and wits enough on dry land to persuade friends and kin to follow him into discernible danger, for a good cause. His words, as well as the slices of his ground, gave Dag much to digest as he retreated with Fawn to their curtained nook. The bits of ground were converting far more readily than those of the mosquito or even the oats, nearly indistinguishable from an ordinary supporting or healing ground reinforcement. As with malices, it seemed people made the best food. Lakewalker cannibals, indeed. Neither Chicory’s ghost tales nor his war stories had unnerved Dag, but as Fawn cuddled into the curve of his body and drifted into sleep, that last reflection kept him awake for a long time.

The Fetch didn’t handle any worse for its added passengers, but neither did it handle any better, Dag noted the next morning as he took his turn on the roof. Hod was on the opposite oar and Whit at the rudder, very proud to be permitted to steer all on his own down this straight stretch. Berry would be coming up shortly to take over, as, she said, the next bend would bring them to one of the trickiest passages on the river. Berry had allowed a few of the Raintree flatties to volunteer for oar duty, but only one at a time and under her or Bo’s close supervision. The rest seemed willing to help out with the increased scullery chores their presence as inadvertent guests had caused, so except for the unavoidable crowding and the friction on the Lakewalkers’ groundsenses, a day more of their company seemed likely to pass pleasantly enough.

Since a chill wind funneled up the valley, with sunshine intermittent between the scudding blue-gray clouds, most everyone stayed inside near the hearth or curled up in nests amongst the stores. As Dag studied the river, two men in a skiff put out from a feeder creek beneath a bluff, rowing in their direction. When they pulled to within shouting distance, the older one rose up on one knee from his bench and hailed them, waving his hat.

“Hallo the boat!”

“How de’!” Whit called cheerfully in return. “What can we do for you fellows?”

“Well, it’s more like what we can do for you. That last flood messed up the channels all through Crooked Elbow something fierce! I’ll undertake to pilot you through safe.”

This was a common way all along the river for local men to earn a bit of coin. Berry, now that she’d come to trust her Lakewalker crew’s groundsenses, usually turned down such offers politely, though she did enjoy the exchange of river gossip that went with. Sometimes, the rowboats also brought out fresh food or other goods to sell or trade.

“I’m not the boat boss,” Whit called back, “but what do you charge?”

“Just ten copper crays to the Elbow. Twenty to the Wrist.”

A nominal sum, well worth it to the average boat given the time—or worse—that could be lost to an accident. Dag opened his ground, furled to block out the uproar of the crowd on the Fetch. And paused in his sculling.

“Huh,” he said to Hod and Whit. “That’s funny. One of those fellows is as beguiled as all get-out.”

“By a malice?” said Whit in alarm. Hod gaped curiously.

“No, there’s not a touch of blight-sign. He must have had some encounter with a Lakewalker, lately.” Dag stared as the men rowed nearer.

The beguiled man was middle-aged, shabby, rough-looking, a typical tough riverman. He hardly seemed the sort to have attracted the attention of some female Lakewalker lover. Perhaps he had less visible attractions, but his ground was certainly no brighter than the rest of him. He hadn’t been healed of any obvious injury lately. The other, Dag could imagine drawing a female eye: well built, young, open-faced, with crisp brown hair, and cleanly in his dress and bearing. But no beguilement distorted his ground, for all that it was furrowed by old stress. It was a puzzle.

“You can come up and talk to our boss, I guess,” Whit called down as the skiff came alongside. “I don’t think we need a pilot, but we have some things to trade, if you’re interested. Some real fine Glassforge window glass, to start.”

The skiff men waved apparent understanding. Hod shipped his oar and swung down to the bow to help them tie their boat and clamber up past the chicken pen. They both gazed around with interest. The pilot could have been watching his prospective customers approach for the past ten miles from a vantage on that bluff, Dag realized.

“Hey, Boss!” Hod called through the front hatch. “More visitors!”

Dag locked his oar and walked forward to the roof edge. He looked down to see the top of Berry’s blond head bob through. She stopped as if stone-struck; the tin cup in her hand fell to the deck with a clank and rolled disregarded, spilling a last mouthful of tea.

The handsome young man looked up at her with recognition in his gray eyes and, Dag would swear, a flash of horror.

“Alder!” Berry shrieked, and flung herself forward to wrap around the startled fellow nearly from top to toe. His arms hesitated in the air, then closed around her to return the hug. “Alder, Alder!” Berry repeated joyously, her face muffled in his shoulder. “You’re alive!”