Passage

21

What Dag most wanted to do was question Crane: Fawn knew this because, putting her back on her feet after grabbing her up in a breath-stopping hug and mumbling a lot of broken words into her hair, it was the first thing he said that she could actually make out. But after one glance at Bo he reordered his plan, dispatching the panting Whit to organize the boatmen who’d been drawn by the ruckus to fish Alder and Big Drum out of the water and secure them, preferably on some boat other than the Fetch.

“What about Crane?” Whit demanded.

“Just leave him lay. He’s not going anywhere.”

Dag had the queerest look on his face as he said this, but before Fawn could figure it out, she was drafted as his hands, helping to straighten out the groaning Bo atop a blanket on a hastily cleared stretch of kitchen floor, peel away his shirt, and wash around the stab wound. Dag sat cross-legged, irritably cast off his arm harness, and fell into the healing trance that was becoming increasingly familiar to Fawn—and, she thought, to him. He was in it for a long time, while the shaken Berry, cut ropes still dangling from her wrists, tended to an even more shaken Hawthorn, who was bleeding from a broken nose and crying. Hod helped everyone as best he could.

Whit took a long time to report back. The arrow-riddled Big Drum had been easy to capture, as he’d waded to shore and put up no fight when he got there. Alder had tried to swim away. Some boatmen chased him down in a skiff and wrestled him out of the water, beating him into submission. He’d almost drowned, and Fawn, glancing at Berry’s stiff face, thought it was a pity he hadn’t. Dragging out his existence one more miserable day seemed a great waste of time, emotion, and hemp. Both men had been tied up on the Snapping Turtle, the shaft in Big Drum’s belly cut off but left in, lest botching its removal keep him from his hanging.

Fawn was wondering if she should shake Dag’s shoulder, or send someone to find Barr or Remo to do whatever it was Lakewalkers did to break unintended groundlocks, when he at last drew a long breath and sat up, animation returning to his face. He stared around blinking, found her, and cast her the ghost of a smile. Emerging from his task, he looked much less wild and distraught, as though the effort had recentered him somehow. Except that Fawn hadn’t seen him look so drained since Raintree.

Bo had been conscious throughout, but silent, watching Dag with a brow furrowed as much in wonder as in pain. “Well, Lakewalker,” he breathed at last, then muffled a cough.

“That healin’ o’ his is a thing, ain’t it?” commiserated the hunkering Hod.

“Don’t try to talk,” whispered Dag. His dry voice cracked, and he cleared it; Fawn hustled to retuck the blanket she’d put around his shoulders and to fetch him a drink. He raised the tin cup to his lips with a trembling hand, swallowed, and went on more easily. “I’ve ground-glued together the two slices through your stomach walls where the blade punched in and out, and likewise some of the bigger blood vessels in there. Crane’s knife missed the biggest ones, or you’d have bled to death before I got here. Fawn’ll have to stitch up your skin.” Fawn nodded, carefully washing away the gory matter that Dag had drawn from the wound by ground projection. She had Dag’s medicine-kit needle already threaded, and bent to the task. Bo made little ow noises, but endured.

Dag went on cautiously, “Biggest danger now’s infection. I expect there’ll be some. Got to wait and see how that plays out.”

Truly. A gut-wound like this was more usually a death sentence, fever finishing what bleeding started, as Bo likely knew, because he nodded shortly. When Fawn tied off her last thread, Whit, Hod, and Berry combined to lift Bo carefully into his bunk. Dag simply lay back on the floor and stared up at the roof.

Fawn was just wondering if they should also unite to lift Dag to his bed, when Barr and Remo clumped in to apologize for killing what they sincerely hoped had been an escaping bandit up in the woods. Fawn nipped to the front hatch to peek out, and saw a couple of saddled horses beyond the gangplank. Over one was draped the body of a skinny, red-haired fellow, his sharp, contorted face pale in death.

Crane was still lying in a heap beside the animal pen; his chin moved and his eyes shifted to glare at her, and she flinched and fled back inside. Dag, what did you do to him? That was like no making I ever seen or heard tell of…

In the kitchen, Barr was frowning down at Dag and asking the very question she’d longed to: “Dag, what the blight did you do to that fellow out on the front deck?”

“Is that Crane?” Remo added, glancing toward the bow.

“Yes,” said Dag, still staring at the roof. “I broke his neck. In effect. He won’t be getting better, in case anyone was worried about tying him up.”

His expression glazed, Dag watched Fawn upside down as she bent and peered at him in worry. She remembered the shock in Crane’s eyes when he’d dropped the knife and collapsed like a wall falling. In effect. But not in any other way? Would the patroller boys think to follow up that little flag of truth amongst Dag’s laconic misdirection? Either Dag would explain in his own time, or she’d wait for a private moment to ask, she decided.

Hod and Whit took tumbling turns giving a description of the events around and aboard the Fetch to the two patrollers, with an occasional corroborating moan or snort from Bo. Berry added little, still holding the sniffling Hawthorn. But as their words turned his frightening experience into a tale, he seemed to revive, uncurling from his childlike clutch in his big sister’s lap, slowly regaining the dignity of his eleven years, and finally adding a few flourishing, if gruesome, details of his own. By the time they’d finished, he mainly wanted to go off and inspect the corpse of Little Drum. Dubiously, Berry released him.

“I about swallowed my heart when I saw that big knife at Fawn’s throat,” said Whit, “but I swear she looked more mad than scared.”

“I was plenty scared enough,” said Fawn. And yet…Crane hadn’t been nearly as scary as the Glassforge malice, even if she might have been equally dead at either’s hands. How odd. Flying from a knife at her throat to an immediate need to pull things together for Bo’s sake, maybe she just hadn’t had time to fall apart yet.

Some boatmen called from outside, a troop sent back from the cave to help guard the boats—a bit belatedly, Fawn thought tartly. The two young patrollers and Whit went off to help sort out things. It was full dawn. Dag sat up.

“I have to…I can’t…let me sleep for one hour. Bo can have a few sips of water, nothing else.” He climbed to his hand and knees, then to his feet, making no protest when Fawn lent him a shoulder to help him lurch to their bed nook. She did insist on pulling off his boots. He was asleep by the time she flung a blanket over him.

Barr, Remo, and Whit had been grimly excited, describing their victory at the bandit cave. After they’d defeated the Glassforge malice, Fawn recalled, Dag had been wildly elated despite his weariness. There was not a trace of triumph in him now, and she wondered at the difference. In the kitchen space that still reeked of the night’s terror, the floor splotched with blood, Fawn sighed and quietly started fixing breakfast.

Fawn let Dag sleep for closer to three hours; he woke on his own when the Fetch pulled away from shore. Stumbling out to the kitchen, he ran a hand through his bent hair, and asked, “What’s been happening?”

“Not much,” she said, passing him a mug of tea. “Everybody decided to move their boats around to the cave landing. Berry, Whit, and Hod are topside.” She gestured upward with her thumb. “I sent Hod and Remo out to clean Crane up a while back.”

Dag’s brows bent, whether in bewilderment or disapproval she was not sure.

She explained, “It was more for us than him. Getting paralyzed like that loosed his bowels and bladder, seemingly. He was stinkin’ up Berry’s boat. Besides…even corpses get washed before burying.”

He nodded glumly. She ran him out onto the back deck to wash up, took his bloodied clothes to soak in a bucket, and handed him fresh ones. The day was turning pale blue as the weak sun climbed, not so much warming up as thinning the chill. Since his hand was still shaking, she also helped him shave, a skill she’d acquired that time his arm had been broken, just before their marriage. Hot food and a cleanup were worth at least a couple hours of the sleep he hadn’t got, she figured.

Their rattling around woke Barr from his own nap; Remo had been lying in his bunk but not sleeping, and he too rose to join them.

“I have to question Crane,” Dag repeated. He nodded to the patrollers. “You two had best sit in. A quorum of sorts.”

“I want to hear that tale, too,” said Fawn.

He shook his head. “It’s like to be nasty, Spark. I would spare you if I could.”

“But you can’t,” she pointed out, which made him wince. Feeling pressed by his dismay, she struggled to explain. “Dag…I’ll never be a fighter. I’m too little. My legs are too short to outrun most fellows. The only equal weapon I’ll ever have is my wits. But without knowing things, my wits are like a bow with no arrows. Don’t leave me disarmed.”

After a bleak moment, he ducked his chin in assent. When he’d finished swallowing down his breakfast and his tea, they all followed him out onto the front deck. The Snapping Turtle was out ahead, approaching the crook of the Elbow, and the keelboat from Silver Shoals trailed them at some distance. The Fetch seemed very far from any shore, running down this stretch of swollen river.

Crane was laid out—like a funeral, Fawn couldn’t help thinking—in Remo’s spare shirt, covered by a blanket and with another folded under his head. His arms lay flaccid along his sides, nerveless feet to the bow. Dag settled down cross-legged next to him. Tidying up the two men first had lent this encounter a curious formality, as though they were couriers from distant hinterlands meeting to exchange news.

Even Crane seemed to feel it, or at least he was no longer trying to bite folks as he had when he’d first been washed. Fawn wondered if his several hours of being stepped past and ignored like a pile of old laundry had felt as weird for him as it had for everyone else. And then she wondered if Dag had arranged it that way on purpose, the way he’d left Barr without food to help tame him.

Fawn dragged the bench forward a little behind Crane and settled on it out of his direct view. But however mangled his ground and groundsense, he had to know she was back there. Barr leaned against the pen fence across from Dag, overlooking the captive; Remo sat at Crane’s feet.

“So what’s your real name?” Dag began. “Your camp? How’d you come to be alone?”

“Did you lose your partner?” Barr asked.

“Did you desert?” asked Remo.

Dag continued, “Or were you banished?”

Crane pressed his lips together and glowered at his interrogators.

“One of the prisoners told me he was an Oleana patroller,” Remo put in uncertainly.

Silence.

“If that’s the case,” said Dag, “and he’s a banished man, then he’s likely Something Crane Log Hollow.” Crane’s head jerked, and Dag’s lips twisted in grim satisfaction. Dag went on, “Because that’s the only Oleana camp I’ve heard tell of that’s banished a patroller in the past half-dozen years, and there can hardly be two the same.”

Crane looked away, as much as he could. “Crane will do,” he said. His first words.

“So it will,” said Dag. “So I have the start of you, and I have the end. What’s in between?”

“What difference does it make?”

“To your fate? Not much, now. But if you mean to tell your own tale and not just leave others to tell it for you—or on you—you’ve got maybe two more hours while we go ’round the Elbow. After that you’ll be out of my hand.”

Crane’s black brows drew down, as though this argument unexpectedly weighed with him, but he said only, “You’ll look pretty funny dragging a man who can’t move off to be hanged.”

“I won’t be laughing.”

Lakewalkers, Fawn was reminded, seldom bothered trying to lie to each other. Could Crane even close his ground, in his disrupted state? Dag had to be partly open at least, and not enjoying it. Barr and Remo kept tensing, like people flinching from a scratched scab they couldn’t leave well enough alone, so Fawn guessed they were partly open, too.

Crane turned his head from side to side, frowning. “What the blight did you do to me, anyway? I can’t even feel most of my body. With sense or groundsense.”

“I once saw a fellow fall from a horse,” Dag answered not quite directly, “who broke his neck in about the same place as I broke yours. He lived for some months. We won’t inflict that on you.”

“But you never touched me! You were twenty feet off, over on the bank. It was some sort of evil groundwork you did!”

“It was,” said Dag impassively, not quibbling with the modifier. Remo and Barr looked disturbed. Crane’s startled gaze said, What are you? plain as plain, but he didn’t voice it.

Crane’s utter helplessness had been made clear during his cleanup. He must realize by now he was a dead man talking. Fawn knew how to feign indifference to torments one could not escape, but she’d never before seen real indifference used so. Crane seemed pained to have his mind roused from its sullen retreat.

More silence.

“So,” Dag probed again, “you were a mule-headed rule-breaker, and didn’t care to reform, so Log Hollow threw you out. Maybe a thief.”

“That was a lie!” said Crane. But added after a moment, “Then.”

“Was it?” said Dag mildly. “There was a farmer woman, I heard. Maybe youngsters. What happened to them? When your camp stripped you and booted you out, did you find your way back to her?”

“For a while,” said Crane. “She didn’t much care for what I brought her from hunting, compared to what I’d used to bring from patrol. Then the blighted strumpet died. I gave it all up for nothing!”

“How’d she die?”

“Fever. I was away. Came back to a blighted mess…”

Dag glanced at Fawn, his face set tight, and she touched the thin, drying scab on her neck left from Crane’s knife. Dag had been skin-close to losing her, last night. She’d sometimes worried what might happen to her if Dag were killed; never, she suddenly realized, what would happen to Dag if she died. His first widowing had nearly destroyed him, even with all the support of his kinfolk and familiar world around him. What would it be like with nothing around him?

“And the youngsters?” Dag said. His voice was very level, devoid of judgment. It would have to be, Fawn thought, to keep Crane talking at all. She bit her knuckle, picturing the lost children.

“Foisted them on her sister. She didn’t want half-bloods. We had an argument…then I left. After that I don’t know.”

Fawn suspected that had been an ugly argument. The death of either parent would be a disaster for young children, but the loss of a mother could be lethal for infants, even with near kin or dear friends to take up the burden. Crane had clearly owned no knack for keeping either. Dag did not pursue this, but led on. “Then what?”

“I knocked around Oleana for a while. When I got tired of living in the woods, I’d take what jobs some farmer would give me, or try the dice. Took to thieving when those didn’t play out. It was so easy, with groundsense. I could walk like a ghost right through their shops or houses. I ’specially liked doing places where they’d given me the evil eye and run me off, when I’d asked honest first.”

Remo said, in an outraged voice, “Oh, that’d make it good for the next patrol to go through, to have Lakewalkers suspected of stealing!” Dag waved him to silence. Crane’s lips turned in a mockery of a smile. How old was Crane? Older than Barr or Remo, to be sure, but younger than Dag, Fawn guessed. About halfway between? Remo was looking at Barr the rule-bender in a way that made him shift uncomfortably. Barr glared back at his partner as if to say, I would not have—! But Fawn thought both could see, Yes, how easy.

Crane continued, “One night, some farmer woke up before I was done gathering, and cornered me. I had to shut him up, but I hit him too hard. That’s when I decided to leave Oleana. Took myself down to the river, spent his money on passage on a farmer flatboat. I started to think—maybe if I got someplace far enough away, I could become somebody else. Shed my skin, my name, start over somehow. I was going to decide when I reached the Confluence, whether to go south to Graymouth or maybe north to Luthlia, though I’d no love of snow by then. It’s said they don’t ask too many questions up there, if a patroller can take the cold. But then the fool boat boss put in at the Cavern Tavern, and I met Brewer and his game.”

“What was his game?” Dag’s voice was curiously soft, now. Remo squinted at him in doubt. Crane’s words were flowing as if he’d half-forgotten his listeners, wound up in his tale and his memories. Dag did nothing visible to disrupt the flow; Fawn couldn’t tell if he was doing something invisible to channel it.

“It was how it amused Brewer to restock on bandits when he’d run low,” Crane said. “When he’d taken captives alive, two or more at a time—it worked best with at least four—he’d set them to fight each other, in pairs. If they refused to fight, they’d be slain outright. The second pair almost never refused. If he had more captives, he might make the winners fight each other, too, but anyway, the prize—besides being allowed to live—was to join his gang. He said he could turn most men that way—after they’d killed their friends for him, he’d own their minds.”

Alder, Fawn thought. Was that what had happened to Alder? In that case, what exactly had happened to Buckthorn, and Berry’s papa, and the rest of their crew? She shuddered, realizing Dag wasn’t keeping his voice low just for the menace of it. It was so his words would not carry to the top deck.

“His arithmetic was off, by my reckoning,” Crane continued. “But I was his prize, when I showed up. To turn a Lakewalker to thievery and murder! He thought he was the game-master, he did. I didn’t tell him I was ahead of him down that road.”

A strange brag. If Crane couldn’t be the best, he’d compete for being the baddest? Evidently so.

“I won my rounds, of course. It was too easy. I stayed on a few weeks, learned the trade, persuaded and beguiled a few fellows just to see what would happen. Then I took Brewer’s game to its logical conclusion. From behind. I was never quite sure if he was surprised, or not.”

“Once you’d won, you could have left, surely. However you were guarded before,” Dag said suggestively. “If you could walk past farmers like a ghost, why not bandits?”

“Go where? Farmers still wouldn’t have me, and Lakewalkers…would’ve been able to smell the blood in my ground, by then. So maybe Brewer won after all, eh?”

“Suicide?” said Dag mildly.

Crane stared at him in astonishment. “I didn’t have a bonded knife! Nor any way of getting one, once I was banished. The blighted camp council stripped mine from me along with everything else.” Crane turned his head away. The flow of his talk dried up for several minutes.

Fawn’s face screwed up in the slow realization that Crane—even Crane! — was taken aback at Dag’s suggestion not because he feared self-murder, but because he scorned to so waste a death, with no sharing knife to catch it. His response seemed quite unthinking and altogether sincere. And Remo and Barr looked as though they found nothing odd in this at all. She pounded her fist gently against her forehead. Lakewalkers! They’re all Lakewalkers! All mad.

Dag finally spoke again. “You’ve kept this gang going for a long time, though, as such things go. I can see where you gave the bandits a sort of twisted leadership, which held them to you, but what held you to them?”

Crane jerked his chin—in lieu of the shrug he could no longer make, Fawn supposed. “The coin, the goods, I’d not much use for, but Brewer’s game fascinated me. Besides being mad after money, I think Brewer liked running the cave because it gave him something lower than himself to despise. Me…It was like owning my own private fighting-dog kennel, except with much more interesting animals.

“I hardly had to do a thing, you know? They just arranged themselves around me. Drop any Lakewalker down amongst farmers, that’s what happens. If he doesn’t rise to the top, they’ll blighted shove him up. They want to be ruled by their betters. They’re like sheep that can’t tell the difference between shepherds and wolves, I swear.”

“So did you make them, or did they make you?” Dag asked quietly.

Crane’s smile stretched. “You are what you eat. Any malice learns that.”

This time, it was Dag’s turn to twitch, and Crane didn’t miss it.

Dag took a long breath, and said, “Remo, give me that knife you found.”

Remo rather reluctantly pulled the sheath cord over his head. Dag weighed the knife in his hand and regarded Crane sternly. “Where’d you come by this? And that boatload of Lakewalker furs?”

Crane twisted his head. “It wasn’t my doing. Just an evil chance. Pair of Lakewalker traders down from Raintree chose to pull in their narrow boat and camp practically in front of the cave. There was no holding the fellows, though I told them they were being blighted fools. I lost six of those idiots in the fight that followed.”

“Did you try the game on the Lakewalkers?”

“They didn’t live long enough.”

Dag touched the knife sheath to his lips in that odd habitual gesture.

“You’re telling me half the truth, I think. This knife was bonded to a woman.”

Crane’s jaw compressed in exasperation. “All right! It was a string-bound couple. They both died the same.”

“You murdered her, and didn’t even let her share?” said Remo.

“She was dead before I got to her. Fought too hard, there was an unlucky blow…At least it saved me a tedious argument with the Drum boys. I figured it’d be a bad idea to let them learn they could play with Lakewalkers.”

A rather sick silence followed this pronouncement.

Crane did not break it. Past hope, past rage, past revenge upon the world. Just waiting. Not waiting for anything, just…waiting. He spoke as if from the lip of a grave he no longer feared but wanted as a tired man wanted his bed.

Dag’s hand folded tightly around the sheath. He asked, “If you had a bonded knife, would you choose to share, or to hang?”

Crane’s look seemed to question his wits. “If I had a bonded knife…!”

“Because I think I could rededicate this one,” said Dag. “To you.”

Barr’s mouth dropped open. “But you’re a patroller!”

“Or a medicine maker,” Remo put in, more doubtfully.

“I said, I think. It would be my first knife making, if it worked.” He added dryly, “And if it didn’t work, leastways no one would complain.”

Crane blinked, squinted, said cautiously, “Do you fancy the justice of it? To put an end to me with that woman’s own knife?”

“No, just the economy. I need a primed knife. I hate walking bare.”

“Dag,” said Remo uneasily, “that knife belongs to somebody. Shouldn’t we try to find the rightful heir? Or at least turn it in at the next camp?”

Dag’s jaw set. “I was thinking of applying river-salvage rules, same as with the rest of the cave’s treasure.”

Barr said, “Should he be allowed to share? His own camp council didn’t think so even back when he carried far fewer crimes in his saddlebags.”

“He’s Crane No-camp now, I’d say. Which makes me his camp captain, by right of might, if nothing else. I guarantee his priming would have no lack of affinity, leastways.”

His glance met Fawn’s startled one; his lids fell, rose. Yes, she thought, Dag would know all about affinity. Barr and Remo were both looking at him with some misgiving after these peculiar statements. Fawn didn’t blame them. An even stranger look lingered in Crane’s face, as if it shocked him to find there was something still in the world for him to want—and it was in his enemy’s hand to give or withhold. Wonder grew in Fawn, winding with her horror. She’d expected Crane to say, Blight you all, and let the malices take the world. Not Yes, I beg for some last share in this.

As if testing his fortune in disbelief, Crane growled blackly, “We made better sport in the cave. Would it give you a thrill, big man, to kill me with your own hand?”

Dag’s gaze flicked down. “I already did. All we’re doing now is debating the funeral arrangements.” He leaned on his hand and pushed himself up with a tired grunt. He was finished with his questions, evidently, although Barr and Remo looked as though they wanted to ask a dozen more. Not necessarily of Crane.

“Captain No-camp?” Crane called as Dag started to turn away.

Dag looked back down.

“Bury my bones.”

Dag hesitated, gave a short nod. “As you will.”

Fawn followed him to the kitchen, where he drew the bone knife from its sheath and hung the cord around his neck. He made no move to hand either back to Remo.

“Scoop up a kettle of river water and put it on the fire for me, Spark. I want to boil this knife clean of its old groundwork before we reach the cave landing.”

After the Fetch moored above the mouth of the bandit cave, Crane was removed on a makeshift litter of blankets stretched between two keelboat poles borrowed from the nearby Snapping Turtle. Heads turned and murmurs rose both from boatmen and roped bandits as he was carried past. He shut his eyes, possibly pretending to be unconscious, an escape of sorts; the only one, Fawn trusted, that he would have. Dag followed, but was seized on almost at once by Bearbait and one of the Raintree hunters, who dragged him off to the cave to look at the hurt men again, or maybe at more hurt men.

Wain’s lieutenant, Saddler, tramped down the stony slope and hailed Berry.

“We found a slew of boats tied up behind that island over there,” he told her, with a wave at the opposite shore, the same level leafless woods that lined most of the river along here, save for the weathered ridge that backed the cave and shaped the Elbow. Only the—relative—narrowness of the channel gave a clue to a river-wise eye that it was an island.

“Wain wanted to know if you could pick out your papa’s. Or name any of the others, for that matter.”

“If the Briar Rose is back there, I suppose I ought to look,” Berry agreed halfheartedly. She glanced at Fawn. “You come with me?”

Fawn nodded. It had to feel to Berry like being taken to look at a body dragged from the river, to see if it was a missing kinsman. You’d want a friend to go with you.

“I’ll come, too…if you want,” Whit offered cautiously.

A silent nod. Berry’s mouth was strained, her eyes gray and flat. It was hard to read gratitude in her face, though Fawn thought some might be hidden there. It was hard to read anything in her face, really.

Saddler and another strong-armed keeler rowed them across in a skiff. Paths threaded between the trees and across the island, wet and squelchy underfoot, as though the river had recently overtopped the banks and left a promise to return. Fawn’s shoes were soaked through before they reached the other side. This channel was narrower, choked with fallen trees and other drifted debris.

Up and down the shore, derelict boats were tied, both keels and flats. A few curious boatmen were poking around in them. Some boats in better condition looked as though they’d been in the process of having their original names scraped away and replaced by new ones, or other identifying marks altered. Others had sprung leaks and settled into the mud. The newest captures were tied at the top end, upstream, and Fawn thought she recognized a couple of the names of the Tripoint boats Cap Cutter had been seeking. Fifteen or so in all—Fawn found herself estimating the sizes of the missing crews, and shivering. And this didn’t even make up the whole, because the bandits had burned some boats, as well. As many died here as at Greenspring. If accumulated secretly over a year or more, and not in a few dreadful days. And there wasn’t even a malice. Malice aplenty, though.

Two flatboats at the far end of the row must have lain here since last fall, for the ice had opened their seams and buckled their boards, and what caulking hadn’t given way in the winter cold had rotted out in the summer heat. They sat low in the water, weathered and ghostly, and even Fawn’s eye could pick out the Rose, second from the last, because it was the exact same design as the Fetch.

Berry made her way across a sagging gray board and lowered herself carefully to the decaying deck; Fawn and Whit followed. With a creaking of rusted hinges, Berry pulled open the front hatch and peered into the shadows within. She wrinkled her nose, hiked up her skirts, and stepped down into the cold water. Fawn, deciding her shoes could get no wetter, did the same. Whit saved his trousers and waited in the hatch, watching Berry in worry.

Most of the fittings had been removed, including the glass windows in the gaping frames toward the back of the cabin. Blue daylight filtered through, reflecting off the water to give a drowned glow to the space. A lot of warped barrel staves were still left, half-floating, slowly rotting. Some kegs might once have held salt butter or lard; Fawn wasn’t sure if they’d been broken open by humans or a passing bear. Wildlife had been in here, certainly. Berry waded right through water to her knees, back and forth; twice, she reached down and pulled up unidentifiable trash. It took Fawn a few minutes to realize she was looking for bodies—or skeletons maybe, by this time—and was immeasurably relieved when none were found. Berry climbed up briefly through the kitchen hatch to peer around the back deck, then, still in that same silence, made her way to the bow and onto shore where Saddler waited.

“Anything left?” he asked.

She shook her head. “It’s good for nothing but firewood, now. Half of it’s too waterlogged even for that.”

He nodded, unsurprised. “Wain says you’re to have a share from the cave. Plan is, we mean to fix up what boats here will still float, and take the goods we found piled up down to the Confluence.”

“You’ll see that Cap Cutter gets word of his lost boats and men? I expect you’ll catch up with him about there.”

Would Boss Cutter be wounded in his male pride to learn that the lowly Fetch had destroyed the river bandits, when all the Tripoint Steel’s bristling bravado had missed the mark? No, more likely by the time the tale was carried downriver by the keelers, boastful Boss Wain would feature as its hero. Well, Berry would not begrudge it to him.

“Cutter from Tripoint? Aye, we know the fellow. Will do.” Saddler ducked his head. “What don’t get claimed by the old owners’ kin will be sold. Together with our salvage shares, it’s going to add up to quite a bit.”

“I don’t want no share of this,” said Berry.

“More for us, but that ain’t right, Boss Berry. I expect Wain’ll have a word or two about that.”

“Wain can have as many words as he wants. They’re free on the river.” She scraped strands of pale hair out of her eyes.

Saddler shrugged, dropping the debate for the moment. “There’s a couple other flats up the row we got more than one guess on. I’d be grateful if you’d take a look at ’em. Settle an argument, maybe.”

She nodded and let herself be drawn off.

Whit stood on the muddy bank, looking from Berry’s straight, retreating back to the rotting hulk of the Rose. He ran a harried hand through his hair, and said to Fawn, “I had one shoulder for if her betrothed was dead, and another for if he was run off with another gal. But I got no shoulder for this. And she’s not cryin’ anyhow. I dreamed of cutting out Alder, but not this way! What’ll I do, Fawn? I want to hold her, but I don’t dare!”

“It’s too soon, Whit. I don’t think she could stand having her hurts touched yet.”

“But I’m afraid that soon it’ll be too late!”

Fawn considered this. “Dag once told me that Lakewalkers wear their hair knotted for a year for their losses, and it’s not too long a time. She’s just been hit with a lot of losses. Her papa, Buckthorn—Alder, too. Alder’s the worst of all, because she’s lost and found and lost him twice.”

“She don’t cry at all.”

“Maybe she’s like Hawthorn, and goes off in the woods to cry private. You do wonder…what sort of life a girl must have had to spurn comfort even in the worst pain, as if needing help was a weakness. Maybe she figured if only she was strong enough, she could save everything. But it doesn’t work that way.” She frowned and went on, “After the Glassforge malice, Dag comforted me, but he had some pretty deep experience to draw on, I reckon.”

“I ain’t got no deep experience,” Whit said, a little desperately.

“I’d say you’re getting some now. Pay attention.”

He rubbed the back of his wrist across his nose. “Fawn…I grant that malice roughed you up and scared you silly, but it wasn’t as complicated as this.”

She took two long breaths, and finally said: “Whit…when it caught me, the Glassforge malice ground-ripped the ten-weeks child I was carryin’ in my womb. When I miscarried of it, I almost bled to death. Dag saved my life that night, taking care of me. Nothing could save my baby by then.”

Hit on the head with a fence post about summed up the look on Whit’s face. Well, she’d certainly got his attention. “Huh…?” he breathed. “You never said…”

“Why did you think I ran away from home?” she asked impatiently.

“But who was the—wait, no, not Dag, couldn’t have been—”

Fawn tossed her head. “No, the papa was a West Blue boy, and it doesn’t matter now who, except that he made it real plain he wanted no parts of his doin’. So I walked on down that road by myself.” She drew air through her nose, and went on, “Where I met Dag, so it came out all right in the end, but it wasn’t—ever—simple.”

“You never said,” he repeated faintly.

“Silence doesn’t mean you’re not grieving. I didn’t want my hurts rummaged in, either. Or to have to listen to a lot of stupid jokes about it. Or otherwise be plagued to death by my family.”

“I wouldn’t have made…” He hesitated.

“For Berry, you just be there, Whit. Be the one person in the wide green world she doesn’t have to explain it to, because you were there and saw it all for yourself. Hand her a clean cloth if she cries or bleeds, and some warm thing for the pain that doubles her over. The time to hold her will come. This day isn’t over yet.”

“Oh,” said Whit. Quietly, he followed her up the riverbank to rejoin Saddler and Berry.