Horizon

15

A cracking thunderstorm, blowing in hard just before dawn, ended their nice dry spell. By the time everyone turned out to settle the spooked animals and recapture wind-scattered gear, gray daylight arrived, but it wasn’t till midmorning that they set off through the trailing drizzle, bleary-eyed. Fawn let Dag talk her into riding inside the wagon; he and Barr were protected in the boatmen’s rain cloaks Fawn had fashioned back on the Fetch. At least the boiling brown creeks in this more settled country were mostly bridged again.

Fawn wasn’t sure whether to be surprised or not that Sumac and her partner elected to trail along with them at the wagon’s pace “just till the ferry.” Sumac rode between Dag and Arkady, chatting animatedly whenever the rain eased. Fawn supposed she and Dag had a lot of catching up to do. Arkady didn’t seem to be saying much, but he didn’t come up on the wagon box at all that day to continue Calla’s lessons. Edged out of the prime spots at Sumac’s stirrups by their seniors, Barr and Rase trailed a trifle disconsolately. But camp that night was not nearly the sodden misery Fawn expected, because Finch and Indigo scouted out a run-down barn that its owner let to benighted Trace travelers. The roof leaked and the old boards thrummed in the gale, but it beat huddling together under the wagon all hollow.

The clouds broke up into a humid pale heat by the next noon as they came to the edge of the Hardboil Valley, quite as wide as that of the Grace. The shining ribbon of river wound through spring-green woods and fields that steamed with the recent rains. As they slithered carefully down the muddy road, Fawn caught her first glimpses of the ferry town, which bore the arresting name of Mutton Hash, and of the ferry itself, which seemed to be the familiar flat barge hauled from shore to shore by a rope-wound capstan. But here, two big boats worked in parallel, one coming while the other was going.

The water was wider than Fawn had imagined, over half a mile, and Mutton Hash the biggest settlement she’d seen for weeks, not a mere village but a lively river town. As they neared she could make out boatbuilders and goods sheds, hotels and liveries, brewers, bakers, smiths, a ropewalk, tanneries, and horse dealers, and she marveled at how comfortably familiar it all seemed to her now. There was also, she discovered as they arrived near the riverbank, a line for the ferry backed up for two blocks. Besides local wagons, riders, and a lot of foot traffic, the entire forty-mule tea caravan had somehow got ahead of them again.

Such a clot seemed to be an expected thing, because the way down to the landing was lined with booths and hawkers selling food, drink, and goods to the bored and waiting travelers. Fawn stood in her stirrups and sniffed inviting smells: meat pies, funnel cakes, beer, honeyed tea.

Sounds, too-someone was playing a fiddle quite as well as Berry did, quick and sweet. The fiddler started an old river song, the music dancing high and low, and Fawn’s heart caught. She kicked Magpie closer.

The fiddler was a lean, tall woman standing on a stump to the side of the road, elbow sawing, her blond hair drawn back in a lank horsetail shining in the sun…

“Berry!” shrieked Fawn in astonishment.

Berry looked up and grinned across the heads of the crowd clustered around her, seized a breath before a repeat to whip her bow through the air in greeting, and continued with her tune. She looked much less surprised than Fawn felt. Hawthorn stood at her feet holding out Bo’s shapeless felt hat. When he craned his neck and spotted Fawn, he plunked the hat down between his sister’s tapping toes and elbowed his way toward her. By the time he arrived, she’d slid from her saddle and was able to give him a heartfelt hug, which he didn’t even shrug off in boy embarrassment. Oh, my! He’s taller than me!

“What are you doing here? ” Fawn demanded.

“Waiting for you, partly. Mostly waiting for Whit to finish fussing with his little pack train.”

What pack train? “Is everyone all right? ”

“Oh, sure. ’Cept my raccoon eloped, halfway up the Gray.” Hawthorn frowned in memory of this defection.

Fawn didn’t think there was any oh sure about it, but she gave up the urge to shake him as Berry finished her tune and cried, “Lunch break! Try Mama Flintridge’s dried peach pies over there, best in the valley!”

She jumped off the stump, stuffed her fiddle in its leather bag, grabbed the hat, and passed through the throng to Fawn, collecting a few more coins on the way. The hugs this time were mutual.

“Berry!”

“Sis! You made it! We figured if we were going to cross paths at all, this would be the place.”

“Where’s Whit and the others? ”

Berry swung an arm toward the river. “He has a day job working the capstan on one ferryboat, and Hod’s on the other. Bo’s keeping an eye on our horses and gear at a place across the river. Farther from the taverns.”

Dag and Barr dismounted and made their way to Berry, rather more easily than Fawn had, in time to hear this. Folks glanced at the tall Lakewakers and edged back, mostly-then stared openmouthed when they exchanged happy hugs with the grinning fiddler.

“How did you all end up here? ” asked Fawn. “I thought you’d taken berths on a keelboat bound for Tripoint.”

“We did, and I do believe upstream keelboat hauling was a shock to Whit-he’d thought he worked hard on a farm. Anyways, our fool boat boss managed to get his hull stove in by a floater just above the mouth of the Hardboil. We made it to shore and worked back to the village there, but it was plain that boat wasn’t going anywhere for some time, not to mention we’d lost half its lading to the wet. Well, we heard there that the ice hadn’t even broke up yet on the upper Grace, but the Hardboil was clear. So we found berths on another keel headed up to Mutton Hash, that being as high as we could get by boat.”

Mutton Hash marked the head of navigation for the Hardboil River. The Trace crossed the Hardboil, not by chance, Fawn guessed, just below some thirty miles of impassable shoals and rapids, the hazard that gave the whole river its name. Legend had it there had once been a bridge and a city upstream at a narrow high point, but both were fallen into the mists of time, buried by the encroaching woods.

Fawn nodded.

“Whit always was divided in his mind between the river and the road,” Berry continued. “This way he gets some of both. I was agreeable, because I figure it’ll cut three or four weeks off the trip home. If we’re to build another flatboat before the fall rise, we’ll need that time.”

Might we get there in time to plant a kitchen garden, too? “Did you get the letter I sent you in Graymouth? ”

“Yep, thanks.”

“You didn’t come all this way just on the chance of meeting us, did you? Because we weren’t sure till the last we’d even be coming home this year.”

“No, but we’ve been keeping a lookout all the same. We knew from asking at the ferry that you two hadn’t passed ahead of us-Dag is memorable all by himself, and when the pair of you are together, folks notice. I won’t say we haven’t been lingerin’ a bit in hope, but I want to start north soon. Before your brother buys any more horses.” She made a face.

The ferry pulled into the landing with shouts and a rumble as the gangplank was laid out. Walkers and wagons heaved up the slope, and the crowd shifted as the new passengers hurried to take their place.

While some of the tea caravan’s younger and less jaded mules were taking exception to their offered boat ride, Hawthorn dashed down to tell Whit about the arrivals.

Whit came thumping up grinning like mad, hugged Fawn, and wrung Dag’s hand. “You made it! Hoped you might! Hey, I bet I could squeeze you on right now.”

“Thanks, but we’re not alone,” said Dag. “We’re traveling with some other folks. Young homesteaders. Theirs is that green wagon up there.”

“Sage is a blacksmith, going to look for work in Tripoint,” Fawn added.

“Even better. Bring them along! I have so much to show you.” Whit glanced back at the filling ferry; a big fellow guarding the gangplank, clearly the ferry boss, was glowering after him. “But I have to go back to work now. Can’t quit in the middle of a day, it wouldn’t be right. I’ll talk to you more when you get aboard, unless you end up on Hod’s boat, and then he’ll tell you all about it. Berry or Hawthorn will take you to our digs, I guess. Where’s Remo? ”

Barr stiffened a little. “He stayed at New Moon.”

Whit blinked. “Oh. Why? ”

“There was this girl,” said Fawn, as the simplest answer. Which had to suffice, as the ferry boss followed up his glower with a bellow. Whit waved and ran back to the boat.

Whit seemed both changed and unchanged. He was definitely broader in the shoulders. He plainly retained his sometimes-alarming enthusiasm for the new; if his ability to stick with a tough job to the end was improved by his marriage, so much the better. As Dag led them all over to introduce Berry and Hawthorn to the company, Fawn decided to save her most important family news for some less crowded moment.

Whit’s ferry slogged all the way across the river and back again before their turn came to clamber aboard. Fawn thought the boat rode alarmingly low in the water when the ferry boss finally slid the gate pole across. Whit and the southern boys seemed to become instant comrades, Whit because he was a friendly cuss, and the others because they’d heard so much about him that it likely felt they already knew one another. Despite their growing up not thirty miles from the Gray, the Hardboil was the largest river some of them had yet seen, and they were agog with it. Under the ferry boss’s amused eye they were permitted a few turns on the four-man capstan.

Dag’s attention was mainly taken keeping Copperhead from picking a fight with all the strange horses jammed up around them. Some of the other travelers eyed the Lakewalkers suspiciously, but the ferrymen evidently saw enough of their sort as to excite no comment, at least not out loud. Well, Sumac drew covert stares, but if any of the men were thinking rude thoughts, the Lakewalkers doubtless kept their groundsenses furled in this crowd, and so could take no offense.

As she led Magpie across the echoing gangplank onto the northern shore, Fawn thought with a thrill, We’re halfway home!

–-

Dag was unsurprised when Berry led them two miles off the Trace to another farm with a dilapidated barn, cheaper to let because it was not so near the road. It offered good pasturage, though, important as their mob of hungry animals joined the six horses that Whit had acquired.

Since Whit had started this whole venture with a mere pair and the clothes on his back, it seemed good progress, except for his new beasts being near breakdowns. Yet on closer look, his selections were shrewd.

Most of the animated racks of bones needed no more than worm medication, rest, and grain, which Whit had already supplied. A couple showed signs of prior abuse, now stitched, patched, and plastered.

“All mares,” Whit, when he arrived from the ferry at sunset, pointed out to Dag. “By the time we get to Clearcreek, I’ll know which ones I want to cull and which I want to keep for breeding. D’you think Mama’s colt Darkling might be ready to cover them by next fall? ” A light of equine enterprise shone in Whit’s eye.

Whit was ecstatic to find that Sage was an experienced farrier, and the two promptly put their heads together on a problem of corrective shoeing for one of the mares. The company’s animals being overdue for a rest, they also obtained an extra day of pasturage and shelter from the farm’s owner in exchange for a promise to shoe one of his horses. It seemed to Dag that an uneven burden had fallen on Sage, but the young smith was willing, and the other boys all turned out to help him as best they could.

He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty was praise for a man whether northern or southern; Arkady was let off from any ragging about his cleanliness when he supplied value by doing ground checks of all the new acquisitions to sort the serious from the remediable problems. As a result, Whit took one of his mares back to the Mutton Hash market the following morning and returned with a different one. So it was late in the afternoon before Whit whipped out his newest prize to show off.

It was a crossbow with a spring steel bow and a cranking mechanism for cocking, the work of some Tripoint artisan. “I got it in trade from a broke-down keeler back on the Gray,” Whit explained eagerly, turning it in his hands to point out its notable features, which seemed to be all of them. The farmer boys were drawn to it as swiftly as if it were fresh apple pie. Everyone wanted to try it at once except Sage, who wanted to take it apart and see if he could copy the mechanisms, an operation Whit was unwilling to allow just yet.

“I only have seven bolts for it,” Whit explained. “I used to have eight, but I lost one already, not having a Lakewalker around to help me find the misses.” He made a sad face.

Fawn frowned, turning one of the short steel-tipped bolts in her hand. “I guess I couldn’t make arrows for this bow. I suppose Sage might.”

“Oh, hey, actually, I was hoping you would. Make me some wooden ones for practice bolts, that is. I don’t want to lose any more of the fancy steel-head ones just on target practice.”

Fawn brightened a trifle. “Sure. I could try, anyhow.”

The mob of them went off to set up a target at the end of the pasture, then retreated to shooting distance to flip a coin for turns. The Lakewalkers leaned on the pasture fence watching, at least till the first frenzy wore off. As the rattle of the ratchet rose in the air, Dag could tell that Barr, Rase, and Sumac were all itching to try out the new toy.

Arkady was less impressed. “It’s rather crude. The range is short, and the firing rate is slow. A Lakewalker bow maker could craft a much finer one.”

Dag pursed his lips. “A lovely unbreakable longbow, yes-in about two weeks, plus a week to recover. But I’ve seen those Tripoint artisans’ shops. Once they were set up for it, they could likely turn out one of those crossbows in a day. More than one, if they organized their hands.”

Arkady sniffed. “Quick and cheap.”

“Yeah, but if they can turn out twenty to our one, it wouldn’t matter if a few broke or didn’t work quite square. They could just swap out, and still be miles ahead. And that’s no poor instrument as it stands-it’s as good a working as my cuff bow, which has held up for years with just minor repairs.” Dag considered his specially adapted bow, crafted to bolt into his wrist cuff in place of his hook, which had turned him into a tolerable archer again after his maiming. And his Tripoint-made arm harness generally, which had gifted him back his life as a patroller.

He dug in his pocket, found a copper cray, and handed the coin to Arkady. “Look closely at this.”

Arkady, mystified, accepted it.

“If you found this somewhere, not knowing what it was, how would you judge the metalwork? ”

“Well… the raised image of the crayfish is actually quite fine. And the lettering, of course, so tiny, but clear to read”-Arkady squinted-“Silver Shoals City Mint, One Cray. And making things perfectly round is harder than it looks, I suppose.”

“Aye. Yet when we all visited the mint at Silver Shoals, back when we were coming downriver on the Fetch, we saw the machine that stamps these out a hundred at a time. One of these disks is a little work of art.

Tens of thousands of ’em… become farmer magic.”

Arkady raised his brows; Dag plowed on. “They’re counters, memories of trade and labor that a man can put in his pocket and carry across a continent. They make things move. With my groundsense, I can summon my horse from a mile away. With enough of these, the folks at Silver Shoals can summon a forty-mule tea caravan from eight hundred miles away. And the ground density and complexity of a big river city like Silver Shoals is a making in its own right.”

“You see a farmer town as a making? ” said Barr, his forehead wrinkling at this new thought.

“I do.”

“What about a Lakewalker camp, then? ”

“That, too, of course.”

Arkady made to hand the coin back; Dag grinned and said, “Keep it. There’s plenty more where that came from.” He paused a moment to contemplate the ratcheting, thwack, and laughter of the crossbow practice, and his smile faded. “Now imagine a city like Silver Shoals or Tripoint turning out those crossbows the way they turn out coins, and putting them into the hands of thousands of farmer boys like ours over there. And now imagine a city like that, and all those boys and all their bows falling into the grip of a malice. Blight, you don’t even have to imagine. I saw the Raintree Lakewalkers last summer put on the run by a bunch of farmers even less well organized and equipped than that. The Raintree malice was wasting its farmer troops right and left from not knowing how to handle ’em yet, but it would have learned better, if we’d given it more time.”

Sumac leaned forward on the fence to tilt her face at him, eyes cool and shrewd. “Huh. So there was more of a bee up your butt when you left Hickory Lake than just the way the Tent Redwing treated your farmer bride, wasn’t there, Uncle Dag? ”

Arkady winced at the crude but vivid turn of phrase, but by the tightening of his mouth, it was plain that he followed the argument.

“I wouldn’t have learned that from Papa,” Sumac went on. “He made out you were just besotted. I think Fairbolt gave me a hint there was more to it. And so did Mari.”

“Fairbolt and I talked about the wider problems, just before I left,” said Dag. “He understood. The shape of the world is shifting under us, and we can’t go on standing still and not fall. Finding our new footing won’t be a task for one man to finish, but it’s surely a task one man can start.” He took a breath. “I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing, but I do know I’m walking in the right direction.”

Rase hadn’t said a word, but he was listening. At least that.

–-

Spring peepers, the noisiest frog per half inch that Dag knew of, had taken up their earsplitting chorus in the farm’s woodlot and pond when he rounded the corner of the barn to make his bedtime patrol. He stopped short when Whit called unexpectedly over the racket, “Wait up, Dag!”

His tent-brother, a lantern swinging from his hand, fell in beside him. Whit cocked his head, listening to the peepers. “Maybe I could stuff cotton in my ears tonight. I’m sure glad I didn’t have to court Berry by squatting with my naked tail in a puddle and screaming for hours till she took pity on me.”

Dag choked on a laugh. “You just had to put that picture in my head, didn’t you? Maybe that’s why the lady peepers pick their mates. To shut them up.”

“That makes a persuasive sort of sense, you know? ”

Dag started forward once more, only to stop again when Whit said, “Dag-does Fawn seem a little peaked to you? Not quite her usual cheerful self? ”

Concerned, Dag turned to face him. “Does she seem so to you? Seeing her every day, I might not notice subtler changes. And of course her ground is so bright and busy right now with its making, it tends to overwhelm everything else. I’d thought she was holding up real well, all things considered, but if you think not, maybe I should…”

“Huh? ” said Whit. “Making? ”

“Didn’t she tell you yet? ”

“Tell me what? ”

Well… Dag supposed he had an equal right to this announcement.

“We’re expecting a child”-would it be coaxing lumps from fate to say our first child?-“in the early winter. Fawn says she’s hoping it’ll be around my birthday, though I think that might be a bit early.”

Whit stepped back a pace, eyes and mouth both wide, before he laughed in astonishment. “Hey! I’ll be an uncle! And Berry will be an aunt! How about that? Oh, I can’t wait to tell them at home.” His black brows drew in. “Wait a minute. What of all those tricks you were telling me about, before Berry and I got married, for delaying things? ”

Dag hoped Whit couldn’t see the heat in his cheeks in this dimness.

“Well. Nobody said they were perfect tricks. Accidents happen even to Lakewalkers, you know.”

“I guess!”

“I was, um… distracted.”

Whit, blight him, sniggered. Dag ignored him with what dignity he could muster and trod off once more, Whit tagging after.

“Well, if she’s increasing, that accounts for it,” said Whit, sounding satisfied to have his mystery solved. “Short-tempered, too, I bet, heh.”

“Not noticeably,” Dag growled.

They walked on in silence for a few moments after that.

An accident? Or accidentally on purpose? Dag hoped his own mind wasn’t playing tricks on him to that extent. What threat had New Moon Cutoff offered him, after all, to make him want to claim his wife so irrevocably at just that moment? A threat of ease? He had to admit, the offer of a life like Arkady’s gentle, protected usefulness was a real temptation, as much for the usefulness as for the protection. But not there, not in the south.

Dag counted time in his head. All those weeks and miles gone by already, and the tiny fire within Fawn’s womb had not faded or faltered, but had clung with dogged, Spark-like determination. Maybe it’ll be a girl, he allowed himself to think. Strong like her mama. Maybe it was finally safe to let himself start thinking of that new spark as a real person, original and astonishing. Maybe. Oh, my heart. It almost hurt to have it stretched so far beyond its former-safe, secret, shriveled-boundaries.

Yet by whatever chance they had arrived, he was not sorry to be on this road.

–-

Five days later, Dag was rethinking that belief.

It hadn’t been wrong, merely much too simpleminded. This was nothing like the northward leg he’d pictured back when he and Fawn had left Hickory Lake-a vision that actually took him some effort to recall-just the two of them, a lingering spring, and plenty of bedroll time together. Yet the whole point of this journey had been to put fresh pictures in their heads, because the old ones hadn’t seemed up to the new tasks they faced. He could hardly complain because his scheme was working to excess.

He turned in his saddle to look back over the cavalcade. Sixteen people and twenty-five animals made nearly a full-size patrol, without a patrol’s training. He wasn’t quite sure how he’d been elected patrol leader. Still, his old system of giving as few orders as possible, because every time you did people would come to expect them, and then badger for them, and then grow too stiff to move without them, seemed to apply here as well.

This disparate clump of folks was blending better than he’d hoped.

The river crew was used to frequent dealings with strangers, which helped ease the less traveled Alligator Hat boys. Sumac accepted the Bluefields as her esteemed uncle’s tent-kin with barely a bump, and Rase wouldn’t dare say boo to her, so that settled him. Arkady kept his own counsel as usual, but Dag knew he was taking it all in.

Berry, Calla, and Fawn had swiftly formed a sisterhood, and it was only now, after watching them pass tasks smoothly from hand to hand, helping one another and laughing together over various female jokes, that Dag realized how painfully isolated Fawn had been at New Moon Cutoff. The medicine tent had tolerated her for Dag’s sake, but not one Lakewalker woman there had truly taken her up to teach her the ways of their inner world. Which led him to a very unexpected contemplation of Sumac as odd woman out in this company, neither farmer woman nor patroller man. Maybe that was why she rode so often beside odd-man Arkady.

But Fawn’s eyes, wide with wonder as the company climbed day by day up into the true mountains, made his every effort worth it. The hillsides tilted up higher and steeper until, she noted with a flatlander’s alarm, the sky had shrunk by half, as if stolen away. Tiny rivulets trickled over cliffs to fall like spun thread into secret crevices lined with pink splashes of mountain laurel. Fern fiddleheads unfurled into delicate fronds around dark and abundant springs. Green, ankle-high umbrella apples sheltered spring beauties and bloodroot, and the white and pink trillium after which Fawn’s mother had been named cascaded in waves down the slopes, all familiar northern wildflowers that made her smile in recognition.

“I finally see why you wouldn’t let us call those hills around Glassforge mountains,” she told Dag.

“There are mountains up in northeast Seagate even bigger than these,” Dag said. “So tall it’s winter on top all year round, and the snow and ice never melt off.”

“You’re pulling my leg!” said Finch.

“Nope. Seen it with my own eyes,” said Dag. “Floating up all white against the blue summer sky, the peaks and ridges like something out of a dream.”

“I wonder if you could make a trade in that ice,” said Whit thoughtfully.

“Pack it down in the summer and sell it to folks.”

“It would be a lot of work, climbing a mountain that high,” said Fawn in doubt. “And ice is heavy. Maybe it could be slid down somehow…”

“Actually,” said Dag, “folks in those parts cut ice from their ponds in the winter and store it in cellars packed in straw. It lasts longer than you’d think.”

“That sounds a bit more practical,” said Fawn.

“Huh,” said Whit. “The things you learn travelin’. I might try that at home.”

Once he’d carefully described what they would be up against, Dag let the farmer boys sort themselves out to tackle the first big mountain pass. That dawn, the four pack animals were unloaded and added to the wagon traces, and the wagon’s cargo reduced. Bo was left at the foot of the pass to guard their gear, because he really wasn’t quite as recovered from the belly stab of last fall as he made out, and Hod set to guard Bo. The plan was to make it to the top by midday and down as far as the first good stopping point, then send some of the boys and the unloaded pack animals back to Bo’s camp for the night. The other half of the party would rest up till they arrived next day, then continue the almost equally painstaking descent, using rocks and logs to help brake the wagon’s wheels and prevent a disastrous runaway. After that would be another four days of relatively easy travel up another long, running valley before they had to do the drill again.

Everything went according to plan till they were halfway up the hill at midmorning, and came upon another wagon blocking the road.

Dag, flanked by Indigo, rode around it to encounter a bizarre sight.

The team hitched to it consisted of three mules and a skinny horse, blowing and marbled with wet and dried white sweat; one of the mules, a wheeler, was down on its knees, tangled in the traces. A woman knelt next to it, weeping, a burning brand in her hand.

A rough, weak voice issued from the depths of the wagon’s raised canvas cover: “Light its fool tail on fire! That’ll get it up!”

“Missus, what are you doing to that poor mule? ” cried Indigo in outrage.

She turned up a red, tear-streaked face, crisscrossed by brown hair falling from its topknot in messy strands. She might have been any age between an exhausted twenty and an equally exhausted thirty, her shirt sweat-stained and skirt dirty. “It’s fallen, and it won’t rise and pull.”

“I can see that,” said Indigo. “If you got that rig up this far with just those spavined beasts, it’s likely spent. You’re crazy to try to drag a wagon that size up this road with only two pairs! Our wagon has five pairs and it’s barely making the grade.”

“It’s all we have. One mule died two days back, so we put the horse in. They have to get us up. They’re all we have…”

“Who you talkin’ to out there, Vio? ” came the hoarse male voice again. “Don’t you go talking to strangers…!” From under the stuffy canvas, a child’s voice began crying.

Dag reluctantly opened his groundsense as the man lurched out to the driver’s box on his knees. His face was fish-belly white, his arms shaking as they propped him up. He peered around suspiciously. In addition to the man, the wagon seemed to hold two children. A half-grown girl, also sick, lay on a pallet. A toddler boy was tied inside by some sort of harness, likely to keep him from falling over the side and under the wheels, and he fretted crossly at the restraint. He’d likely howled before and would howl again, but just at the moment was still working up to the next spate.

The woman’s gaze drifted to Dag. She recoiled. “Grouse, help, there’s a Lakewalker fellow on this road!”

“Where? What-” The man staggered back inside, then crawled out onto the box waving a boar spear. “Keep away, you! You won’t have our bones!”

“Is he crazy?” muttered Indigo.

“Fevered, I think,” said Dag. Not that he couldn’t be crazy as well.

Dag wheeled Copperhead out of range of the wavering spear point, and bellowed back down the road, where Sage’s wagon had halted and the other riders were starting to jam up, “Fawn! Berry! I need you here!”

The two women rode up and dismounted, taking in the scene, and Dag backed off slightly to avoid unnerving the distraught travelers further. Vio burst into ragged sobs at the sight of such friendly female faces. The man slumped to his knees behind the box, bent over the seat, still clutching the spear he could barely lift. Under Fawn’s soothing murmurs and Berry’s crisp questions, it wasn’t long before their tale tumbled out.

The Basswoods were a poor couple with no due-shares from a village south of the Hardboil who had fled their life of drudgery in hopes of the rumored free land in Oleana. Sage and Finch left their animals and walked forward in time to hear most of the sad story. Fawn looked over their rickety rig with a shrewd eye.

“You two are a mite underequipped for homesteading. It’s good land, mind, but it takes a lot of hard labor for better than a year, usually, before you could expect to live off it. Though I suppose if you could make it to the Grace Valley, you could get day work there and build up your supplies.”

“That’s the life we just left!” said Vio.

Grouse growled from his slump, “Not going back. Not going back to be scorned and made mock of!”

“Well,” said Berry the ex-boat boss, who for all her youthful blond looks didn’t suffer fools gladly, “if you can’t go up and you won’t go back, it looks like you’ll just have to set and starve on this here hillside. Which’ll save you steps, I reckon. But don’t set that silly mule on fire. It can’t tow you up this mountain nohow.”

“It’s best if you turn around now,” said Dag, reluctant to draw attention to his scary Lakewalker self, but feeling the need to voice support of Berry. “Even if you somehow made it to the top here, there are two more passes farther along the Trace that are as bad or worse. You’ll founder.”

“Anyways, you still have to shift your rig to the side so’s others can get by,” said Berry firmly.

Vio’s weeping increased. Inside the wagon the children, Plum and Owlet, heard their mother’s distress and began to cry along.

Dag saw the sympathy in Fawn’s eye, and guessed what was coming.

“Sage,” she said, “we’re bringing half our animals back down for another go anyhow. What if you brought your team back later and hitched it on with theirs? Their animals could have a rest while they waited. Then, with seven pairs to pull, this wagon would go up the hill in jig time.”

Indigo scratched his head. “Actually, if we hung together to the next pass, we could hitch on all our mules to each wagon in turn, and wouldn’t have to do all that shuffling around with the packhorses.”

Vio stopped sniveling and looked up in hope. “Would you? Could we? Oh, please, say yes, Grouse!”

The fevered man mumbled something about Kill us in our beds, which his wife ignored in her fresh concentration on Indigo. “Grouse’ll make better sense when this bog ague spell passes off. One more day, I promise, and he’ll be back on his pins. Oh, please… oh my, so cruel, oh, you shouldn’t ought to have said it if you didn’t mean it…!”

Which was how, that night, they all ended up camped at the top of the pass in a chill fog, instead of lower down in some more pleasant location, and Dag and Arkady were pressed into trying to force bog-ague remedy into a half-delirious man who fought them every step. Grouse’s terror took the form of swearing and abuse, mainly. His wife was helpless in the face of it, but Berry lent a hand, and a voice, that settled him as swiftly as a drunken keeler. Arkady was less taken aback than Dag expected; his prior experience with difficult sick farmers seemed to be wider than he’d quite let on.

Dag walked his perimeter patrol wondering if anybody was going to stumble over a precipice while trying to take a piss tonight, and if Arkady had any headache remedies in his pack. Strong ones…

He paused, arrested by the feel of horses and riders coming up the trail behind them. Honest folks had little reason to dare the Trace after dark, and sensible ones none, here in this mist only made more blurry by the meager light of a half-moon. Bandits preyed on travelers in these unpeopled stretches. He extended his groundsense anxiously.

A very familiar ground bumped his.

Dag strode down the road in time to see three riders loom up out of the milky haze. Remo. And Neeta. And Tavia.

“Absent gods, Dag!” Remo’s aggravated voice echoed weirdly in the damp air. “It’s blighted time we caught up with you!”