Legacy

10

T hree days gone, Fawn thought. Today would begin the fourth. Was it over, was it even begun, was Dag’s company there yet? Wherever there was. Somewhere to the west, yes, and he was still alive; so much her marriage cord now told her. Better than no news, but far, far from enough.

She watched across the campsite as Cattagus settled himself at a log table with knife, awl, and assorted deerhide scraps. His task of the morning was to make a new pair of slippers for his great-niece Tesy, judging by the fascinated way she danced around him, giggling when he tickled her feet after measuring them against his pieces. It might have been mere chance that his right hand rested for a moment on his left wrist before he leaned forward and began cutting.

Fawn stretched her back against the apple tree and forced herself to take up her knitting again. Without Sarri’s two children, the campsite would have fallen all too quiet these past days. Although the distraction they’d provided by disappearing for several hours day before yesterday didn’t exactly count as a help. They’d been found by a neighbor, pressed into aiding the search, in the woods nearly at the other end of the island—on a quest of their own, looking for their fathers. From their infant points of view, Fawn supposed, Razi and Utau were grand playmates who vanished as mysteriously as they arrived, and Sarri’s strained, carefully repeated explanations about gone on patrol as baffling as if she’d announced they had gone off to the moon.

Fawn’s monthly had begun the day after Dag had left, not a surprise, but an unpleasant reminder of too many regrets. Sarri had shown Fawn how Lakewalker women used cattail fluff as absorbent stuffing for their ragbags, which could be emptied into the slit trench instead of tediously washed out along with the bags, after. The consolation was slight. Fawn had spent two unhappy days sitting, spinning, and cramping, trying without success to decide if this was just a bad one, or some abnormal relic from the malice’s mishandling, and wishing Mari were here to ask; but the grinding pain had passed off at last, and her fears eased with her bleeding. Today was much better.

Last row. Fawn cast off neatly and laid the new pair of cotton-yarn socks out on her skirted thigh. They had come out well; the few dropped stitches had been properly recaptured, the heels turned at a natural angle and not something that her brothers would have threatened to dress the rooster in. She grinned in memory of the irate bird stalking around with those misshapen wool bags tied to its feet, though at the time she’d been even madder than it had.

She slipped into her tent and combed her unruly hair, tying it up with a ribbon, then rummaged in her scrap bag for a bit of colored yarn. She folded the socks neatly and made a bow around the bundle with the yarn, to help them look more like a present. Then she straightened up, put her shoulders back, and walked down the road toward Cumbia Redwing’s encampment.

Rain had blown through from the west last night, and the tall hickory trees shed sparkling drops as a fresh breeze stirred them. Dag’s company must have ridden through the same broad storm, Fawn calculated, though whether it had caught them on the road or in shelter she could not guess. Despite the lingering damp, when Fawn came to the Redwing site she spotted Cumbia working outside, sitting on a leather cushion atop the inevitable upended log seat at one of the crude plank tables. She was wearing the sleeveless calf-length shift that seemed usual for women in summer here, this one a faded bluish-red that spoke of some berry dye. The lean, upright posture was slightly bent, the shining silver head turned down over her task. Skeins of the long-fibered plunkin flax yarn lay out on the table; with a four-pronged lucet, Cumbia was looping them into the strong, light cord Lakewalkers used. As Fawn had hoped, Dar and Omba were nowhere in sight—off to the bone shack and Mare Island, presumably.

Cumbia looked up and scowled as Fawn approached. Her hands, as gnarled with work and age as any farmwife’s, went on expertly braiding.

Fawn dipped her knees, and said, “How de’. Nice morning.”

Silence.

Unpromising, but Fawn hadn’t expected this to be easy. “I knitted Dag a pair of socks to go under his riding boots, very fine. He seemed to like them a lot. So I made a pair for you, too.” She thrust out her little bundle. Cumbia made no move to take it. If Fawn had been offering a dead squirrel found rotting in the woods, Cumbia’s expression might have been much the same. Fawn set the socks down next to the skeins and stepped back just a little, schooling herself not to turn and flee. She had to hook up some response to build on besides that dead stare. “I was glad to see you come watch Dag ride out the other morning. I know you wanted him to become an officer.”

The hands reached the end of some counting turn, stopped, and set the wooden tool on the table with a sharp clack. The scowl deepened. As if the words were jerked from her, Cumbia said, “Not like this.”

“How else should it be? It seemed very like Dag.”

“It came out all wrong.” Cumbia blew out her breath. “It generally does, with that boy. The aggravation and sorrow he has brought me, first to last, can hardly be counted.” Her gaze on Fawn left no doubt as to what she considered the latest entry in that tally.

At least she’s started talking. “Well, folks we’re close to most often do aggravate us. Because otherwise we wouldn’t care. He’s brought good things as well. Twenty-seven malice kills, to start. You have to be proud of that.”

Cumbia grimaced. “Oh, he’s proven himself on patrol, right enough, but he’d done that by the time he was twenty-five. It’s in camp where he’s ducked his duties, as if patrolling got him off responsibility for all else. If he’d married when he should have, years ago, we wouldn’t be in this muddle now.”

“He did, once,” Fawn pointed out, in an attempt at a dignified reply. “Right on time for a Lakewalker man, I guess. It turned into a hurtful tragedy that still haunts him.”

“He’s not the first nor the last to suffer such. Plenty of others have lost folks in the maw of some malice.” And Cumbia was one of them, Fawn was reminded. “He’s had twenty years to put it behind him.”

“Well, then”—Fawn took a breath—“it looks like he’s not going to, doesn’t it? You all had your chance with him, and a good long chance it was. Maybe it’s someone else’s turn now.”

Cumbia snorted. “Yours?”

“Seems like. I’d say you haven’t lost anything to me that you had in the first place. When I met him, he wasn’t betrothed to anything but his own death, near as I could tell. And if he’s lost that infatuation, well, good!”

Cumbia leaned back, her attention now fully engaged. Which wasn’t exactly a comfortable feeling, but at least it was a shift from her attempt to pretend Fawn didn’t exist at all.

Fawn went on, “You’re both of you stiff-necked. I think Dag must get it from you, to tell the truth. Somebody has to bend before things break.” Hearts, for one. “Can’t you please stop Dar from going to the camp council? It’s bound to end badly.”

“Yes, for you,” said Cumbia. More level than venomous, oddly.

Fawn raised her chin. “Do you really believe Dag’ll choose to cut strings if he’s forced to the edge? That he’d break his word? You have a strange idea of your son, for knowing him so long.”

“I believe he’ll be secretly relieved to be freed of that ill-chosen oath to you, girl. Embarrassed, sure, and obnoxious about it—men always are, when they’re caught in the wrong. But in the long run, glad to be rescued from his own mistakes, and gladder still not to have to do it himself.”

Fawn bit her lip. So you think your son’s a coward, as well as a liar? She didn’t say it. Or spit it. She was shaken by a faint undercurrent of plausibility in Cumbia’s argument. I’ve known him half a summer. She’s known him all his life. She gripped the cord around her left wrist, for solace and courage. “What if he chooses banishment?”

“He won’t. No Lakewalker could. He’ll remember what he owes, and who to.”

In general, Dag tried to keep as much distance between himself and his family as he could, and Fawn was beginning to see why. People left their families all the time—it was as normal for a Lakewalker man as it was for a farmer woman. Sometimes it was the straight path for growing up, like Dag’s marriage in Luthlia; he presumably had never intended to return from there once he’d wed Kauneo. Sometimes families were impossible in their own right, and could not be fixed, only fled from, and she was beginning to wonder if a little of that might have been behind Dag’s first marriage, too. She chose at last, “Who’s pushing this camp council showdown—you, or Dar?”

“The family is united in trying to rescue Dag from this—I grant, self-inflicted—disaster.”

“Because I think Dar knows better. And if he’s telling you something else, he’s lying.”

Cumbia looked faintly bemused. “Farmer girl, I’m a Lakewalker. I know when someone is lying.”

“Fooling himself, then.” Fawn tried another tack. “All this is hurting Dag. I can see the strain in him. It wasn’t right to send him off to war with all this mess on his mind.”

Cumbia’s brows rose. “So whose fault was that? It takes two sides to tear a man apart. The solution is simple. Go back to your farm. You don’t belong here. Absent gods, girl, you can’t even veil your ground properly. It’s as if you’re walking around naked all the time, do you even know that? Or did Dag not tell you?”

Fawn flinched, and Cumbia looked briefly triumphant. In sudden panic, Fawn wondered if her mother-in-law was reading her ground the way Dag did. If so, she’ll know how to split me up the middle easy as splitting a log with a wedge and mallet.

Cumbia’s head cocked curiously; her eyes narrowed. As if in direct response to this thought, she said, “What use to him is a wife so stupid and ignorant? You’ll always be doing the wrong thing here, a constant source of shame to him. He might be too stiff-necked to admit it, but inside, he’ll writhe. You’d bear children with weak grounds, incapable of the simplest tasks. If your blighted womb can bear at all, that is. You’re pretty now, I admit, but that won’t last, either—you’ll age fast, like the rest of your kind, growing as fat and distracted as any other fool of a farmwife, while he goes on, rigid with regret.”

She’s probing. Shooting not at any facts that could possibly be known to her, and certainly not blind, but at Fawn’s fears. A vision of her mama and Aunt Nattie, both grown downright dumpy in their middle age, nonetheless assaulted Fawn’s imagination. Half a dozen barbs, half a dozen direct hits—no, not blind. Still…I must have hit her somewhere, too, for her to be counterattacking so cruelly.

Fawn remembered a description she’d heard down in Glassforge of how the rougher keelboat men fought duels. Their wrists were strapped together with rawhide thongs, and their free hands given knives. So they were forced to circle close, unable to disengage or get out of their enemy’s stabbing range. This fight with Cumbia felt like that. Driven to her wits’ end by her own family, Fawn had not believed Dag when he’d said his would be worse, but if her people fought to bruise and tumble, his aimed to slice to the bone. Maybe Dag was right about the best contact being none. I didn’t come here to fight this old woman, I came to try for some peace. Why am I letting her have her war?

Fawn took a deep breath, and said, “Dag is the most truthful man I ever met. If we have a problem, he’ll tell me, and we’ll fix it.”

“Huh.” Cumbia sat back. Fawn could sense another shift in her mood, away from the sudden, sharp attack, but it did not reassure her. “Then let me tell you the truth about patrollers, girl. Because I was married to one. Sister, daughter, and mother to the breed—walked with them, too, when I was your age, ’bout a thousand years ago. Men, women, old, young, kind or mean-minded, in one thing they are all the same. Once they’ve seen their first malice, they don’t ever give up patrol unless they’re crippled or dead. And they don’t ever put anyone else before it. Mari—by all right reason, she should be staying in camp taking care of Cattagus, but off she goes. And he sends her, being just as bad. Dag’s father was another. All of ’em, the whole lot. Don’t you be thinking I imagine Dag’ll choose to cut strings because of any consideration for me, or Dar, or anyone else who has supported him his whole life.

“Here’s the fork. If Dag doesn’t love you enough, he’ll choose the patrol. And if he loves you beyond all sense—he’ll choose the patrol. Because you’re standing in the center of that world he’s sent to save, and if he doesn’t save it, he doesn’t save you, either. When Fairbolt called on him the other night with the news from Raintree, how long did it take your bridegroom to decide to go off and leave you? All alone, with no friends or kin?”

Not very long, Fawn did not say aloud. Her mouth had grown too dry for speech.

“And it wouldn’t make a whit of difference if you were Lakewalker born, or a hundred times prettier, or writhing in birth bed, or crying at his child’s deathbed, or in agony on your own. Patrollers turn and go all the same. You can’t win this one.” She sat back and favored Fawn with a slow blink, cold as any snake. “Neither could I. So take your foolish knitting and go away.”

Fawn swallowed. “They’re good socks. Maybe Omba would like to have them.”

Cumbia set her jaw. “You’re a touch hard of listening, aren’t you, girl?” And then plucked up the little bundle and tossed it into the fire pit smoldering a few yards away.

Fawn almost screamed aloud. Three days of work! She dove after it. It had not yet caught, but the dry cotton smoked against the red coals, and a stray end of the jaunty woolen yarn winked in scarlet sparks, curling up and starting to blacken. She leaned in and snatched it back out, brushing off a smear of soot and glowing bits from the browning edge, drawing in her breath sharply at the burning bite of them. Her blue skirt had muddy patches from where her knees had thumped down, and she scrubbed at them as she rose, glaring uselessly at Cumbia.

It wasn’t just the pain of the burn on her fingers that started tears in Fawn’s eyes. She choked out, “Dag said it would be useless to try and talk to you.”

“Should have listened to him, too, eh?” said Cumbia. Her face was nearly expressionless.

“I guess,” returned Fawn shortly. Her bright theory that letting Cumbia vent might clear the air seemed singularly foolish now. She wanted to shoot some devastating last word over her shoulder as she stalked off, hurting as she’d been hurt, but she was far too shaken to think of any. She wanted only to escape.

“Go, then,” said Cumbia, as if she could hear her.

Fawn clutched the knit bundle in her unburned hand and marched away. She didn’t let her shoulders bow till she was out of sight on the road and having to pick her footfalls among the drying puddles. Her stomach shuddered, and this island seemed abruptly lonely and strange, hostile and pinched, despite the bright morning air. Oppressive, like a house turned prison. She sniffed angrily, feeling stupid stupid stupid, and smeared away the drops on her lashes with the back of her hand, then turned it to capture the cooling moisture on her throbbing fingers. A reddening line crossed three of them; she thought one might be starting to blister. Mama or Aunt Nattie would have dabbed the spots with butter, made soothing murmurs, and maybe kissed them. Fawn wasn’t too sure about the butter—in any case, she had none in the tiny cache of food that passed for her larder—but the rest of the remedy she missed desperately. Not to be had. Ever again. The thought made her want to bawl far more than the little pain in her hand.

She’d gone to Cumbia to try to head off the clash with the camp council at its apparent root. To save Dag. She had not only failed, she might have made it even worse. Cumbia and Dar could have no doubt now of what an easy target Dag’s farmer wife was. Why did I think I could help him? Stupid…

In her home campsite—in Mari’s and Sarri’s campsite, Fawn corrected this thought—Cattagus was still sitting over his leatherwork, now stitching a diminutive slipper held up nearly to his nose, poking rawhide cords in and out of the holes he’d made with his awl. Tesy had gone off somewhere, though Cattagus was apparently keeping an eye on her brother, presently penned in a little corral and diverted with a pair of alarmed turtles; he was tapping on a shell and calling the creature to come out. As Fawn crossed the clearing, Cattagus put down his work and looked at her shrewdly. She recalled Cumbia’s shot about walking around naked and wondered if all her efforts to put on a brave face were useless; if any Lakewalker looking at her could see what a seething mess she really was. Likely.

To her surprise, Cattagus beckoned her over. She stopped by his table, and he leaned on one elbow, regarding her rather ironically, and wheezed, “So, where have you been, girlie?”

“Went to talk to Cumbia,” Fawn admitted. “Tried, anyhow.”

“Burn your fingers, did you?”

Fawn hastily pulled her hand from her licking tongue and hid it behind her back. “She threw the socks I’d brought her for a present in the fire. Should have just let them burn, I guess, but I couldn’t stand the waste.”

“That what you been crouching over all these past three days?”

“Pretty much.”

“Huh. Let’s see. No, girlie, the burn,” he added impatiently as she thrust out her scorched bundle. She gave him her other hand; he held it in his dry, thick fingers, and his gray head bent slightly. He was dressed as usual in nothing but the short trousers and sandals that were his summer uniform, and she was conscious of the smell of him, a mix of old man and lake green, not unpleasant at this concentration, and very Cattagus. Would Dag smell like that when he grew as old? She thought she could learn to like it.

Fawn stared at her rejected knitting as Cattagus kneaded her palm. “Do you think Mari would like those socks? They’re too big for me and too small for Dag, but they’re good for under riding boots. If she’s not too proud to take work from a stupid farmer,” she added bitterly. “Or Cumbia’s castoffs.”

“That last might actually be a draw,” said Cattagus, with his whistling chuckle.

He released her hand, which had stopped throbbing; Fawn peeked at the red marks, which had faded to pink instead of raising blisters as she’d thought they would. He does healing groundwork like Dag. “Thank you,” she said gratefully. Cattagus nodded, picked up the socks, and set them beyond his leather scraps, signifying acceptance of the gift, and Fawn blinked back eye-fog again.

Fawn turned away, then turned back, blurting, “Cumbia said because I can’t veil my ground it’s just like walking around naked.”

“Well,” said Cattagus in a slow, judicious drawl, “Cumbia tends to be a bit on the tight side, herself. Full of things she doesn’t want others to see. Most folks our age just give up and be what they are.”

Fawn tilted her head, considering this. “Older farm folk can be like that, some of them. Well, not with their grounds, of course, but with clothes, and what they do and say.”

“Cumbia’s still tryin’ to fix the world, I’m afraid. She’d have been a relentless patroller. Thank the absent gods she went for a maker.” He appeared to lose himself in a vision of patrolling with a younger Cumbia, and shuddered.

“What does she make? Particularly?”

“Rope and cord that does not break. Very much in demand for folks’ boats and sailboats, y’see. And other key uses.”

“Oh. So…so she was making magic when I, um, interrupted her…?”

“No great thing if you did, she’s been doing it for so long. Wouldn’t have slowed her a bit if you’d been someone she wanted to see.”

“I was not that,” Fawn sighed. She blinked, trying to recapture her thought. “So do Lakewalkers go about with their grounds open, too?”

“If they’re relaxed, or wishful to take in the world around them at its fullest, aye. Too, lots of folks have short groundsense ranges. So you’re out of their sight, so to speak, at any little distance, even if you’re flaring.”

But everyone in this campsite, the children excepted, had long groundsense ranges. She had a sudden horrible thought. “But when Dag and I, when Dag opens up to me…um.”

Cutting off her words was no help; Cattagus was chuckling downright evilly. Leaving no doubt that he’d caught her meaning, he said, “Me, I cheer for Dag. Even though Mari hits me. Those Redwing women are a stern sisterhood, I can tell you.” He added to her hot blush, “It’s this breath-thing, y’see. Puts me out of the action myself, mostly. ’Bout all I can do these days is wave on the luckier ones.”

Fawn’s blush deepened, but she dimly recognized that he had handed her back this intimate revelation by way of turnabout: even-all. Cruelty and kindness, how could one morning hold so much of both? “Folks is folks, I guess,” she said.

Cattagus nodded. “Always have been. Always will be. That’s better.”

She realized she had grown much calmer; her throat no longer ached. She touched the cord on her left wrist, and nodded to Cattagus’s. “Is Mari all right this morning? Too?”

“So far.” His eyes narrowed at her cord. “Dag did something to yours, didn’t he? Or…to you.”

Fawn nodded, though she flushed again to recall the exact circumstances. But Cattagus, while he could be shrewd or crude, was not mean-minded, and seemed unlikely to press her for private details. “I got my ground to go into Dag’s cord all right, by a…a trick, I guess, when we wove them, but I couldn’t sense his. So he did some extra groundwork on mine just before he left. It’s good to know I could find him, if I had to. Or he me, I suppose.”

Cattagus opened his mouth, stopped. Blinked. “Beg pardon?”

She held up her wrist, closed her eyes, and turned about. Opening them, she found herself facing west into the woods. “That way. It’s pretty vague, but I reckon, if I got closer, the sense of just where he is would grow tighter. It did the other morning when he was nearby, anyhow.” She turned and looked in surprise at Cattagus’s climbing brows. “Don’t everyone’s cords do that?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

Cattagus rubbed his nose. “Wasn’t exactly the cord he did the work on, I think. Best not to mention that trick to anyone else till he gets back.”

“Why not?”

“Um. Well. Let’s just say, if Dag wants to add any complications to his argument with the camp council, let him pick and choose them himself.”

There was an undercurrent, but in what direction it flowed Fawn could scarcely guess. “All right,” she said doubtfully. Wistful, she stared west again. “When do you think they’ll come back?”

He shrugged. “No knowing.” But his eyes seemed to know too much.

Fawn nodded, not so much in agreement as silent sympathy, and took herself off to her tent. She needed to think of a new project for her hands. Not knitting. The sun was climbing toward noon. She hoped it lit Dag’s path, wherever it was now winding.

Dead silence, thought Dag, was never a truer phrase.

The high summer sun beat down on a winter landscape. The marshland open to his gaze looked as if it had suffered a week of killing frost. What should have been high green stands of reeds lay flattened and tangled, browning. The line of planted poplars along which his patrol was ghosting looked ghostly themselves, yellowing leaves spinning down one by one in the breezeless air. The air itself was hot, moist, close as only a Raintree summer could be, but devoid of the whine and whirr of insects, empty of birdcalls. It was a blight indeed when even the mosquitoes lay dead, floating with rafts of miscellaneous pond wrack in long, gray smears atop the blank water. The undersides of a couple of dead turtles made dim yellow patches in the murk. The blue sky reflected there in crooked strips, weird contrast to the scum.

The blighted soil nipped at his feet, yet without the deeper sucking drain on his ground that marked land long occupied by a malice. More; Dag could not feel that dry shock in his midsection, like the reverberation of some great blow to the body, that told him a malice lay near. Cautiously, he stood up for a better view of the ruined Lakewalker village that lay along the shore across a quarter mile of open water.

Crouched down in the dead and dying weeds behind Dag, Mari hissed nervous warning.

“It’s not here,” he breathed to her.

She frowned, nodded acceptance of this, but whispered back, “Its slaves might still be.”

He dared to open his groundsense just a little, swallowing against the nausea induced by so much recent blight beating against him. When he was sure he wasn’t going to vomit, he opened himself further. Nothing fluttered in his perception but a few distraught blackbirds, fled from the earlier disruption, returning to search futilely for mates or nests.

“There’s nothing alive for a mile—wait.” He hunkered down again. A few hundred paces beyond the village, in a boggy stretch along the shore, something swirled in his senses, a familiar concentration of distorted ground. Ground around the patch seemed to seep toward it, creeping through the soil like draining water. He narrowed his eyes, searched more carefully.

“I believe there’s a mud-man nursery planted beyond the camp. It doesn’t seem to have guards just now, though. But there’s something else.”

Mari’s brows twitched up, and her frown deepened. “You’d think it would be watched. If anything was.”

Dag considered the possibility of a cleverly baited trap. That would seem to credit this malice with an unlikely degree of foresight, however. He hand-signaled Mari, who passed the order silently, and the patrol took up its stealthy, painfully slow, veiled approach once more, skirting through the scant cover around the edge of this lakelike section of the larger marsh until it reached the abandoned village, or what was left of it.

Perhaps ninety or a hundred dwellings were strung along the lakeside or back from it in kin clusters, home till lately of a community of over a thousand Lakewalkers, with another thousand souls scattered more widely around Bonemarsh. A dozen tent-cabins were burned to the ground; the recent rain had extinguished all coals. Signs of hasty flight were all around, but aside from the burned tents there was only a little mindless destruction. Dag did not see or smell corpses, only partly reassuring, as ground-ripped bodies were sometimes very slow to rot. Still, he permitted himself the hope that most here had escaped, fleeing southward. Lakewalkers knew how to pick up and run. Then he wondered what that little farmer town the malice was supposed to have come up under looked like right now. What would Spark have done if…he cut off the wrenching thought.

He reached the log wall of the last tent standing and peered uncertainly toward the boggy patch a couple hundred paces off. Back from it, a thicket of scrubby trees—willow, slim green ash, vicious trithorned honey locust—shaded something dark about their boles that he could barely make out with his eye. He opened his groundsense again, flinched, then snapped it back.

“Mari. Codo. To me,” he said over his shoulder.

Mari was at his side at once; Codo, the oldest patroller here but for Mari, slid forward in a moment and joined them.

“There’s somebody under those trees,” Dag murmured. “Not mud-men, not farmer slaves. I think it’s some of us. Something’s very wrong.”

“Alive?” asked Mari, peering too. The half dozen figures didn’t move.

“Yes, but…extend your groundsenses. Carefully. Don’t get caught up. See if it’s anything you recognize.” Because I think I do.

Codo gave him a dry glance from under gray brows, silent commentary on Dag’s earlier repeated insistence that no one open their grounds without a direct order. Both he and Mari stared with eyes opened, then closed.

“Not seen anything like that before,” muttered Mari. “Unconscious?”

“Groundlocked…?” said Codo.

“Ah. Yes. That’s it,” said Mari. “But why are they…”

Dag re-counted—six with his eyes, five with his groundsense. Which suggested one was a corpse. “I think they’re tied to those trees.” He turned to Mari’s partner Dirla, hovering anxiously. “The rest of you stay back. Codo, Mari, come with me.”

There was no cover between here and the stand of scrub. Dag gave up the fraying pretense of stealth and walked openly forward, Codo and Mari right on his heels.

The Bonemarsh Lakewalkers were indeed bound to the thicker tree boles, slumped or half-hanging. They appeared unconscious. Three men and three women, older for the most part; they seemed makers, not patrollers, if Dag could guess from their look and the remains of their clothing. Some bore signs of physical struggle, bruises and cuts, others did not. One woman was dead, waxy and still; Dag hesitated to touch her to check for the stiffness, or lack of it, that would tell him how long. But not very long, he suspected. Late again, old patroller.

Codo hissed and drew his knife, starting for the ropes that bound the prisoners.

“Wait,” said Dag.

“Eh?” Codo scowled at him.

“Dag, what is this?” asked Mari. “Do you know?”

“Aye, I think so. A new malice has to stay by its mud-man nursery to keep them growing, part of what keeps it tied to its lair even after it’s no longer sessile. This malice has gotten strong enough to…to farm out the task. It’s linked up these makers to make its mud-men for it, while it goes…off.” Dag glanced southward uneasily.

Codo breathed a silent whistle through pursed lips.

“Can we break them out of their groundlock?” said Mari, eyes narrowing.

“Not sure, but wait. What I don’t know is how much of a sense the malice has of them, at whatever distance it’s gone now. If we fool with them, with this groundwork, might be an announcement that we’re here, behind it.”

“Dag, you can’t be thinking of leaving them!” said Codo in a shocked voice. Mari looked not so much shocked as grim.

“Wait,” Dag repeated, and turned to walk toward the boggy patch. The other two exchanged glances and followed.

Every few feet along he found a shallow pit in the wet soil, looking like a mud pot dug by playing children. At the center of each, a snout broke the surface, usually flexing frantically to draw air. He identified muskrat, raccoon, possum, beaver, even squirrel and slow, cold turtle. All were starting to lose their former shapes, like caterpillars in a chrysalis, but none had yet grown to human size. He counted perhaps fifty.

“Well, that’s handy,” said Codo, looking over his shoulder with fascinated revulsion. “We can kill them in their holes. Save a lot of grief.”

“These aren’t going to be ready to come out for days, yet,” said Dag. “Maybe weeks. We take the malice down first, they’ll die in place.”

“What are you thinking, Dag?” said Mari.

I’m thinking of how much I didn’t want to be in command of this jaunt. Because of decisions like this. He sighed. “I’m thinking that the rest of the company is half a day behind us. I’m thinking that if we can get some drinking water down those poor folks, they’ll last till nightfall, and Obio can cut them loose, instead. And we won’t have given away our position to the malice. In fact, the reverse—it’ll think any pursuit is still back here.”

“How far ahead of us do you think this malice is by now?” said Codo.

Dag shook his head. “We’ll scout around for clues, but not more than a day, wouldn’t you guess? It’s plain the malice has gathered up everything it’s got and pressed south. Which says to me it’s on the attack. Which also says to me it won’t be looking behind it much.”

“You mean to follow. Fast as we can,” said Mari.

“Anyone here got a better idea?”

They both shook their heads, if not happily.

They returned to the patrol, now gathered warily in the village. Dag dispatched a pair to go get Saun and bring up the horses, sending the rest to scout around the desolation the malice had left. About the time Saun arrived with their mounts, Varleen found the butchering place back in the scrub where the malice’s forces had eaten their last meal, bones animal and human mixed, some burned, some gnawed raw. Dag counted perhaps a dozen human individuals in the remains for sure, but not more. He tried hard to hang on to that not more as a heartening thought, but failed. Fortunately, there was no way for the three patrollers most recently familiar with Bonemarsh Camp to recognize anyone among the disjointed carcasses. The burying, too, Dag left for Obio and the company following.

His veiled patrol had been keyed up for a desperate attack. Gearing back down for a quiet, hasty lunch instead, especially for the ones who’d seen the butchery, went ill, and Dag had no desire to linger, if only for the certainty that the fierce argument over whether to attempt to release the groundlocked makers would start up again. Saun was particularly unhappy about that one, as he recognized some of them from the two years he’d patrolled out of Bonemarsh before he’d exchanged to Hickory Lake.

“What if Obio chooses another route?” Saun protested. “You left him free to.”

“Soon as we take the malice down, tonight or tomorrow, we’ll send someone back,” said Dag wearily. “Soon as we take the malice down, they may well be able to free themselves.”

This argument was, in Dag’s view, even more dodgy, but Saun accepted it, or at least shut up, which was all Dag wanted at this point. His own greatest regret was for the time they’d lost in their stealthy on-foot approach; they might have ridden into the village at a canter for all the difference it would have made. Dag suspected they were now going to come up on the malice well after dark, exhausted, at the end of a much too long and disturbing day. Part of a commander’s task was to bring his people to the test at the peak of their condition and will. He’d fumbled both time and timing, here.

Tracking the malice south presented no difficulty, at least. Starting just beyond the marsh, it had left a trail of blight a hundred paces wide that a farmer could not have missed, let alone anyone with the least tinge of groundsense. At the end of this, one malice, guaranteed. Finding it would be dead easy now.

The malice not finding us first will be the hard part. Dag grimaced and kicked Copperhead forward at a trot, his troubled patrol strung out in his wake.