Legacy

17

S ome six days after striking the north road, the little patrol clopped across the increasingly familiar wooden span to Two Bridge Island. Fawn turned in her saddle, watching Dag. His head came up, but unlike everyone else, he didn’t break into whoops, and his lopsided smile at their cheers somehow just made him look wearier than ever. Mari had decreed easy stages on the ride home to spare their mounts, though everyone knew it had been to spare Dag. That Mari fretted for him troubled Fawn almost more than this strange un-Dag-like fatigue that gripped him so hard. The last day or two the easy part had silently dropped out, as the patrol pressed on more like horses headed for the barn than the horses themselves.

They paused at the split in the island road, and Mari gave a farewell wave to Saun, Griff, and Varleen. She jerked her head at Dag. “I’ll be taking this one straight home, I think.”

“Right,” said Saun. “Need a helper?”

“Razi and Utau should be there. And Cattagus.” Her austere face softened in an inward look, then she added, “Yep.” Fawn wondered if she’d just bumped grounds with her husband to alert him to her homecoming.

Dag roused himself. “I should see Fairbolt, first.”

“Fairbolt’s heard all about it by now from Hoharie and the rest,” said Mari sternly. “I should see Cattagus.”

Saun glanced at his two impatient comrades, both with families waiting, and said, “I’ll stop in and see Fairbolt on my way down island. Let him know we’re back and all.”

Dag squinted. “That’d do, I guess.”

“Consider it done. Go rest, Dag. You look awful.”

“Thankee’, Saun,” said Dag, the slight dryness in his voice suggesting it was for the latter and not the former statement, though it covered both. Saun grinned back, and the younger patrollers departed at a trot that became a lope before the first curve.

Dag, Mari, and Fawn took the shore branch, and while no one suggested a trot, Mari did kick her horse into a brisker walk. She was standing up in her stirrups peering ahead by the time they turned into her campsite.

Everyone had come out into the clearing. Razi and Utau held a child each, and Sarri waved. Cattagus waved and wheezed, striding forward. In addition there was a mob of new faces—a tall middle-aged woman and a fellow who had to be her spouse, and a stair-step rank of six gangling children ranging from Fawn’s age downward to a leaping little girl of eight. The woman was Mari’s eldest daughter, obviously, back from the other side of the lake with her family and her new boat. They all surged for Mari, although they stepped aside to give Cattagus first crack as she slid from her saddle. “’Bout time you got back, old woman,” he breathed into her hair, and, “You’re still here. Good. Saves thumpin’ you,” she muttered sternly into his ear as they folded each other in.

Razi dumped his wriggling son off on Sarri, who cocked her hip to receive him, Utau let Tesy loose with admonishments about keeping clear of Copperhead, and the pair of men came to help Dag and Fawn dismount. Utau looked tired but hale enough, Fawn thought. Mari’s son-in-law and Razi had all three horses unsaddled and bags off in a blink, and the two volunteered to lead the mounts back to Mare Island, preferably before the snorting Copperhead bit or kicked some bouncing child.

Tent Bluefield was still standing foursquare under the apple tree, and Sarri, smiling, rolled up and tied the tent flaps. Everything inside looked very neat and tidy and welcoming, and Fawn had Utau drop their grubby saddlebags under the outside awning. There would be serious laundry, she decided, before their travel-stained and reeking garments were allowed to consort again with their stay-at-home kin.

Dag eyed their bedroll atop its thick cushion of dried grass rather as a starving dog would contemplate a steak, muttered, “Boots off, leastways,” and dropped to a seat on an upended log to tug at his laces. He looked up to add, “Any problems while we were away?”

“Well,” said Sarri, sounding a trifle reluctant, “there was that go-round with the girls from Stores.”

“They tried to steal your tent, the little—!” said Utau, abruptly indignant. Sarri shushed him in a way that made Fawn think this was an exchange much-repeated.

“What?” said Dag, squinting in bewilderment.

“Not stealing, exactly,” said Sarri.

“Yes, it was,” muttered Utau. “Blighted sneakery.”

“They told me they’d been ordered to bring it back to Stores,” Sarri went on, overriding him. “They had it halfway down when I caught them. They wouldn’t listen to me, but Cattagus came out and wheezed at them and frightened them off.”

“Razi and I were out collecting elderberries for Cattagus,” said Utau, “or I’d have been willing to frighten them off myself. The nerve, to make away with a patroller’s tent while he was out on patrol!”

Fawn frowned, imagining the startling—shocking—effect it would have had, with her and Dag both so travel-weary, to come back and find everything gone. Dag looked as though he was imagining this, too.

“Uncle Cattagus puffing in outrage was likely more effective,” Sarri allowed. “He turns this alarming purple color, and chokes, and you think he’s going to collapse onto your feet. The girls were impressed, anyway, and left off.”

“Ran, Cattagus tells it,” said Utau, brightening.

“When Razi and Utau came back they put your tent up again, and then went down and had some words with the folks in Stores. They claimed it was all a misunderstanding.”

Utau snorted. “In a pig’s eye it was. It was some crony of Cumbia’s down there, with a notion for petty aggravation. Anyway, I spoke to Fairbolt, who spoke with Massape, who spoke with someone, and it didn’t happen again.” He nodded firmly.

Dag rubbed the back of his neck, looking pinch-browed and abstracted. If he’d had more energy, Fawn thought he might have been as angry as Utau, but just now it merely came out saddened. “I see,” was all he said. “Thank you.” He nodded up to Sarri as well.

“Fawn, not to tell you your job, but I think you need to get your husband horizontal,” said Sarri.

“I’m for it,” said Fawn. Together, she and Utau pulled Dag upright and aimed him into the tent.

Utau, releasing Dag’s arm from over his shoulder as he sank down onto his bedroll, grunted, “Dag, I swear you’re worse off than when I left you in Raintree. That groundlock do this to you? Your leg hasn’t turned bad, has it? From what Hoharie said, I’d thought she’d patched you up better ’n this before she left you.”

“He was better,” said Fawn, “but then we went and visited Greenspring on the way home. It was all really deep-blighted. I think it gave him a relapse of some sort.” Except she wasn’t so sure it was the blight that had drained him of the ease he’d gained after their triumph over the groundlock. She remembered the look on his face, or rather the absence of any look on his face, when they’d ridden out of the townsmen’s burying field past the line of small uncorrupted corpses. He’d counted them.

“That was a fool thing to do for a ground-ripped man, to go and expose yourself to more blight,” Utau scolded. “You should know better, Dag.”

“Yeah,” sighed Dag, dutifully lying flat. “Well, we’re all home now.”

Sarri and Utau took themselves out with an offer of dinner later, which Fawn gratefully accepted. She fussed briefly over Dag, kissed him on the forehead, and left him not so much dozing as glazed while she went to deal with unpacking their gear. She glanced up at the lately contested awning of little Tent Bluefield as she began sorting.

Home again.

Was it?

Fawn brought Dag breakfast in bed the next morning. So it was only plunkin, tea, and concern; the concern, at least, he thought delicious. Though he had no appetite, he let her coax him into eating, and then bustle about getting him propped up comfortably with a nice view out the tent flap at the lakeshore. As the sun climbed he could watch her down on the dock scrubbing their clothes. From time to time she waved up at him, and he waved back. In due course, she shouldered the wet load and climbed up out of sight somewhere, likely to hang it all out to dry.

He was still staring out in benign lassitude when a brisk hand slapped the tent side, and Hoharie ducked in. “There you are. Saun told me you’d made it back,” she greeted him.

“Ah, Hoharie. Yeah, yesterday afternoon.”

“I also heard you weren’t doing so well.”

“I’ve been worse.”

Hoharie was back in her summer shift, out of riding gear; indeed, she’d made a questionable-looking patroller. She settled down on her knees and folded her legs under herself, looking Dag over critically.

“How’s the leg, after all that abuse?”

“Still healing. Slowly. No sign of infection.”

“That’s a blessing in a deep puncture, although after all that ground reinforcement I wouldn’t expect infection. And the arm?”

He shifted it. “Still very weak.” He hadn’t even bothered with his arm harness yet this morning, though Fawn had cajoled him into clean trousers and shirt. “No worse.”

“Should be better by now. Come on, open up.”

Dag sighed and eased open his ground. It no longer gave him sensations akin to pain to do so; the discomfort was more subtle now, diffuse and lingering.

Horarie frowned. “What did you do with all that ground reinforcement you took on last week over in Raintree? It’s barely there.”

“It helped. But we crossed some more blight on the way back.”

“Not smart.” Her eyes narrowed. “What’s your groundsense range right now?”

“Good question. I haven’t…” He spread his senses. He hardly needed groundsense to detect Mari’s noisy grandchildren, shouting all over the campsite. The half-closed adults were subtler smudges. Fawn was a bright spark in the walnut grove, a hundred paces off. Beyond that…nothing. “Very limited.” Shockingly so. “Haven’t been this weak since I lost my real hand.”

“Well, if you want an answer to, How am I recovering? there’s your test. No patrolling for you for a while, Captain. Not till your range is back to its usual.”

Dag waved this away. “I’m not arguin’.”

“That tells a tale right there.” Hoharie’s fingers touched his thigh, his arm, his side; he could feel her keen regard as a passing pressure through his aches. “After my story and Saun’s, Fairbolt reckoned he’d be putting your peg back in the sick box. He wanted me to tell him for how long.”

“So? How long?”

“Longer than Utau, anyway.”

“Fairbolt won’t be happy about that.”

“Well, we’ve talked about that. About you. You did rather more in that Bonemarsh groundlock than just take hurt, you know.”

Something in her tone brought him up, if not to full alertness, which eluded him still, then to less vague attention. He let his ground ease closed again. Hoharie sat back on the woven mat beside the bedroll and wrapped her arms around her knees, regarding him coolly.

“You’ve been patrolling for a long time,” she observed.

“Upwards of forty years. So? Cattagus walked for almost seventy. My grandfather, longer than that. It’s a life.”

“Ever think of another? Something more settled?”

“Not lately.” Or at least, not until this summer. He wasn’t about to try to describe how confused he’d become about his life since Glassforge.

“Anyone ever suggest medicine maker?”

“Yes, you, but you weren’t thinking it through.”

“I remember you complained about being too old to be an apprentice. May I point out, yours could be about the shortest apprenticeship on record? You already know all the herb-lore, from decades of patrol gathering. You know field aid on the practical side—possibly even more than I do. Your ground-matching skills are astonishing, as Saun has lived to testify to anyone who will listen.”

“Saun, you may have noticed, is a bit of an enthusiast. I wouldn’t take him too seriously, Hoharie.”

She shook her head. “I saw you do things with ground projection and manipulation, inside that groundlock, that I can still barely wrap my mind around. I examined Artin, after it was all over. You not only could do it, you could be good, Dag. A lot of people can patrol. Not near as many can do this level of making, fewer still such direct groundwork. I know—I scout for apprentices every year.”

“Be reasonable, Hoharie. Groundsense or no, a medicine maker needs two clever hands for, well, all sorts of tasks. You wouldn’t want me sewing up your torn trousers, let alone your torn skin. And the list goes on.”

“Indeed it does.” She smiled and leaned forward. “But—patrollers work in partnered pairs all the time. You’re used to it. And I get, from time to time, a youngster mad for medicine-making, and with clever hands, but a bit lacking on the groundsense side. You get along well with youngsters, even if you do scare them at first. I’m thinking—what about pairing you up with someone like that?”

Dag blinked. Then blinked again. Spark? She had the cleverest hands of anyone he’d ever met, and, absent gods knew, the wits and nerve for the task. His imagination and heart were both suddenly racing, tossing up pictures of the possibilities. They could work together right here at Hickory Lake, or at Bearsford Camp. Honorable, necessary, respected work, to win her a place here in her own right. He could be by her side every day. And every night. And once she was trained, they might do more…would Fawn like the notion? He would ask her at once. He grinned at Hoharie, and she brightened.

“I see you get the idea,” she said in a tone of satisfaction. “I’m so glad! As you might guess, I have someone in mind.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, did Othan talk to you?”

“Beg pardon?”

“It’s his younger brother, Osho. He’s not quite ready for it yet, mind, but neither are you. But if I knew he’d be pairing with you, I could admit him to training pretty soon.”

“Wait, what? No! I was thinking of Fawn.”

It was Hoharie’s turn to rock back, blinking. “But Dag—even if she’s still—she has no groundsense at all! A farmer can’t be a medicine maker. Or any kind of a maker.”

“Farmers are, in their own way, all the time. Midwives, bonesetters.”

“Certainly, but they can’t use our ways. I’m sure their skills are valuable, and of course better than nothing, but they just can’t.”

“I’d do that part. You said.”

“Dag…the sick and the hurt are vulnerable and touchy. I’m afraid a lot of folks wouldn’t trust or accept her. It would be one strange thing too many. There’s also the problem of her ground. I like Fawn, but having her ground always open around delicate groundwork, maybe distracting or interfering…no.”

It wouldn’t distract me, he thought of arguing. He settled his shoulders back on his cushion, his little burst of excitement draining away again, leaving his fatigue feeling worse by contrast. Instead, he asked, more slowly, “So why don’t we do more for farmers? No, I don’t mean the strong makers like you, you’re rare and needed here, but all of us. The patrols are out there all the time. We know and use a dozen little tricks amongst ourselves, that we could find ways to share. More than just selling plants and preparations. We could build up goodwill, over time.” He remembered Aunt Nattie’s tale of her twisted ankle. Just such a good deed had borne some fair fruit, even decades afterwards.

“Oh, Dag.” Hoharie shook her head. “Do you think no one’s tried it, tempted through pity? Or even friendship? It sounds so fine, but it only works as long as nothing goes wrong, as it inevitably must. That goodwill can turn to bad will in a heartbeat. Lakewalkers who let themselves get in over their heads trying to share such help have been beaten to death, or worse.”

“If it were…” His voice faltered. He didn’t have a counterargument for this one, as it was perfectly true. There has to be a better way was easy to say. It was a lot harder to picture exactly how.

Returning to her subject, Hoharie said, “Fairbolt doesn’t much want to give you up, but he would for this. He can see a lot of the same things I do. He’s watched you for a long time.”

“I owe Fairbolt”—Dag lifted his left arm—“everything, pretty much. My arm harness was his doing. He’d spotted something like it in Tripoint, see. A farmer artificer and a farmer bonesetter over there had got together to fix things like it for some folks who’d lost limbs in mining and forge accidents. Neither of them had a speck of groundsense, but they had ideas.”

Hoharie began to speak, but then turned her head; in a moment, Fawn popped around the tent’s open side, looking equally pleased and anxious. “Hoharie! I’m so glad you’re here. How is he doing? Mari was worried.”

As if Fawn didn’t expect her own worry to count with the medicine maker? And is she so wrong in that?

Hoharie smiled reassuringly. “He mostly needs time and rest and not to do fool things.”

Dag said plaintively, not to mention horizontally, “How can I do fool things when I can’t do anything?”

Hoharie gave his query the quelling eyebrow twitch it deserved, and went on to give Fawn a set of sensible instructions and suggestions, which added up to food, sleep, and mild camp chores when ready. Fawn listened earnestly, nodding. Dag was sure she’d remember every word. And be able to quote them back at him, likely.

Hoharie rose. “I’ll send Othan down in a couple of days to pull those stitches out.”

“I can do that myself,” said Dag.

“Well, don’t,” she returned. She glanced down at him. “Think about what I said, Dag. If your feet—or your heart—ache too much to walk another mile, you could do a world of good right here.”

“I will,” he said, unsettled. Hoharie waved and took herself out.

Frowning, Fawn flopped down on her knees beside him and ran a small hand over his brow. “Your eyebrows are all scrunched up. Are you in pain?” She smoothed away the furrows.

“No.” He caught the hand and kissed it. “Just tired, I guess.” He hesitated. “Thinkin’.”

“Is that the sort of thinkin’ where you sit like a bump for hours, and then jump sideways like a frog?”

He smiled despite himself. “Do I do that?”

“You do.”

“Well, I’m not jumping anywhere today.”

“Good.” She rewarded this resolve with a kiss, and then several more. It unlocked muscles in him that he hadn’t known were taut. One muscle, at least, remained limp, which would have disturbed him a lot more if he hadn’t been through such convalescences before. Must rest faster.

Dag spent the next three days mired in much the same glazed lassitude. He was driven from his bedroll at last not by a return of energy, but by a buildup of boredom. Out and about, he found unexpectedly intense competition for the sitting-down camp chores among the ailing—Utau, Cattagus, and himself. He watched Cattagus, moving at about the same rate he did, and wondered if this was what it was going to feel like to be old.

There being no hides to scrape at the moment, and Utau and Razi having shrewdly been first in line to help Cattagus with his elderberries, Dag defaulted to nut-cracking; he had, after all, a built-in tool for it. He was awkward at first with the fiddly aspects, but grew less so. Fawn, who plainly thought the task the most tedious in the world, wrinkled her nose, but it exactly suited Dag’s mood, not requiring any thought beyond a vague philosophical contemplation of the subtle shapes of nuts and their shells. Walnuts. And hickory shells. Over and over, very reliably. They might resist him, but only rarely did they counterattack, the hickory being the more innately vicious.

Fawn kept him company, first spinning, then working on two pairs of new riding trousers, one for him and one for her, made of cloth shared by Sarri. Sitting with him in the shade of their awning one afternoon, she remarked, “I’d make you more arrows, but everyone’s quivers are full up.”

Dag poked at a particularly intractable nutshell. “Do you like making arrows better than making trousers?”

She shrugged. “It just feels more important. Patrollers need arrows.”

He sat back and contemplated this. “And we don’t need trousers? I think you have that the wrong way round, Spark. It’s poison ivy country out there, you know. Not to mention the nettles, thistles, burrs, thorns, and bitey bugs.”

She pursed her lips as she poked her needle slowly through the sturdy cloth. “For going into a fight, though. When it counts.”

“I still don’t agree. I’d want my trousers. In fact, if I were waked up out of my bedroll in a night attack, I think I’d go for them before my boots or my bow.”

“But patrollers sleep in their trousers, in camp,” she objected. “Although not in hotels,” she allowed in a tone of pleasurable reminiscence.

“That gives you a measure of importance, then, doesn’t it?” He batted his eyes at her. “I can just picture it, a whole patrol riding out armed to the teeth, all bare-assed. Do you have any idea what the jouncing in those saddles would do to all our tender bits? We’d never make it to the malice.”

“Agh! Now I’m picturing it!’ She bent over, laughing. “Stop! I’ll allow you the trousers.”

“And I’ll thank you with all my heart,” he assured her. “And with my tender bits.” Which made her dissolve into giggles again.

He could not remember when she’d last laughed like this, which sobered him. But he still smiled as he watched her take up her sewing once more. He decided he would very much like to thank her with his tender bits, if only they would get around to reporting for duty again. He sighed and took aim at another hickory shell.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, while he was still recuperating, Fawn’s monthly came on—a bad one, it seemed, alarmingly bloody. Dag, concerned, dragged Mari over to Tent Bluefield for a consultation; she was reassuringly unimpressed, and rattled off a gruesome string of what Dag decided were the female equivalent of old-patroller stories, about Much Worse Things She Had Seen.

“I don’t recall the young women on patrol having this much trouble,” he said nervously, hovering.

Mari eyed him. “That’s because girls with these sorts of troubles gener’lly don’t choose to become patrollers.”

“Oh. Makes sense, I guess…”

Softening, Mari allowed as how Fawn was likely still healing up inside, which from the state of the scars on her neck Dag guessed to be exactly the case, and that the problems should improve over the next months, and even unbent enough to give Fawn a tiny ground reinforcement in the afflicted area.

Dag thought back to his too-few years with Kauneo, how a married man’s life got all wound about in these intimate rhythms, and how they had sometimes annoyed him—till he’d been left to wish for them back. He dealt serenely, wrapping hot stones, and coaxing some of Cattagus’s best elderberry wine out of him and into Fawn, and her pains eased.

At last, one bright, quiet morning, Dag hauled his trunk out under the canopy for a writing desk and took on the task of his letter to Luthlia. At first he thought he would keep it painlessly short, a sentence or two simply locating each bone’s malice kill. He was so much in the habit of concealing the complications of the unintended priming; it seemed so impossible to set it out clearly; and the tale of Fawn and her lost babe seemed too inward a hurt to put before strangers’ eyes. Silence was easier. And yet…silence would seem to deny that a farmer girl had ever had any place in all this. He weighed the smooth shards of Kauneo’s bone in his hand one last time before wrapping them up in a square of good cloth that Fawn had hemmed, and changed his mind.

Instead he wrote out as complete an account of the chain of events, focusing on the knives, as he could manage, most especially not leaving out his belief of how the babe’s ground had found refuge from the malice. It was still so compressed he wasn’t sure but what it sounded incoherent or insane, but it was all the truth as he knew it. When he was done he let Fawn read it before he sealed it with some of Sarri’s beeswax. Her face grew solemn; she handed it back with a brief nod. “That’ll do for my part.”

She helped him wrap up the packet carefully, with an outer cover of deer leather secured by rawhide strings for protection, and he addressed it to Kauneo’s kin, ready for Razi to take up to the courier at patroller headquarters. He fingered the finished bundle, and said slowly, “So many memories…If souls exist, maybe they lie in the track of time we leave behind us. And not out ahead, and that’s why we can’t find them, not even with groundsense. We’re lookin’ in the wrong direction.”

Fawn smiled wryly into his eyes, leaned up, and kissed him soft. “Or maybe they’re right here,” she said.

Fairbolt turned up the next day. Dag had been half-expecting him. They found seats on a pair of stumps out in the walnut grove, out of earshot from the busy campsite.

“Razi says you’re feeling better,” Fairbolt remarked, looking Dag over keenly.

“My body’s moving again, anyway,” Dag allowed. “My groundsense range still isn’t doing too well. I don’t think Hoharie’s notion that it has to come all the way back before I patrol again is right, though. Halfway would be good as most.”

“It’s not about you going back on patrol, for which judgment I’ll be relying on Hoharie and not you, thanks. It’s about your camp council summons. I’ve been holding ’em off on the word that you’re still too injured and ill after Raintree, which is harder to make stick when it’s seen you are up and about. So you can expect it as soon as that Heron Island dredging fracas is sorted out.”

Dag hissed through his teeth. “After Raintree—after all Fawn and I did—they’re still after a camp council ruling against us? Hoharie, and I, and Bryn and Mallora and Ornig would all be dead and buried right now in blighted Bonemarsh if not for Fawn! Not to mention five good makers lost. This, on top of the Glassforge malice—what more could they possibly want from a farmer girl to prove herself worthy?” His outrage was chilled by a ripple of cold reflection—in forty years he had never been able to prove himself worthy, in certain eyes. He’d concluded sometime back that the problem was not in him, it was in those eyes, and no doing of his could ever fix it. Why should any doing of Fawn’s be different?

Fairbolt scratched his ear. “Yeah, I didn’t figure that news would sit too well with you.” He hesitated. “I owe an apology to Fawn, for trying to stop her here when you were calling her from out of that groundlock. It seems right cruel, in hindsight. I had no idea it was you behind her restiness that day.”

Dag’s brows drew down. “You been talking to Othan about the Bonemarsh groundlock?”

“I’ve been talking to everyone who was there, as I had the chance, trying to piece it all together.”

“Well, just for the scribe, it wasn’t me who told Fawn to put that knife in my leg, like, like some malice riding a farmer slave. She figured it out by her own wits!”

Fairbolt held up both palms in a gesture of surrender. “Be that as it may, how are you planning to handle this council challenge? I’ve discouraged and delayed it about as much as I can without being bounced off your hearing myself for conflict of interest. And since I don’t mean to let myself get excluded from this one, the next move has to fall on you. Which is where it belongs anyway, I might point out.”

Dag bent, venting a weary sigh. “I don’t know, Fairbolt. My mind’s been working pretty slow since I got back. It feels like a bug stuck in honey, truth to tell.”

Fairbolt frowned curiously. “An effect of that peculiar blight you took on, do you think?”

“I…don’t know. It’s an effect of something.” Accumulation, maybe. He could feel it, building up in him, but he could not put a name to it.

“It wouldn’t hurt for you to tell more of your tale around, you know,” said Fairbolt. “I don’t think everyone rightly understands how much would be lost to this camp, and to Oleana, if you were banished.”

“What, brag and boast?” Dag made a face. “I should be let to keep Fawn because I’m special?”

“If you’re not willing to say it to your friends, how are you going to stand up in council and say it to your enemies?”

“Not my style, and an insult to boot to everyone who walks their miles all the same, without fanfare or thanks. Now, if you want me to argue that I should be let to keep Fawn because she’s special, I’m for it.”

“Mm,” said Fairbolt. If he was picturing this, the vision didn’t seem to bring him much joy.

Dag looked down, rubbing his sandal in the dirt. “There is this. If the continued existence of Hickory Lake Camp—or Oleana—or the wide green world—depends on just one man, we’ve already lost this long war.”

“Yet every malice kill comes, at the end, down to one man’s hand,” Fairbolt said, watching him.

“Not true. There’s a world balanced on that knife-edge. The hand of the patroller, yes. But held in it, the bone’s donor, and the heart’s donor, and the hand and eye and ground of the knife maker. And all the patrol backing up behind who got the patroller to that place. Patrollers, we hunt in packs. Then all the camp and kin behind them, who gave them the horses and the gear and the food to get there. And on and on. Not one man, Fairbolt. One man or another, yes.”

Fairbolt gave a slow, conceding nod. He added after a moment, “Has anyone said thank you for Raintree, company captain?”

“Not as I recollect,” Dag said dryly, then was a little sorry for the tone when he caught Fairbolt’s wince. He added more wistfully, “Though I do hope Dirla got her bow-down.”

“Yes, they had a great party for her over on Beaver Sigh, I heard from the survivors.”

Dag’s smile tweaked. “Good.”

Fairbolt stretched his back, which creaked faintly in the cool silence of the shade. Between the dark tree boles, the lake surface glittered in a passing breeze. “I like Fawn, yet…I can’t help imagining how much simpler all our lives could be right now if you were to take that nice farmer girl back to her family down in West Blue and tell them to keep the bride-gifts and her.”

“Pretty insulting, Fairbolt,” Dag observed. He didn’t say who to. It would take a list, he decided.

“You could say you’d made a mistake.”

“But I didn’t.”

Fairbolt grimaced. “I didn’t think that notion would take. Had to try, though.”

Dag’s nod of understanding was reserved. Fairbolt spoke as if this was all about Fawn, and indeed, it had all begun with her. Dag wasn’t so sure his farmer bride was all it was about now. The all part seemed to have grown much larger and more complex, for one. Since Raintree? Since West Blue? Since Glassforge? Or even before that, piling up unnoticed?

“Fairbolt…”

“Mm?”

“This was a bad year for the patrol. Did we have more emergences, all told, or just worse ones?”

Fairbolt counted silently on his fingers, then his eyebrows went up. “Actually, fewer than last year or the year before. But Glassforge and Raintree were so much worse, they put us behind, which makes it seem like more.”

“Both bad outbreaks were in farmer country.”

“Yes?”

“There is more farmer country now. More cleared land, and it’s spreading. We’re bound to see more emergences like those. And not just in Oleana. You’re from Tripoint, Fairbolt, you know more about farmer artificers than anyone around here. The ones I watched this summer in Glassforge, they’re more of that sort”—Dag raised his arm in its harness—“doing more things, more cleverly, better and better. You’ve heard all about what happened at Greenspring. What if it had been a big town like Tripoint, the way Glassforge is growing to be?”

Fairbolt went still, listening. Listening hard, Dag thought, but what he was thinking didn’t show in his face.

Dag pushed on: “Malice takes a town like that, it doesn’t just get slaves and ripped grounds, it gets know-how, tools, weapons, boats, forges and mills already built—power, as sure as any stolen groundsense. And the more such towns farmers build, and they will, the more that ill chance becomes a certainty.”

Fairbolt’s grim headshake did not deny this. “We can’t push farmers back south to safety by force. We haven’t got it to spare.”

“Then they’re here to stay, eh? I’m not suggesting force. But what if we had their help, that power, instead of feeding it to the malices?”

“We cannot let ourselves depend. We must not become lords again. That was our fathers’ sin that near-slew the world.”

“Isn’t there any other way for Lakewalkers and farmers to be with each other than as lords and servants, malices and slaves?”

“Yes. Live apart. Thus we avert lordship.” Fairbolt made a slicing gesture.

Dag fell silent, his throat thick.

“So,” said Fairbolt at length. “What is your plan for dealing with the camp council?”

Dag shook his head.

Fairbolt sat back in some exasperation, then continued, “It’s like this. When I see a good tactician—and I know you are one—sit and wait, instead of moving, as his enemy advances on him, I figure there could be two possible reasons. Either he doesn’t know what to do—or his enemy is coming into his hand exactly the way he wants. I’ve known you for a good long time…and looking at you right now, I still don’t know which it is you’re doing.”

Dag looked away. “Maybe I don’t either.”

After another silence, Fairbolt sighed and rose. “Reasonable enough. I’ve done what I can. Take care of yourself, Dag. See you at council, I suppose.”

“Likely.” Dag touched his temple and watched Fairbolt trudge wearily away through the walnut grove.

The next day dawned clear, promising the best kind of dry heat. The lake was glassy. Dag lay up under the awning of Tent Bluefield and watched Fawn finish weaving hats, the result of her finding a batch of reeds of a texture she’d declared comparable to more farmerly straw. She took her scissors and, tongue caught fetchingly between her teeth, carefully trimmed the fringe of reeds sticking out around the brim to an even finger length. “There!” she said, holding it up. “That’s yours.”

He glanced at its mate lying beside her. “Why isn’t it braided up all neat around the rim like the other?”

“Silly, that’s a girl’s hat. This is a boy’s hat. So’s you can tell the difference.”

“Not to question your people, but that’s not how I tell the difference between boys and girls.”

This won a giggle, as he’d hoped. “It just is, for straw hats, all right? So now I can go out in the sun without my nose coming all over freckles.”

“I think your nose looks cute with freckles.” Or without…

“Well, I don’t.” She gave a decisive nod.

He leaned back, his eyes half-closing. His bone-deep exhaustion was creeping up on him, again. Maybe Hoharie had been right about that appalling recovery time after all….

“That’s it.” Fawn jumped to her feet.

He opened his eyes to find her frowning down at him.

“We’re going on a picnic,” she declared roundly.

“What?”

“Just you wait and see. No, don’t get up. It’s a surprise, so don’t look.”

He watched anyway, as she bustled about putting a great deal of food and two stone jugs into a basket, bundled up a couple of blankets, then vanished around behind Cattagus and Mari’s tent to emerge toting a paddle for the narrow boat. Bemused, he found himself herded down to the dock and instructed to get in and have a nice lie-down, padded and propped in the bottom of the boat facing her.

“You know how to steer this craft?” he inquired mildly, settling.

“Er…” She hesitated. “It looked pretty easy when you did it.” And then, after a moment, “You’ll tell me, won’t you?”

“It’s a deal, Spark.”

The lesson took maybe ten minutes, once they’d pushed off from the dock. Their somewhat-wandering path evened out as she settled into her stroke, and then all he had to do was coax her to slow down and find the rhythm that would last. She found her way to that, too. He pushed back his boy’s hat and smiled from under the fringe at her. Her face was made luminous even beneath the shadow of her own neat brim by the light reflecting off the water, all framed against the deep blue sky.

He felt amazingly content not to move. “If your folks could see us now,” he remarked, “they really would believe all those tales about the idleness of Lakewalker men.”

He’d almost forgotten the blinding charm of her dimple when she smirked. She kept paddling.

They rounded Walnut Island, pausing for a glimpse of some of the stallions prancing elegantly in pasture, then glided up through the elderberry channels. Several boats were out gathering there today; Dag and Fawn mainly received startled stares in return for their waves, except from Razi and Utau, working again on Cattagus’s behalf and indirectly their own. Cattagus fermented his wines in large stone crocks buried in the cool soil of the island’s woods, which he had inherited from another man before him, and him from another; Dag had no idea how far back the tradition went, but he bet it matched plunkins. They stopped to chat briefly with the pair. A certain hilarity about Dag’s hat only made him pull it on more firmly, and Fawn paddle onward, tossing her head but still dimpling.

At length, to no surprise but a deal of pleasure on Dag’s part, they slipped into the clear sheltered waters of the lily marsh. He then had the amusement, carefully concealed under his useful hat fringe, of watching Fawn paddle around realizing that her planning had missed an element, namely, where to spread blankets when all the thick grassy hillocks like tiny private islands turned out to be growing from at least two inches of standing water. He listened to as much of her foiled muttering as he thought he would get away with, then surrendered to his better self and pointed out how they might have a nice picnic on board the boat, wedged for stability up into a willow-shaded wrack of old logs. Fawn took aim and, with only a slightly alarming scraping noise, brought them upright into this makeshift dock.

She sat in the bottom of the boat facing him, their legs interlaced, and shared food and wine till she’d succeeded in fulfilling several of Hoharie’s recommendations at once by driving him into a dozy nap. He woke at length more overheated than even farmer hats and the flickering yellow-green willow shade could contend with, and hoisted himself up to strip off his shirt and arm harness.

Fawn opened one eye from her own replete slump, then sat up in some alarm as he lifted his hips to slip off his trousers. “I don’t think we can do that in a narrow boat!”

“Actually, you can,” he assured her absently, “but I’m not attempting it now. I’m going into the water to cool off.”

“Aren’t you supposed to get cramps if you swim too soon after a heavy meal?”

“I’m not going swimming. I’m going floating. I may not move any muscles at all.”

He selected a dry log about three feet long from the top of the wrack, wriggled it loose, and slipped into the water after it. The surface of the water was as warm as a bath, but his legs found the chill they sought farther down, flowing over his skin like silk. He hung his arms over his makeshift float, propped his chin in the middle, kicked up some billowing coolness, and relaxed utterly.

In a little while, to his—alas, still purely aesthetic—pleasure, Fawn yanked her shift over her flushed face, unwedged a log of her own, and splashed in after him. He floated on blissfully while she ottered around him with more youthful vigor, daring to wet her hair, then her face, then duck under altogether.

“Hey!” she said in a tone of discovery, partway through this proceeding. “I can’t sink!”

“Now you know,” he crooned.

She splashed him, got no rise, then eventually settled down beside him. He opened his eyes just far enough to enjoy the sight of her pale bare body, seemingly made liquid by the water-waver, caressed by the long, fringed water weeds as she idly kicked and turned. He looked down meditatively at the yellow willow leaves floating past his nose, harbinger of more soon to come. “The light is changing. And the sounds in the air. I always notice it, when the summer passes its peak and starts down, and the cicadas come on. Makes me…not sad, exactly. There should be a word.” As though time was sliding away, and not even his ghost hand could catch it.

“Noisy things, cicadas,” Fawn murmured, chinned on her own log. “I heard ’em just starting up when I was riding to Raintree.”

They were both quiet for a very long time, listening to the chaining counterpoint of bug songs. The brown wedge of a muskrat’s head trailed a widening vee across the limpid water, then vanished with a plop as the shy animal sensed their regard. The blue heron floated in, but then just stood folded as though sleeping on one leg. The green-headed ducks, drowsing in the shade across the marsh, didn’t move either. The clear light lay breathing like a live thing.

“This place is like the opposite of blight,” murmured Fawn after a while. “Thick, dense…if you opened up, would its ground just flow in and replenish you?”

“I opened up two hours ago. And yes, I think it may,” he sighed.

“That explains something about places like this, then,” she muttered in satisfaction.

A much longer time later, they regretfully pulled their wrinkled selves up onto the wrack and back into the boat, dressed, and pushed back to start for home. The sun was sliding behind the western trees as they crossed the wide part of the lake, and had turned into an orange glint by the time they climbed the bank to Tent Bluefield. Dag slept that night better than he had for weeks.