Legacy

8

T hey were making ready to lie down in their bedroll before Dag reported his conversations with his brother and Fairbolt to Fawn. From the brevity of his descriptions, compared to the time he’d been gone, Fawn suspected he was leaving a good bit out; more than these clipped essentials had cast him into his dark mood. Brothers can do that. But his explanation of the camp council was frightening enough.

In the light of their candle stub atop Dag’s trunk, which did for their bedside table, Fawn sat cross-legged, and said, “Seven people can just vote you—us—to be banished? Just like that?”

“Not quite. They have to sit and hear arguments from both sides. And they’ll each speak with other folks around their islands, gather opinions, before delivering a ruling of this…this gravity.”

“Huh.” She frowned. “Somehow I thought your people not liking me being here would take the form of…I don’t know. Leaving dead rotten animals outside our door to step on in the morning, nasty tricks like that. Fellows in masks setting fire to our tent, or sneaking from the bushes and beating you up, or shaving my head, or something.”

Dag raised quizzical brows. “Is that the form it would take in farmer country?”

“Sometimes.” Sometimes worse, from tales she’d heard.

“A mask won’t hide who you are from groundsense. Anyone wants to do something that ugly around here, they sure can’t do it in secret.”

“That would slow ’em up some, I guess,” allowed Fawn.

“Yes, and…this isn’t a matter for boys’ tricks. Our marriage cords, if nothing else, draw it up to another level altogether. Serious dilemmas take serious thought from serious folks.”

“Shouldn’t we be making a push to talk to those serious folks, too? Dar shouldn’t have it all his own way, seems to me.”

“Yes—no…blight Dar,” he added, in a burst of aggravation. “This shoves me into exactly the worst actions to ease you in here smoothly. Drawing attention, forcing folks to choose sides. I wanted to lie low, and while everyone was waiting for someone else to do something, let the time for choosing just slip on by. I figured a year would do it.”

Fawn blinked in astonishment at his timetable. Perhaps a year didn’t seem like such a long time to him? “This isn’t exactly your favorite sort of arguin’, is it?”

He snorted. “Not hardly. It’s the wrong thing at the wrong time, and…and I’m not very smooth at it, anyway. Fairbolt is. Twenty minutes talking with him, and your head’s turned around. Good camp captain. But he’s made it clear this is my own bed to lie in.” He added in a lower voice, “And I hate begging for favors. Figured I used up a life’s supply long before this.” A slight thump of his left arm on the bedroll indicated what favors he was thinking of, which made Fawn huff in turn. Whatever special treatment had won him his arm harness and let him back on patrol must, it seemed to her, have been paid back in full a good long time ago.

Nevertheless, Dag began the next morning to show their presence more openly by taking Fawn out in the narrow boat for plunkin delivery duty. The first step was to paddle out to a gathering raft, which over the season had worked its way nearly to the end of their arm of the lake and would shortly start back up the other side. A dozen Lakewalkers of various ages, sexes, and states of undress manned the ten-foot-square lashing of tree trunks, which seemed to be munching its way down a long stretch of water lilies. This variety had big, almost leathery leaves that stuck up out of the water like curled fans, and small, simple, unappealing yellow flowers, which also stood up on stalks. The crew worked steadily to dig, then trim and separate the stems, roots, and ears, and then replant. Churned-up mud and plant bits left a messy trail in the raft’s inching wake.

Dag saluted an older woman who seemed to be in charge. A couple of naked boys rolled a load of plunkins into the narrow boat that made it ride alarmingly low in the water, and after polite farewells, Dag and Fawn paddled off again, a good bit more sluggishly. Fawn was intensely conscious of the stares following them.

Delivery consisted of coasting along the lakeshore, pulling up to each campsite in turn, and tossing plunkins into big baskets affixed to the ends of their docks, which at least showed Fawn where their daily plunkins had been coming from all this time. She hated the way the boat wobbled as she scrambled around at this task, and was terrified of dropping a plunkin overboard and having to go after it, especially in water over her head, but at length they’d emptied their boat out again. And then went back for another load and did it all over again, twice.

Dag waved or called a how de’ to folks in other boats or along the shore, seemingly the custom here, and exchanged short greetings with anyone working on the docks as their boat pulled up, introducing Fawn to enough new folks that she quickly lost track of the names. No one was spiteful, though some looked bemused; but few of the return stares or greetings seemed really warm to her. After a while she thought she would have preferred rude, or at least blunt, questions to this silent appraisal. But the little ordeal came to an end at noon, when they climbed wearily back up the bank to Tent Bluefield. Where lunch, Fawn reflected glumly, would be plunkin.

They repeated the exercise on the next four mornings, until the raft-folk and dock-folk stopped looking at them in surprise. In the afternoons, Fawn began to help Sarri with the task of spinning up her new plunkin flax, and, for more novelty, aid Cattagus with his rope-braiding, one of his several sitting-down camp chores that did not strain his laboring lungs. His breathing, he explained between wheezes, was permanent damage left from a bad bout of lung fever a few years back that had nearly led him to share, and had forced him finally to give up patrolling and grow, he claimed, fat.

Fawn found she liked working with Cattagus more than with any other of the campsite’s denizens. Sarri was stiff and wary, or distracted by her children, and Mari wryly dubious, but Cattagus seemed to regard Dag’s farmer girl with grim amusement. It was daunting to reflect that his detachment might stem from how close he stood to death—Mari, for one, was very worried about leaving him come bad weather—but Fawn finally decided that he’d likely always had a rude sense of humor. Further, though not as patient a teacher as Dag, he was nearly as willing, introducing her to the mysteries of arrow-making. He produced arrows not only for his patroller wife, but for Razi and Utau as well. It was very much a two-handed chore; Dar, it seemed, had used to make Dag’s for him, in his spare time. It didn’t need, nor did Cattagus make, any comment that Dag now needed a new source. Fawn found in herself a knack for balance and a sure and steady hand at fletching, and shortly grew conversant with the advantages and disadvantages of turkey, hawk, and crow quills.

Dag trudged off several times to, as he said, scout the territory, returning looking variously worried, pleased, or head-down furious. Fawn and Cattagus were sitting beneath a walnut tree having a fletching session when he stalked back from one of the latter sort, ducked into the tent without a word, returned with his bow and quiver, grabbed a plunkin from the basket by the tent flap, and set it up on a stump in the walnut grove. Within fifteen minutes he had reduced the plunkin to something resembling a porcupine smashed by a boulder and was breathing almost steadily again as he tried to unwedge his deeply buried near misses from the tree behind the stump. There were no wider misses to retrieve from the grove beyond.

“That one sure ain’t gettin’ away,” Cattagus observed, with a nod at the remains of the plunkin. “Anybody I know?”

Dag, treading over to them, smiled a bit sheepishly. “Doesn’t matter now.” He sat down with a sigh, unlatched and set aside his short bow, then picked up one of the new arrows and examined it with a judicious eye. “Better and better, Spark.”

She decided this was deliberate diversion. “You know, you keep saying I shouldn’t come with you so’s folks’ll talk frank and free, but it seems to me you might get further with some if they were to talk a little less frank and free.”

“That’s a point,” he conceded. “Maybe tomorrow.”

But the next morning ended up being dedicated to some overdue weapons practice, with an eye to the fact that Mari’s patrol would be going out again soon. Saun turned up, invited by Razi and Utau, and Fawn grew conscious for the first time of how few visitors had come to the campsite. If she and Dag were indeed a wonder of the lake, she would have thought curiosity, if not friendliness, should have brought a steady stream of neighbors making excuses to get a peek at her. She wasn’t sure how to interpret their absence: politeness, or shunning? But Saun was as nice to her as ever.

The session began with archery, and Fawn, fascinated, made herself useful trotting into the walnut grove after misses, or tossing plunkin rinds up into the air for moving targets. Her arrows seemed to work as well as her mentor’s, she saw with satisfaction. Cattagus sat on a stump and appraised the archers’ skills as freely as his breathlessness would allow. Saun was inclined to be daunted by him, but Mari gave him back as good as she got; Dag just smiled. The five patrollers moved on to blade practice with wooden knives and swords. Mari was clever and fast, but outmatched in strength and endurance, not a surprise in a woman of seventy-five, and soon promoted herself to a seat beside Cattagus to shrewdly critique the others.

The action grew hotter then, with what seemed to Fawn a great many very dirty moves, not to mention uncertainty of whether she was watching sword fighting or wrestling. The clunk and clatter of the wooden blades was laced with cries of Ow! Blight it! or, to Saun’s occasional gratification, Good one! Dag pushed the others on far past breathlessness, on the gasped-out but convincing theory that the real thing didn’t come with rest breaks, so’s you’d better know how to move when you couldn’t hardly move at all.

The sweat-soaked and filthy combatants then took a swim in the lake, emerging smelling no worse than usual, and assembled in the clearing to munch plunkin and try, without success, to persuade Cattagus to uncork one of his last carefully hoarded jugs of elderberry wine from the prior fall. Dag, slouched against a stump and smiling at the banter, suddenly frowned and sat up, his head turning toward the road.

“What is it?” Fawn, sitting beside him, asked quietly.

“Fairbolt. Not happy about something.”

She lowered her voice further. “Think it’s our summons from the camp council, finally?” She had lived in increasing dread of the threat.

“Could be…no. I’m not sure.” Dag’s eyes narrowed.

By the time Fairbolt’s trotting horse swung into the clearing, all the patrollers had quieted and were sitting up watching him. He was riding bareback, and his face was as grim as Fawn had ever seen. She found her heart beating faster, even though she was sitting still.

Fairbolt pulled up his horse and gave them all a vague sort of salute. “Good, you’re all here. I’m looking for Saun, first.”

Saun, startled, stood up from his stump. “Me, sir?”

“Yep. Courier just rode in from Raintree.”

Saun’s home hinterland. Bad news from there? Saun’s face drained, and Fawn could imagine his thoughts suddenly racing down a roster of family and friends.

“They’ve got themselves a bad malice outbreak north of Farmer’s Flats, and are calling for help.”

Everyone straightened in shock at this. Even Fawn knew by now that to call for aid outside one’s own hinterland was a sign of things going very badly indeed.

“Seems the blighted thing came up practically under a farmer town, and grew like crazy before it was spotted,” Fairbolt said.

Saun’s gnawed plunkin rind fell from his hand. “I’ll ride—I have to get home at once!” he said, and lurched forward. He caught himself, breathless, and looked beseechingly at Fairbolt. “Sir, may I have leave to go?”

“No.”

Saun flushed, but before he could speak, Fairbolt went on, “I want you to ride with the rest tomorrow morning as pathfinder.”

“Oh. Yes, of course.” Saun subsided, but stayed on his flexing feet, like a dog straining on the end of a chain.

“Being the high season, almost three-quarters of our patrols are out right now,” Fairbolt continued, his gaze sweeping over the suddenly grave patrollers in front of him. “For our first answer, I figure I can pull up the next three patrols due to go out. Which includes yours, Mari.”

Mari nodded. Cattagus scowled unhappily, his right hand rubbing on his knee, but he said nothing.

“Being out of the hinterland, it’s on a volunteer basis as usual—you folks all in?”

“Of course,” murmured Mari. Razi and Utau, after a glance at each other, nodded as well. Fawn hardly dared move. Her breath felt constricted. Dag said nothing, his face oddly blank.

Saun wheeled to him. “You’ll come, won’t you, Dag? I know you meant to sit out our next patrol in camp, and you’ve earned some time off your feet, but, but—!”

“I want to speak to Dag private-like,” said Fairbolt, watching him. “The rest of you can start to collect your gear. I figure to send the first company west at dawn.”

“Couldn’t we start tonight? If everyone pulled themselves together?” said Saun earnestly. “Time—you never know how much difference a little time could make.”

Dag grimaced at that one, not, Fawn thought, in disagreement.

Fairbolt shook his head, although his glance was sympathetic. “Folks are spread all over the lake right now. It’ll take all afternoon just to get the word out. You can’t outpace the company you’re leading, pathfinder.”

Saun gulped and nodded.

Fairbolt gave a gesture of dismissal, and everyone scattered, Razi and Utau for their tent, where Sarri had come to the awning post with her little boy on her hip, staring hard at the scene, Mari and Cattagus to theirs. Saun waved and started jogging up the road back to his own campsite on the island’s other end.

Fairbolt slid down from his horse and left it to trail its reins and browse. Dag motioned toward Tent Bluefield, sheltered in the orchard, and Fairbolt nodded. Fawn hurried after their matched patrollers’ strides. Fairbolt eyed her, neither inviting nor excluding, so when each man took a seat on an upended log in the shade of her tent flap, she did, too. Dag gave her an acknowledging nod before turning his full attention on his commander.

“With three patrols sent out in a bunch, they’re going to need an experienced company captain,” Fairbolt began.

“Rig Crow. Or Iwassa Muskrat,” said Dag, watching him warily.

“My first two choices exactly,” Fairbolt said. “If they weren’t both a hundred and fifty miles away right now.”

“Ah.” Dag hesitated. “Surely you’re not looking to me for this.”

“You’ve been a company captain. Further, you’re the only patroller in camp right now who’s been in on a real large-group action.”

“And so successfully, too,” murmured Dag sourly. “Just ask the survivors. Oh, that’s right—there weren’t any. That’ll give folks lots of confidence in my leadership, sure enough.”

Fairbolt made an impatient chopping motion. “Your habit of picking up extra duty means you’ve worked, at one time or another, with almost every other patroller in camp. No problem with unfamiliar grounds, or not knowing your people pretty much through and through. Weaknesses, strengths, who can be relied on for what.”

Dag’s slow blink didn’t deny this.

Fairbolt lowered his voice. “Another angle. I shouldn’t be saying this, but your summons to stand before the camp council is due out in a very few more days. But they can’t set a hearing if you’re not here to receive the order. You wanted delay? Here’s your chance. Do a good job on this, and if you’re still called to stand before the council, you’ll do so with that much more clout.”

“And if I do badly?” Dag inquired, his voice very dry.

Fairbolt scratched his nose and grinned without humor. “Then we are all going to be having much more pressing problems than one patroller’s personal lapses.”

“And if I’m killed in the field, the problem goes away, too,” said Dag with false brightness.

“Now you’re thinking like a captain,” said Fairbolt affably. “Knew you could.”

Dag huffed a very short laugh.

Patroller humor, Fawn realized. Yeep.

Fairbolt sat back more seriously. “Not my first pick of solutions, though. Dag, when it comes to malices you’re known as about the most volunteerin’ fellow in camp. This is your chance to show ’em all nothing’s changed.”

Dag shook his head. “I don’t know what’s changed. Changing. More than…I sometimes think.” His hand touched his left arm, and while Fairbolt might take it to mean his marriage cord, Fawn wondered how much the gesture was for his ghost hand.

Fairbolt glanced at Fawn. “Aye, it’s a hard thing to ask a patroller newly string-bound to go out in the field under any circumstances. But this one’s bad, Dag. I didn’t want to give more details in front of Saun right off, but word from the courier is that they’ve already lost hundreds of people, farmers and Lakewalkers both. The malice has shifted from its first lair under that poor farmer town to attack Bonemarsh Camp. Most everyone got away, but there’s no question the malice captured some. Once our first company is dispatched, I’m going to start scraping up a second—absent gods know from where—because I have an ugly hunch they’ll be wanted.”

Dag rubbed his brow. “Raintree folks will be off-balance, then. Focusing on the wrong things, defense and refugees and the wounded. People will get frantic for each other, and lose sight of the main chance. Get a knife in the malice. Everything else is a distraction.”

“An outsider might be better at keeping his head,” said Fairbolt suggestively.

“Not necessarily. It’s been thirty years since I patrolled in north Raintree, but I still remember friends.”

“And the terrain?”

“Some,” Dag admitted reluctantly.

“Exactly. Never been out that way, myself. I figured, by the by, that I’ll pair Saun as pathfinder with the company captain.”

Dag did not respond directly to this, but touched his throat. “I don’t have a primed knife right now. First time I’ve walked bare in decades. I usually carried two, sometimes three. You wondered how I took out so many malices, besides the extra patrolling? Folks gave me more knives. It was that simple.”

“Not the captain’s job to place the knife. It’s his job to place the knife-wielders.”

“I know,” Dag sighed.

“And I know you know. So.” Fairbolt stood up. “I’m going to finish passing the word up this side of the island. I’ll ride back this way. You can give me your answer then.” He didn’t say Talk it over with each other, but the invitation was plain. He stared a moment at Fawn, as if thinking of making some plea to her, but then just shook his head. His horse came wandering over in a way that she suspected was not by chance, and he stepped up on his log seat and swung his leg over. He was back on the road in moments, setting the animal into a lope.

Dag had risen when Fairbolt had; he stood staring after him, but his face was drawn and inward-looking, as if contemplating quite another view. Her own face feeling as stiff and congealed as cold dough, Fawn rose too, and went to him. They walked into each other’s arms and held on tight.

“Too soon,” whispered Dag. He set her a little from him, looking down in anxiety. Fawn wondered whatever was the use of putting on a brave face when he could see right through to whatever wild roil her ground was in right now. She stiffened her spine anyhow, fighting to keep her breathing even and her lips firm.

“Fairbolt’s right about the experience, though,” he continued, his voice finding its volume again. “This sort of thing is different from hunting sessiles, or even from that mess we had near Glassforge. I run down the patrol lists in my head and think, They don’t know. Especially the youngsters. How far north of Farmer’s Flats was that town, anyway? Farmer settlements aren’t supposed to be allowed above the old cleared line…” He shook his head abruptly, and grasped her hands. His gold eyes glittered with an expression she’d never seen in them before; she thought it might be frantic.

She swallowed, and said, “You did this once. So the question isn’t, Can you do it? but, Can you do it better than someone doing it for the first time ever?”

“No—yes—maybe…It’s been a while. Still—if not me, who am I condemning to go in my place? Someone has to—”

She reached up and pressed her fingers to his lips, which stilled. She said simply, “Who are you arguin’ with, Dag?”

He was silent for the space of several heartbeats, though at length a faint wry smile turned his mouth, just a little.

Fawn took a deeper breath. “When I married a patroller instead of a farmer, I figured I must be signing up for something like this. You for the leaving…me for the being left.” His hand found her shoulder, and tightened. “It’s come on sooner than we thought, but…there has to be a first time.” She raised her arms to catch his beloved cheekbones between her hands, pressing hard, and gave his head a stern little shake. “Just you make sure it’s not the last, you hear?”

He gathered her in. She could feel his heartbeat slow. The scent of him, as she turned and buried her face in his shirt, overwhelmed her: sweat and summer and sun and just plain Dag. She opened her mouth and widened her nostrils as though she could breathe him in and store him up. Forever. And a day. Well, there wasn’t any forever. Then I’ll take the day.

“You’re not afraid to be left alone here?” he murmured into her curls.

“On the list of things I’m afraid of, that one’s just dropped down. Quite a ways.”

She could feel his smile. “You have to grant, I’ve always come back so far.”

“Yeah, the other patrollers in Glassforge said you were like a cat, that way.” But they all went out looking for you anyhow. “Papa used to say to me, when I got all upset about one of our barn cats that had got its fool self in a fix and was crying all woeful, Lovie, you ever seen a cat skeleton in a tree?”

That deep chuckle she so loved, too seldom felt lately, rumbled through his chest. They stood there wrapped in each other until the unwelcome sound of trotting hoofbeats echoed from the road. “Right, then,” muttered Fawn. She backed off and stared up.

He was looking down with a curious smile. He returned her nod. Squeezed and released her, all but her hand. Turned to face Fairbolt, looking down from his horse.

Fairbolt didn’t speak, merely raising his brows in question.

“I’ll want to talk to that courier,” said Dag. “And have a fresh look at whatever large-scale maps we have of the northern Raintree region.”

Fairbolt accepted this with no more comment than a short jerk of his chin. “Get up behind me, then. I’ll give you a lift to headquarters.” He kneed his horse around, and Dag stepped up on a stump and slid aboard. The burdened beast took to the road again at a rapid walk.

Fawn’s eyes were hot but dry. Mostly. Blinking, she ducked inside her tent flap to see what she could do to help get Dag’s saddlebags in order.