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  “With a malice that strong, didn’t they risk getting their grounds ripped?” asked Dirla. And if it was in fear, none could tell, for her voice did not quaver, and she had her groundsense well locked down.

  “Some did,” said Dag. Bluntly, without apology. “But I think we can try a similar strike. Whatever resistance is forming up right now south of Bonemarsh Camp, trying to protect Farmer’s Flats, gets to play the part of the company on the ridge, overwhelming the malice’s concentration. We here”—Dag unlocked his hand and gestured around the campfire—“will be for the sneak attack. You were all picked for your groundsense control.”

  “Not Saun!” complained Dirla. Saun flushed and glowered at her.

  “No, he’s our walking map. And someone’s going to have to stay with the horses.” Dag cast Saun an apologetic look; the boy grimaced but subsided.

  “And the rest of the company?” asked Obio Grayheron, one of the remaining patrol leaders.

  Dag gave him a short nod. “You’ll give us a half-day start. At which point it will either be over—or command will pass to you and you’ll be free to try again, try something else, or circle to join forces however you can with the Raintree Lakewalkers.”

  Obio settled back, digesting this unhappily. “And you’re going with…well. Yes, of course.”

  Going with the veiled patrol, Dag finished for him. Because Dag was well-known to be one of the cleverest at that trick in camp. Which begged the question, in his own mind if not theirs, whether he had chosen this strategy because it was the best they could do, or because it played to his personal quirks. Well, if the gamble paid off, the subtle self-doubt would be moot. And also if it doesn’t. You can’t lose, old patroller. In a sense.

  Saun was shoving shallow furrows in the drying mud with his boot heel. He looked up. “A little cruel on the folks fighting the retreat toward Farmer’s Flats. They don’t even get to know they’re the bait.”

  “Neither did most of the folks up on Wolf Ridge,” said Dag dryly. And, before Saun could ask How do you know? continued, “Saun, Codo, Varleen, you’re all familiar with Bonemarsh. Stand up and give us a terrain tutorial.”

  A customary task; Dag stepped back, the local knowledge stepped forth, and the other patrollers began pelting them with variously shrewd questions as the precious parchment maps were passed around, and annotations scribbled in the dirt with sticks, rubbed out, and redrawn. Dag listened as hard or harder than anyone else, casting and recasting tactical approaches in his head, glumly aware that nine-tenths of the planning would prove useless in the event.

  There was enough brains and experience in this bunch that Dag scarcely needed to guide the detailed discussion from here; two bad ideas were knocked down, by Utau and Obio respectively, before Dag could open his mouth, and three better ones that Dag wouldn’t even have thought of were spat forth, to be chewed over, altered, and approved with only the barest shaping murmurs on his part. Mari, bless her, took over the problem of coaxing sharing knives from a couple of patrollers who were not going with the veiled patrol, as there were six pairs but only four knives among those here assembled. They even sorted themselves out in new partner-pairs before the group, growing quiet and thoughtful, broke up to seek their bedrolls. Dag hoped they would all sleep better than he seemed likely to.

  He rolled on his back in his own bedroll, thin on the cold, damp ground, and searched the hazy sky for stars, trying to quiet the busy noise in his head. There was no point in running over the plans for tomorrow yet again, for the tenth, or was that the twentieth, time. He’d done all he could for tonight, except sleep. But when he forced the roiling concerns for his company out, the ache of missing Fawn crept back in.

  He’d grown so accustomed to her companionship in so few weeks, as if she’d always been there, or had slotted into some hollow place within him just her shape that had been waiting for years. He’d come to delight not only in her sweet body, awakening appetites he’d imagined dulled by time, age, and exhaustion, but in the way her shining eyes opened wide in her endless questions, that determined set to her mouth when she faced a new problem, her seemingly boundless world-wonder. And if her hunger for life was a joy to him, his own, renewed, was an astonishment.

  He considered the dark side of that bright coin uneasily. Had this marriage also reawakened his fear of death? For long, his inevitable end had seemed neither enemy nor friend, just there, accepted, to be worked around like his missing hand. If a fellow had nothing to lose, no risk held much alarm, and fear scarcely clogged thought. If that indifference had given him his noted edge, was that edge becoming blunted?

  His right hand crept across his chest to trace the heavy cord wrapping his left arm above the elbow, calling up the reassuring hum of Spark’s live ground. Indeed, he had something to lose now. By the shadow of his fear, he began to see the shape of his desire, the stirrings of curiosity for a future not constrained and inevitable but suddenly containing a host of unknowns, places and people altogether unimagined, unconceived in all senses. Blight it, I want to live. Not the best time to make that discovery, eh? He snorted self-disdain.

  Instead of letting his thoughts chase one another back around the circle, he folded his left arm in, rolled over around the absence of Spark, and resolutely closed his eyes. The summer night was short. They would head due south at dawn. And make sure your body and your wits are riding the same horse, old patroller.

  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 b
it 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 Gla
ssforge 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?”