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  Berry’s eleven-year-old brother, Hawthorn, came next, his pet raccoon riding on his shoulder, both boy and animal sniffing the air in bright-eyed curiosity. There had been some argumentation over whether a raccoon was a proper ornament to a wedding party, but the creature had ridden with them all the way from Oleana, and had become something of a boat’s mascot over the downriver weeks. Dag was just glad no one had extended the argument to Daisy-goat, equally faithful and far more useful. A bit more of Hawthorn’s swinging wrist stuck out of his shirtsleeve than when Dag had first met him, and Dag didn’t think it was because the cloth had shrunk with its rare washings. When his straw-blond head finally grew to overtop that of his sister Berry, he would be an impressive young man. Three more years, Dag gave it; forever, Hawthorn moaned; Dag tried to remember when three years had seemed forever.

  Next, the bride herself, supported by Fawn. Fawn had spent a good long time earlier this morning with her clever fingers plaiting Berry’s straight hair, usually tied at her nape, up into Lakewalker-style wedding braids. Somewhere in the Drowntown day market Fawn had found fresh winter flowers, either local to these southern climes or grown under glass, Dag was not sure. She’d arranged all the big white blooms she could fit in around Berry’s straw-gold topknot, with ivy trailing down in the silky fall of hair behind. Her own hair she’d gathered into a jaunty horsetail at her crown, with sprigs of scarlet flowers seeming to glow against the dark curls. Climbing behind the two women, Dag enjoyed the effect. There had been no time for new bride clothes, in these hasty preparations so far from home, but there had been a lot of laundry done on the Fetch yesterday after Fawn had returned from the market with Remo. Shabby and travel-worn the whole party’s workaday garments might be, but they were all clean and mended.

  As they reached a turn in the stairs and reversed direction, Fawn’s little hand gripped Berry’s in a gesture of encouragement. Berry’s work-hardened fingers looked unusually cold and pale. Dag had seen Berry face down raging shoals, snagging sandbars, rough rivermen, sly goods-dealers, murderous bandits, knife fights, heartbreak, and hangings, high water and low as the riverfolk put it, with unflagging courage. Any who would dare chuckle at her pre-wedding nerves…had never faced a wedding ceremony themselves, Dag decided.

  Fawn’s brother Whit, climbing beside Dag, had chuckled merrily at his sister and Dag six months ago when they’d tied their knots in West Blue. He wasn’t laughing now, and the corners of Dag’s mouth tucked up at the pure justice of the moment. No one, looking at Fawn and Whit together, would take them for anything other than brother and sister even before they opened their mouths. Both had the same dark curls and clear skin, and though Whit topped Fawn by a head, he was still a sawed-off Bluefield. More height he would likely never gain, but his shoulders had broadened this fall, as the strain on his shirt seams testified. And, without losing his still-sometimes-annoying humor, his eyes were graver, more thoughtful; more than once lately Dag had seen him start to let fly with a witty or half-witty barb, then stop and swallow it instead. He, too, had come a long way from West Blue.

  Enough to be ready for his wedding day? No, probably not; few folks ever were. Enough to be ready for all the days that followed? That also was a matter of learn-as-you-go, in Dag’s experience. But I think he will not betray her. He sent an encouraging glint of a smile down at his…brother-in-law, in farmer parlance, tent-brother, in Lakewalker terms, and thought that Whit had met the tests of both roles. Whit put his shoulders back and managed a ghastly grin in return.

  Behind Dag, Remo’s and Barr’s long legs took some of the shorter uneven stairs two at a time, in step with each other. Either would likely be shocked to learn Dag now thought of them as part of his peculiar farmer-Lakewalker family tent, but Dag imagined both partners would admit to being his patrollers. As difficult as their present circumstances were, Dag was glad they had become entangled in his little band, whatever one might name it. One Lakewalker among farmers was an oddity. Three were…a start, maybe.

  They all exited the walkway into Uptown. Dag stared around with interest, this being his first jaunt up the stairs to the bluff. Today was nearly windless in the watery light, but Dag imagined that in high summer Uptown would catch whatever mosquito-removing breezes there were. The streets, better drained than those below, were not as muddy, and were laid out in tidy blocks with boardwalks lining them—more sawed-up former flatboats, no doubt. The houses and buildings looked substantial, less haphazardly cobbled together, free of high-water stains. The people seemed not too different: boat bosses and goods-shed men, drivers and drovers, innkeepers and horseboys; some of the women seemed better dressed, if more soberly than the fancy getups worn by the girls from the bed-boats tied along the Drowntown shore.

  The Graymouth town clerk’s office was not the front room of some villager’s house, as Dag had seen back in tiny West Blue, but a separate building, two stories high, built of sturdy brick probably floated downstream from Glassforge in far-off Oleana. Fawn pointed out the brick to Hod, who grinned in recognition and nodded. The Fetch’s party clumped up onto the porch and inside.

  Berry and Whit had ventured up here the requisite three days ago to register their intent to wed and to secure an appointment with a recording clerk—the town employed several, Dag understood. The big, busy room to the right of the entry hall had to do with boats and the shipping business; to the left, with land records. Berry and Whit both gulped, grabbed each other’s hand, and led the way upstairs to a smaller, quieter chamber.

  The rather bare upstairs room held a writing table by a window and half a dozen wooden chairs pushed back to the wall, not quite enough for the crew of the Fetch. Hod saw that Bo took a seat with Fawn and Berry. Dag rested his shoulders on the wall and crossed his arms, and Barr and Remo, after a glance at him, did likewise.

  The wait was neither long nor uncomfortable, at least not for Dag. He wouldn’t vouch for Whit, who kept readjusting his shirt collar. In a few minutes, a man carrying a large record book and a sheet of paper bustled in. Dag judged him maybe a decade older than Whit or Berry; he might have been a cleanly goods-shed clerk working up to owner. He looked up to see Dag, and stepped back with a small uh. His eyes flicked down over the hook that served in place of Dag’s left hand, to the long knife at his belt, back up to his short-trimmed if still unruly hair, and across again to Barr and Remo with their more obviously Lakewalker-style hair and garb. Both Remo’s long, dark braid and Barr’s shorter tawny queue were decorated for the occasion with ornaments new-made from shark teeth and pearl shell.

  “Ah,” the clerk said to Dag, “can I help you fellows find the room you’re looking for? There’s a marriage registration due next in this one, the Bluefield party.”

  “Yes, we’re part of that patrol,” Dag replied amiably. He gave a nod toward Berry and Whit, who popped to their feet, smiling nervously.

  The fellow Dag took to be the clerk tore his gaze from the Lakewalkers to glance at his paper and say, “Whitesmith Bluefield and Berry Clearcreek?”

  Both ducked their heads; Whit stuck out his hand and said, “They call me Whit.”

  “I’m Clerk Bakerbun,” said the clerk, who shook Whit’s hand and, after a brief glance at Fawn, nodded at Berry. “Miss Clearcreek. How de’ do.” He laid his big book out on the table. “Right, we can begin. Do you each have your principal witnesses?”

  “Yes,” said Berry. “This here’s my uncle Bo, and that’s my little brother Hawthorn.” Both rose and nodded, Hawthorn tightly clutching his raccoon, which made a noise of indolent protest.

  Whit added, “Yeah, and this is my sister Fawn and her husband, Dag Bluefield.” His gesture taking in Dag made the clerk blink.

  “I’m sorry, I thought you were a Lakewalker,” said the clerk to Dag. He looked up into Dag’s gold-tinged eyes. “Wait, you are a Lakewalker!”

  Whit raised his voice to override the inevitable spate of questions: “And these here are Hod, Remo, and Barr, all friends and boat hands from the Fe
tch, which is Berry’s flatboat out of Clearcreek, Oleana, see. They’ll sign as witnesses, too. She goes by Boss Berry down on the river, by the way.” He smiled proudly at his betrothed. Berry usually had a generous grin beneath wide cheekbones that made her face look like a friendly ferret’s; now her smile was stretched thin with nerves.

  The clerk looked at Hawthorn, who grinned back more in the usual Clearcreek family style. “Ah, um…this youngster looks to be well under twenty years of age. He can’t be a legal witness, not in Graymouth.”

  “But Berry said I could sign. I been practicin’!” protested Hawthorn. He undid one arm from under the fat and sleepy raccoon and held up ink-stained fingers in proof. “And now that Buckthorn and Papa was killed last fall, I’m her only brother!”

  “I did promise he could,” said Berry. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry, Hawthorn.”

  Bo added gruffly, “Oh, come on, let the little feller sign. It won’t do no harm, and it’ll mean the world to him. To both of ’em.”

  “Well…” The clerk looked nonplussed. “I don’t think I can. It might compromise the validity of the document should it be challenged.”

  Dag’s brows drew down. Farmer customs could be so baffling. All that paper and ink and fuss over property and witnesses. He considered his own wedding cord wound around his upper arm, concealed beneath his jacket sleeve, braided by Fawn’s own hands and containing a thread of her live ground, proof of their union to anyone with groundsense. She wore its twin on her left wrist, peeping like a hair bracelet from her shirt cuff, humming with a bit of Dag’s ground in turn. Not that any Lakewalker camp wouldn’t seize on a wedding as an excuse for a party, and not that the tent-kin on both sides didn’t mix in till you were ready to wrap some spare cords around their necks and twist, but in the end, the marriage was solely between two people, tracking its traces in their inward selves. Even if the couple should be cast among strangers, the cords silently spoke their witness for them.

  “Never mind, Hawthorn,” said Whit to the crestfallen boy. “I bought Berry and me a new family book to start, and you can sign in that. ’Cause it’s ours, and doesn’t belong to these Graymouth folks.” He added to Berry, “It’s my first wedding present to you, see.” Her pale face lightened in a real grin.

  Whit reached into the cloth bag he’d been toting and pulled out a large volume bound in new leather of the sort in which good-sheds kept their records. He laid it on the table, opening it to the first blank white page. Dag was thrown back in memory to the aging family book he’d seen at West Blue, three-quarters full of entries about Bluefield marriages, births, and deaths, and land or animals bought, sold, or swapped, which he and Fawn and for that matter Whit had all put their names in, as principals or witness. That volume had been the latest of a series going back over two hundred years, all carefully kept in a trunk in the parlor. The precious family books would pass in turn, along with the farm itself, to Whit and Fawn’s eldest brother and his bride. As the fourth son, Whit was on his own. And, Dag guessed, not sorry for it now.

  Fawn measured the book’s thickness, a good two fingers, and grinned. “Ambitious, Whit!” Hawthorn looked it over in approval, evidently consoled. Would the old Clearcreek family book pass to Hawthorn, then, not to Berry? It was all so backward to the way a Lakewalker eldest girl inherited the family tent from her mother.

  “Hm,” said the clerk in a tone of doubt, but did not pursue his quibble. He laid his own big book, its leather cover stamped with Graymouth’s town seal, on the table beside Whit’s, and opened it to a new page. “If I’m to make two clean copies, best we get started.” He sat at the table, drew the ink pot toward him, shot back his cuffs, selected a quill from the jar, and looked up again at Berry and Whit. “State your full names, your parents’ names and residences—or, if they are deceased, places of burial—your dates of birth, places of birth, and occupations.”

  It took a few minutes to get all this down, twice. The fellow did have nice handwriting, Dag decided, leaning over for a peek. Since this caused Bakerbun to stop writing and stare over his shoulder in alarm, Dag returned to his wall space. Berry gave her occupation as boat boss, and after a moment, and fiddler; Whit, after the briefest hesitation, said not farmer but boat hand. Dag fancied he could almost hear the twang as Whit’s last tie to West Blue parted.

  “Next, do you give your sworn words you have no impediments? No other betrothal, marriage, or indenture?”

  They both murmured their nays, although Berry winced a little at the other betrothal part.

  “Good, that’s easy,” muttered the clerk. “You came up from Drowntown, so I don’t guess you have any substantial property to worry about. I must say, Drowntown folks don’t usually bother to come up here to us for this, but that’s Drowntown for you.”

  “I have the Fetch,” said Berry.

  The clerk hesitated. “Flatboat, you say? Not a keel?”

  “That’s right.”

  “We don’t have to count flats. What about you, Whitesmith Bluefield?”

  “I have my earnings for the trip.”

  The clerk waved this away. “Real property. Land, a house, a building for business? Expectations of inheritance?”

  “No. Not yet,” Whit amended, with a distant look. “I have a family due-share from the farm in West Blue, but I don’t rightly know when I’ll get back to collect it. It’s not much, anyhow.”

  The clerk frowned judiciously.

  “You should have your papa’s house and the hill in Clearcreek, Berry,” Bo put in. “You and Hawthorn.”

  The clerk came suddenly alert. “Do you know how it was left? What terms?”

  “I can’t rightly say. Don’t think no one in Clearcreek even knows Berry’s papa is dead, yet. He disappeared on the river last fall, see, along with her older brother, so that’s what this trip was for, mainly, to find out what had happened to ’em. Which we did do.”

  A sudden spate of questions from the clerk drew out the information that the house was substantial, or at least large and rambling, and the hill, too steep for farming but where Berry’s family harvested the timber to build their yearly flatboat, was a good square mile in extent. And no one knew for sure if Berry’s papa might have left Hawthorn’s guardianship to some other relative than Berry in the event of his death, a notion that clearly alarmed Hawthorn very much. Any records were back in Clearcreek, fifteen hundred river miles away.

  “This is all very confused,” said the clerk at last, rubbing his nose and leaving a faint smear of ink on his upper lip. “I don’t think I can register this marriage.”

  “What?” cried Whit in alarm, in chorus with Berry’s dismayed “Why not?”

  “It’s the rules, miss. To prevent theft by runaway or fraudulent marriages. Which has been tried, which is why the rules.”

  “I’m not a runaway,” said Berry indignantly. “I’m a boat boss! And I got my mother’s own brother with me!”

  “Yes, but your marriage would give Whitesmith, here, some claims on your property that your other kin might not want to allow. Or if that house and hill is all left to the tad, here, as your papa’s only surviving son, he presumably owes you some due-share, but he’s too young to administer it. I’ve seen this sort of tangle lead to all sorts of fights and disputes and even killings, and over a good deal less property than your Oleana hill!”

  “In Graymouth, maybe!” cried Berry, but Bo scratched his chin in worry.

  “Better you should wait and get married back in Clearcreek, miss,” said the clerk.

  “But it could be four or six months till we get back there!” said Whit, sounding suddenly bewildered. “We want to get married now!”

  “Yeah, Fawn’s baked the cake and fixed the food and everything!” put in Hawthorn. “And she made me take a bath!”

  “Something like this sort of problem must have come up before.” Dag pitched his voice deep to cut across the rising babble of protest. “In a town with as many strangers passing through for trade as Graymouth
gets. Couldn’t you just leave out all mention of the property, let the Clearcreek clerk write it all in later?”

  “I should have kept my fool mouth shut,” muttered Bo. “Sorry, Berry.”

  The distress from the folks assembled in the room was rising like a miasma around Dag, and he closed himself tighter against it.

  “That’s what the marriage registration is for, to settle all these critical matters!” said the clerk. “Not that I’d expect a Lakewalker to understand,” he added in a low mutter. “Don’t you fellows trade your women around? Like bed-boat girls, but with big knives, and not near so friendly.”

  Dag stiffened, but decided to pretend not to hear, although Remo stirred in annoyance and Barr’s sandy eyebrows rose.

  The clerk straightened up, cleared his throat, and gripped the edges of the table. “There have been variances made, from time to time,” he said. Whit made an eager noise. “The fellow puts up a bond with the town clerk in the amount of the disputed property, or a decreed percentage. When he brings back the proper documents or witnesses to prove his claims, he gets it back, less a handling fee. Or, if his claims don’t fly, the woman’s kin comes to collect it, for damages.”

  “What damages?” said Hawthorn curiously, but Bo’s grip on his shoulder quelled him.

  Whit’s nose abruptly winkled. “Just how much money are we talking about here?”

  “Well, the worth of that hill and house, I suppose.”

  “I don’t have that much money!”

  The clerk shrugged helplessly.

  “We’ve still to sell off the Fetch,” said Berry dubiously, “but it won’t run to anything near the value of our place in Clearcreek. And besides, we need that money to take home to live on next year.”

  Remo glanced at Barr and cleared his throat. “Barr and I—anyway, I still have my salvage share from the cave,” he offered. “I could, uh, pitch in.”

  Barr swallowed, and with an effort, got out, “We.”