Passage

  “The Gray really is gray!” said Fawn.

  “Yep,” said Dag. “It drains the whole of the Western Levels. It’s well-wooded along here, but about a hundred miles due west, depending, the trees fail and the blight gradually starts. It’s said that after the first great malice war, the blight reached the river here, and the whole Gray was dead from the poison, but it’s long since come alive again. I find that a pretty encouraging tale, myself.”

  The westering sun was playing hide-and-seek behind cold blue-gray clouds with glowing edges that filled the sky from horizon to horizon. “I think that’s the widest sky I ever did see,” Fawn said. “Is it because the land’s so level out here?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Berry.

  “And I thought Raintree was flat!” Whit marveled.

  “It’s beautiful. In a severe sort of way. Never seen a sky like that at home.” Fawn turned completely around, drinking in all that her eyes could hold. “That’s a thing to come see, all right.”

  In a maternal spirit, she dragged Hod outside to share the sight; he gaped gratifyingly, but, rubbing his red nose, soon went back inside to hug the hearth. Despite the chilly wind, Fawn sat at Dag’s feet for the next half-hour, watching for when the two streams would at last become indistinguishable. During the stretches when they had merely to ship their oars and float on, Whit and Berry doubled up boat cloaks, guarding each other from the blustery discomfort.

  Dag found himself thinking, I’m so glad we brought Whit. He wished the boy all good speed and fortune in his courtship, because he thought Fawn must warmly welcome such a tent-sister. And my tent-sister too, how unexpected! The most important thing about quests, he decided, was not in finding what you went looking for, but in finding what you never could have imagined before you ventured forth.

  Keep that in mind, old patroller.

  As the year slid toward its darkest turning, the late dawns and early sunsets squeezed the daylight hours down to less than a double handful. After encountering a spurt of snow flurries the morning before they’d passed the Confluence, Boss Berry took advantage of having three Lakewalker pilots aboard and reversed her ban on night running—also because she no longer needed the daylight, Fawn figured, to watch for wrecks that might be the Briar Rose. For five nights straight they floated down the wide channel far into the evenings, until nearly half the winding river miles between the Confluence and the Graymouth were behind them, and the cold breath of winter eased into something, if still damp, much less penetrating.

  Then one afternoon the wind swung around to the south, the clouds broke up, and the air grew downright warm. Berry relented enough to tie up the Fetch during a spectacular sunset in the immense western sky and declare an evening of rest. After a string of nights handing out hasty meals to the off-watch crew to eat while crowding around the hearth, Fawn celebrated by fixing a bang-up sit-down supper, with everyone squeezed together around the table for once, even Bo, though she made sure his food was soft.

  The meal was eaten with appetite enough, but in uncharacteristic and rather weary silence. After a glance around at the long faces, Fawn swallowed her last bite of fried potato and declared, “Well, this is no good. You’re all looking as glum as a chorus of frogs with no pond. We should do something after the dishes to ginger folks up. How about archery lessons? Everybody liked those. We still have plenty of lanterns in stock. And there’s hardly any wind tonight.”

  Hawthorn and Hod looked interested, but Whit scrubbed his hand over his face and said, “Naw. I don’t think that would be so much fun anymore.”

  Dag’s eyelids had been drooping in a combination of fatigue and food-induced mellowness; at this, they flicked open. He watched Whit, but did not at once speak.

  Fawn glanced at Dag, then badgered, “Why not?”

  Whit shrugged, made a face, and seemed about to fall into hunched silence, but then got out, “It feels funny to be making a game out of it, after I shot a man.”

  “Big Drum?” said Berry. “Whit, we’re right glad you shot Big Drum.”

  “No, not him.” Whit made a frustrated waving-away gesture. “Besides, I didn’t kill Big Drum; that fellow who cut off his head later did that. It was the other one. The first one.”

  “What first one?” Fawn asked carefully.

  “It was the night before, at the cave. Some fellows ran out trying to get away, which was exactly why Dag put us bowmen where he did, I guess. I was so scared and excited, I couldn’t hardly see what I was doing, but…my first shot, my very first shot ever, went right through this bandit’s eye. Killed him outright.”

  Fawn winced and murmured Eew. Hawthorn, unhelpfully, made a very impressed Ooh.

  Whit waved again. “It wasn’t the eye thing that bothered me. Well, it did, but that wasn’t…” He drew air through his nostrils, and tried, “It was too easy.”

  Bo rubbed his rough chin in some sympathy, but rumbled, “Whit, some men need killin’.”

  Berry put in perhaps more shrewdly, “It doesn’t need to be catching.”

  “It’s not that, exactly,” said Whit, his brows drawing in.

  Dag spoke for the first time, so unexpectedly that Fawn gave a little jump. “No, but you’re not the same person, after. It changes you in your ground, and that’s a fact. Whit, Barr, and Remo all crossed that line for the first time that night at the cave, and there’s no stepping back over it. You have to go on from where you are.”

  “I suppose you did the same, once,” said Remo diffidently. “So long ago you don’t remember, likely.”

  “Oh, I remember,” said Dag.

  Nods all around the table at this received wisdom.

  Dag set his tankard down so hard his drink slopped out. “Absent gods, do you people have to swallow down every blighted thing I say? Don’t you ever choke?”

  Fawn’s eyes widened, and hers were not the only ones; surprised heads turned toward Dag all around the table. Hod flinched.

  “What the blight’s bit you?” said Barr. Saving Fawn the trouble of composing a more tactful question to the same effect.

  Dag drummed his fingers, grimaced, blurted: “I killed Crane by ground-ripping a thin little slice out of his spinal cord. That’s how I dropped him on the deck. From twenty feet away, mind you. Remember that mosquito back in Lumpton Market, Whit? Just like that. But inside his body, same as I do healing groundwork.”

  “Oh,” said Whit, his eyes growing big. “I, um, didn’t realize you could do that.”

  “I realized. Even back then.” Dag’s glance darted around the table.

  “It was too easy.”

  Fawn recalled, then, where she’d heard that exact phrase before, if in a different tone of voice, and it wasn’t just now from Whit: Crane’s confession. But Whit hadn’t been there for that. His echo of the renegade’s words was accidental. Dag’s isn’t, she thought. Did Barr and Remo catch the twisted meanings, too? Do I?

  “That was what you did to Crane? Ground-ripped him?” said Barr blankly.

  “I didn’t know any person could do that,” said Remo, more warily. “I thought only malices…?”

  “It’s a very weak version of the same thing, yes. I have reason to believe it’s an advanced maker’s skill as well, or some variant, but since it’s come out—come back—in me I haven’t had a chance to find a maker skilled enough to ask. You can easily defend against it by closing your grounds, which is why I had to wait for a moment when Crane opened his. It only worked because I took him by surprise.”

  “Oh,” said Barr, relaxing. “That’s all right, then.”

  “For some of us here,” said Dag dryly.

  Whit, at least, looked as though he caught the full implications; his mouth went round. Whatever was Dag about, to plop out this admission here, now, in this company? Was it for Whit’s sake, or his own?

  Fawn sat up straight. “Dag, this is morbid. You aren’t no more going to turn into a malice, or even into Crane, than Whit is going to turn into Little Drum. For that matter, I made
that arrow Whit shot in that fellow’s eye, with my own hands, as strong and straight and sharp as Cattagus could teach me. And I made it for killin’—whatever needed killin’—because I figured it would be down to either the other fellow or Dag at that point, and I knew which I wanted it to be. Same goes for my brother, if you’ve any doubt.” She drew breath. “A knife, an arrow, ground-ripping, they’re all just different tools. You can kill a man with a hammer, for pity’s sake.”

  The farmerly alarm around the table faded as folks digested this thought. Dag said nothing, though his tension eased; he cast Fawn that odd little salute of his, and a slow nod. Had he never thought of ground-ripping as a tool, before? Or only as some uncanny magical menace? Fawn loved him beyond breath, but there was no doubt his tendency to Lakewalkerish gloom could be awfully exasperating, some days.

  Dag said, “So you see, Whit, if there’s an answer to your trouble, I haven’t found it yet either. As for the bow lessons, though I do enjoy them very much, they were never a game for me, not even when I was a tadpole Hawthorn’s size. They’re earnest training for earnest business.” He blinked and added, “Same as ground-veiling drills, come to think, which we’ve also neglected for the past week. I’ll see you two out on the deck tomorrow morning.” He tilted his head at Barr and Remo, who did not argue.

  Dag went on, “I won’t invite you out to play a game, Whit—and Hod and Hawthorn, and the rest of you—but I will invite you out to continue your training. Because—as you’ve seen—you never know when you’ll need a skill, and more lives than your own may depend on it.”

  “My papa used”—Berry’s breath caught, broke free again—“used to say, Nothing worth doing is fun all the time. But it’s still worth doing all the time.”

  Whit gave her a crooked smile, and nodded.

  The archery lessons commenced by lantern light as soon as the dishes were washed up. Fawn was pleased to see the company’s mood lift, with all the exercise and interplay and stretching of legs running up and down the riverbank, which had been her whole purpose for the proposition in the first place. So that part was all right.

  She was more worried for Dag, as he wrapped himself around her and fell into exhausted slumber that night. They hadn’t made love since before the cave. If Fawn hadn’t watched Dag convalescing after Raintree, she might have feared it meant some dwindling of his affection, but she was clear this was only profound fatigue. Yet this time he hadn’t been physically injured, or blighted, or ground-ripped. He had put out ground reinforcements—and unimaginably more complex healing efforts—till he couldn’t stand up, though, and the tally of the strange ground he’d taken in, directly or as part of unbeguiling, was daunting. Skink, Chicory, Bo, Hawthorn, who knew how many boatmen; most of all, that big wedge of Crane.

  Yet Fawn wasn’t sure but what Crane had done more damage with his poisonous tongue than his dubious ground. He’d sure tried, anyhow. Dag should have paralyzed that part of the renegade, too, she decided. Had Dag’s odd outburst at dinner been some belated response to Crane, or just general accumulation?

  Dag’s ground had to be in the most awful mess just now, come to think. Like a house the day after some big shindig where all the neighbors and kinfolks came, and ate and danced and drank and fought till all hours and your least favorite cousin threw up on the floor. You couldn’t hardly expect to get any work done till you’d cleaned up the place again all tidy, and you couldn’t tackle that till the hangover passed off.

  Upon reflection, Fawn was profoundly thankful that Dag showed no weakness for drink. Patrollers in their cups had to make the most morose drunks in the world.

  She snorted and rolled over, cuddling in tight. Please be well, beloved gloomy man.

  24

  The next day the Fetch floated through yet more of the bleak, treeless, unpeopled country they’d been passing for the last hundred miles. Berry promised there would only be about another day of this, then the banks of the river would grow more interesting than these endless scrubby sand bars: strange new trees, still green in the dead of winter and bearded with moss, mysterious creeper-hung side channels, an abundance of birds. Fawn mainly wondered if they would see any of those scary swamp lizards of Dag’s, and if Bo’s tales about the snakes were true. By noon the air was warm enough to go up on the roof without a jacket or boat cloak, and Fawn joined Berry, Dag, and Whit to keep company and to soak up the pale but valiant sun. With no duty to watch ahead for hazards, she was the first to look behind them.

  “Hey, is that a narrow boat comin’ downstream, or—or not? If it is, that’s the biggest narrow boat I ever did see.”

  Dag swung around. A slim vessel some thirty-five feet long was rapidly overtaking them. Paddles flashed in the hazy winter light, ten to a side; the occupants kept up a song to unite the rhythm of their strokes. Distance muffled the words, but Dag seemed to smile in recognition.

  Barr, whose own watch was coming up soon, came out and stared over the stern rail, a half-eaten apple in his hand. “Isn’t that a Luthlian boat?” he called up excitedly.

  “Yep,” said Dag. “But those aren’t Luthlians paddling, exactly. Those are southern Lakewalkers, heading home from a couple of years of exchange patrol.”

  “How can you tell?” asked Fawn. “Their clothes? Their ages?”

  The big narrow boat was already shooting past them—a quarter-mile off but still in the channel, as the river was a mile wide at this point. Even at that distance Fawn could see the mix of strong, young men and women, laughing and leaning into their work.

  “That, and the enthusiasm. Though if you were outrunning the Luthlian winter, you’d paddle hard, too. That’s twenty or thirty new patrol leaders over there, young veterans. See, there’re areas to the south that haven’t seen a malice emergence in two, three hundred years. But the rule is, you can’t be a patrol leader till you’ve been in on at least one malice kill, preferably more. For obvious reasons.”

  Fawn, who had not only seen but made a malice kill, nodded perfect understanding. Barr, who hadn’t, looked envious.

  “So the southern Lakewalkers export all their best young patrollers up the Gray for a couple of seasons. And hope they get them back.”

  “Do the malices take so many?” asked Berry.

  “No, actually. The biggest causes of losing young patrollers in—or to—Luthlia are accidents and the weather, and marriage. The malices are a long ways down the list. There are those who say the malices aren’t nearly as scary as the Luthlian girls.” Dag grinned briefly.

  “Not you!” said Fawn.

  “I was a much braver man, when I was young.”

  Whit cocked his head, watching the narrow boat pulling out of sight south around a broad curve of the great river. “Hey, Dag—it just occurred to me. I never asked. What was your name up in Luthlia when you were married to Kauneo? Because it wouldn’t have been Dag Redwing Hickory Oleana, then. Dag Something Something Luthlia, right?”

  Barr, about to abandon the back deck again for the kitchen, paused and glanced up over the roof edge, ears plainly pricked.

  Dag cleared his throat, and recited, “Dag Wolverine Leech Luthlia, in point of fact.” He added in hasty clarification, “Leech for Leech Lake, like Hickory Lake.”

  “So Wolverine was Kauneo’s tent-name. And, er…Leech would have been your camp name?”

  “Yep. It’s a pretty well-known camp, up in those parts.”

  Whit scratched his chin. “Y’know, that Dag Bluefield thing is starting to make all kinds of sense, all of a sudden.”

  Fawn ignored him to ask, “Did the lake really have leeches?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Dag. “Big ones—six inches, a foot long. They were actually pretty harmless to frolic with. Kept you alert while swimming, though.”

  He grinned to watch her wrinkle her nose and go Eew! Which made her wonder if that had actually been the aim of his anecdote.

  Six more days brought them to Graymouth.

  But not, Fawn discovered to her disappoi
ntment, to the sea; the town lay not on the shore but ten miles inland. Downstream from the bluffs on which the town stood, the river split into several channels that ran out into a broad, marshy delta. The town itself was divided into two portions, Uptown along the bluff, Downtown—sometimes called Drowntown—along the riverbank. Fawn supposed she could think of them as the two lips of the Graymouth, and smiled at the notion.

  Uptown, as near as Fawn could tell from this waterside vantage, was built of substantial houses and goods-sheds and pleasant inns; Downtown, of cheap temporary shacks, rough boatmen’s taverns, rickety sheds, and camps. The shore was lined with much the same sort of businesses as Silver Shoals, if not so many of them, plus long rows and double rows of flatboats—some for sale, some being used as floating shacks—and keelboats. On the southern end, the boats were of a very different shape and had tall masts sticking up; fishing boats and coasting vessels that actually dared thread the delta and put out to sea.

  Downtown boasted a lively day market and trade of all sorts. Keelers looking to hire on upstream crewmen propositioned Whit and Hod within a short time of the Fetch tying to the bank, and another fellow tried to buy Copperhead right off the deck. Copperhead—rested, refreshed, and rowdy after his long boat ride—showed off by trying to kick out the pen slats. Dag rescued Berry’s boat and the innocent bystanders by saddling the beast and taking him out for a hard gallop.

  Whit and Hawthorn took off down the row of boats; Fawn snagged Berry to guide her to the market to find fresh new food for supper. Barr and Remo followed them, trying to look tall and grim, like guardsmen of some sort. Fawn thought if it weren’t for the sheer embarrassment of it, they’d be clinging to each other like youngsters lost in the woods, surrounded by all these strange farmers. They stuck tight to her, anyhow, staring around warily.

  “It’s not as big as Silver Shoals,” Remo muttered.

  “Couldn’t prove it by me,” Barr muttered back.

  Who’s protecting who? Fawn didn’t say aloud. Tact was a fine thing.