“I know what I’m seeing, thank you kindly. It ain’t the first time, neither.”
“I’ve scarcely known the girl a day!”
“Oh, aye? What’ll it be after a week, then? The woods’ll catch fire, I guess.” She snorted derision. “All I know is, in the long haul, when folks tangle hearts with your folks, they end up dead. Or wishing they was.”
Dag unclenched his jaw, and gave her a short nod. “Ma’am… in the long haul, all folks end up dead. Or wishing they were.”
She just shook her head, lips twisting.
“Good night!” He touched his hand to his temple and went to haul the tick, stuffed into the next room, out onto the porch. If Little Spark was able to travel at all tomorrow, he decided, they would leave this place as soon as might be.
Chapter 8
To Dag’s discontent, no patrollers emerged from the woods that night, either before or after the rain drove him inside. He did not see Fawn again till they met over the breakfast trestle. They were both back in their own clothes, dry and only faintly stained; in the shabby blue dress she looked almost well, except for a lingering paleness. A check of the insides of her eyelids, and of her fingernails, showed them not as rosy as he thought they ought to be, and she still grew dizzy if she attempted to stand too suddenly, but his hand on her brow felt no fever, good.
He was pressing her to eat more bread and drink more milk when the boy Tad burst through the kitchen door, wide-eyed and gasping. “Ma! Pa! Uncle Sassa! There’s one of them mud-men in the pasture, worrying the sheep!”
Dag exhaled wearily; the three farm men around the table leaped up in a panic and scattered to find their tool-weapons. Dag loosened his war knife in its belt sheath and stepped out onto the porch. Fawn and the farmwife followed, peering fearfully around him, Petti clutching a formidable kitchen knife.
At the far end of the pasture, a naked man-form had pounced across the back of a bleating sheep, face buried in its woolly neck. The sheep bucked and threw the creature off. The mud-man fell badly, as if its arms were numb and could not properly catch itself. It rose, shook itself, and half loped, half crawled after the intended prey. The rest of the flock, bewildered, trotted a few yards away, then turned to stare.
“Worried?” Dag murmured to the women. “I’d say those sheep are downright appalled. That mud-man must have been made from a dog or a wolf. See, it’s trying to move like one, but nothing works. It can’t use its hands like a man, and it can’t use its jaws like a wolf. It’s trying to tear that silly sheep’s throat out, but all it’s getting is a mouthful of wool. Yech!”
He shook his head in exasperation and pity, stepped off the porch, and strode toward the pasture; behind him, Petti gasped, and Fawn muffled a squeak.
He jogged to the end of the lane, to circle between the mud-man and the woods, then hopped up and swung his legs over the rail fence. He stretched his shoulders and shook out his right arm, trying to work out the soreness and knots, and drew his knife. The morning air was heavy with moisture, gray on the ground, lilac and pale pink rising to turquoise in the sky beyond the tree line. The grass was wet from the rain, beaded droplets glimmering like scattered silver, and the saturated soil squelched under his boots. He weaved around a few sodden cow flops and eased toward the mud-man. Aptly named—the creature was filthy, smeared with dung, hair matted and falling in its eyes, and it whiffed of nascent rot. Its flesh was already starting to lose tone and color, the skin mottled and yellowish. Its lips drew back as it snarled at Dag and froze, undecided between attack and flight.
Jump me, you clumsy suffering nightmare. Spare me the sweat of chasing you down. “Come along,” Dag crooned, crouching a little and bringing his arms in. “End this. I’ll get you out of there, I promise.”
The creature’s hips wriggled as it leaned forward, and Dag braced himself as it sprang. He almost missed his move as it stumbled on the lunge, hands pawing the air, neck twisting and straining in a vain attempt to bring its all-too-human jaw to Dag’s neck. Dag blocked one black-clawed hand with his left arm, spun sideways, and slashed hard.
He jumped back as hot blood spurted from the creature’s neck, trying to save himself more laundry duty. The mud-man managed three steps away, yowling wordlessly, before it fell to the mucky ground. Dag circled in cautiously, but no further mercy cut was required; the mud-man shuddered and grew still, eyes glazed and half-open. A tuft of dirty wool, stuck to its lips, stopped fluttering. Absent gods, this is an ugly cleanup chore. But neatly enough done, this time. He wiped his blade on the grass, making plans to beg a dry rag from the farmwife in a moment.
He stood up and turned to see the farm men, huddled in a terrified knot clutching their tools, staring at him openmouthed. Tad came running from the fence and was caught around the waist by his father as he attempted to approach the corpse. “I told you to stay back!”
“It’s dead, Pa!” Tad wriggled free and gazed up with a glowing face at Dag. “He just walked right up to it and took it down slick as anything!”
Ah. The last mud-men these folk had encountered had still been bound by the will of their maker, intelligent and lethal. Not like this forsaken, sick, confused animal trapped in its awkward body. Dag didn’t feel any overwhelming need to correct the farm men’s misperceptions of his daring. Safer if they remained cautious of the mud-men anyway. His lips curled up in grim amusement, but he said only, “It’s my job. You can have the burying of it, though.” The farm men gathered around the corpse, poking it at tool-handle distance. Dag strolled past them toward the house, not looking back.
Most of the animals had collected in the upper end of the pasture, away from the disturbing intruder. The bay mare raised her head and snuffled at him as he approached. He paused, wiped his knife dry on her warm side, sheathed it, and scratched her poll, which made her flop her ears sideways, droop her lip, and sigh contentedly. The farmwife’s tart suggestion of last night that he take the mare and ride off surfaced in his memory. Tempting idea.
Yes. But not alone.
He climbed the fence, crossed the yard, and made his way up onto the porch. Fawn gazed up at him with nearly as worshipful an expression as Tad, only with keener understanding. The farmwife had her arms crossed, torn between gratitude and glowering.
Dag was suddenly mortally tired of mistrustful strangers. He missed his patrol, for all their irritations. He almost missed the irritations, in their comfortable familiarity.
“Hey, Little Spark. I was going to wait for the wagon and take you to Glassforge lying flat, but I got to thinking. We might double up and ride out the way we came in the other day, and you wouldn’t be jostled around any worse.”
Her face lit. “Better, I should think. That lane would rattle your teeth, in a wagon.”
“Even taking it slowly and carefully, we could reach town in about three hours’ time. If you think it wouldn’t overtire you?”
“Leave now, you mean? I’ll pack my bedroll. It’ll only take a moment!” She twirled about.
“Put my arm harness in it, will you? Along with the other things.” Arm harness, knife pouch, and the linen bag of shattered bone and dreams—everything else that he’d arrived in, he was wearing; everything he’d borrowed was put back.
She paused, lips pursing as if following the same inventory, then nodded vigorously. “Right.”
“Don’t bounce. Don’t scamper, either. Gently!” he called after her. The kitchen door shut on her trailing laugh.
He turned to find Petti giving him a measuring look. He raised his brows back at her.
She shrugged, and said on a sigh, “Not my business, I suppose.”
He bit back rude agreement, converting the impulse to a more polite nod, and turned to collect the mare.
By the time he’d reaffixed the rope to the halter for reins and led the horse to the porch, murmuring promises of grain and a nice stall in Glassforge into the fuzzy flicking ears, Fawn was back out, breathless, with her bedroll slung over her shoulder, pelting Petti with
good-byes and thank-yous. The honest warmth of them drew an answering smile from the farmwife seemingly despite herself.
“You be a lot more careful of yourself, now, girl,” Petti admonished.
“Dag will look after me,” Fawn assured her cheerily.
“Oh, aye.” Petti sighed, after a momentary pause, and Dag wondered what comment she’d just bit back. “That’s plain.”
From the mounting block of the porch, Dag slid readily aboard the mare’s bare back. Happily, the horse had wide-sprung ribs and no bony back ridge, and so was as comfortable to sit as a cushion; he needed to beg neither saddle nor pads from the farm. He stiffened his right ankle to make a stirrup of his foot for Fawn, and she scrambled up and sat across his lap as before. Wriggling into place, she smoothed her skirts and slipped her right arm around him. A little to his surprise, Petti shuffled forward and thrust a wrapped packet into Fawn’s hands.
“It’s only bread and jam. But it’ll keep you on the road.”
Dag touched his temple. “Thank you, ma’am. For everything.” His hand found the rope reins again.
She nodded stiffly. “You, too.” And, after a moment, “You just think about what I said, patroller. Or just think, anyways.”
This seemed to call for either no answer at all, or a long defensive argument; Dag prudently chose the first, helped Fawn tuck the packet in her bedroll, nodded again, and turned the horse away. He extended his groundsense to its limit in one last check, but nothing resembling an aggravated patroller beating through the bushes stirred for a mile in any direction, nor more distraught dying mud-men either.
The bay mare’s hooves scythed through the wiry chicory, its blossoms looking like bits of blue sky fallen and scattered along the ruts, and the nodding daisies. The farm men were dragging the mud-man’s corpse into the woods as they rode down the fence line. They all waved, and Sassa trotted over to the end of the lane in time to say, “Off to Glassforge already? I’ll be going in soon. If you see any of our folks, tell them we’re all right! See you in town?”
“Sure!” said Fawn, and “Maybe,” said Dag. He added, “If any of my people turn up here, would you tell them we’re all right and that I’ll meet them in town too?”
“ ‘Course!” Sassa promised cheerily.
And then the track curved into the woods, and the farm and all its folk fell out of sight behind. Dag breathed relief as the quiet of the humid summer morning closed in, broken only by the gentle thump of the mare’s hooves, the liquid trill of a red-crest, and the rain-refreshed gurgle of the creek that the road followed. A striped ground squirrel flickered across the track ahead of them, disappearing with a faint rustle into the weeds.
Fawn cuddled down, her head resting on his chest, and allowed herself to be rocked along, not speaking for a while. Ambushed again by the deep fatigue of her blood loss after the dawn’s spate of excitement, Dag judged; like other injured younglings he’d known, she seemed likely to overestimate her capacity, swinging between imprudent activity and collapse. He hoped her recovery would be as swift. She made a warm and comfortable burden, balanced on his lap. The mare’s walk was certainly smoother than a wagon would have been in these muddy ruts, and he had no intention of jostling either of them with a trot. A few mosquitoes whined around them in the damp shade, and he gently bumped them away from her fair skin with a flick of his ground against theirs.
The scent of her skin and hair, the moving curve of her breasts as she breathed, and the pressure of her thighs on his stimulated him, but not nearly so much as the light, the contentment, and the flattering sense of safety swirling through her complex ground. She was not herself aroused, but her air of openness, of sheer physical acceptance of his presence, made him unreasonably happy in turn, like a man warmed by a fire. The deep red note of her inmost injury still lurked underneath, and the violet shadings of her bruises clouded her ground as they did her flesh, but the sharp-edged glints of pain were much reduced.
She could not sense his ground in turn; she was unaware of his lingering inspection. A Lakewalker woman would have felt his keen regard, seeing just as deeply into him if he did not close himself off and keep closed, trading blindness for privacy. Feeling guiltily perverse, he indulged his inner senses upon Fawn without excuse of need—or fear of self-revelation.
It was a little like watching water lilies; rather more like smelling a dinner he was not allowed to eat. Was it possible to be starved for so long as to forget the taste of food, for the pangs of hunger to burn out like ash? It seemed so. But both the pleasure and the pain were his heart’s secret, here. He was put in mind, suddenly, of the soil at the edge of a recovering blight; the weedy bedraggled look of it, unlovely yet hopeful. Blight was a numb gray thing, without sensation. Did the return of green life hurt? Odd thought.
She stirred, opening her eyes to stare into the shadows of the woods, here mostly beech, elm, and red oak, with an occasional towering Cottonwood, or, in more open areas around the stream, stubby dogwood or redbud, long past their blooming. Splashes of the climbing sun spangled the leaves of the upper branches, sparking off lingering water drops.
“How will you find your patrol in Glassforge?” she asked.
“There’s this hotel patrols stay at—we make it our headquarters when we’re in this area. Nice change from sleeping on the ground. It’ll also be our medicine tent. I’m pretty sure that more patrollers than my partner Saun took blows when we jumped those bandits the other night, so that’s where they’ll be holed up. They’re used to our ways, there.”
“Will you be there long?”
“Not sure. Chato’s patrol was on their way south over the Grace River to trade for horses when they got waylaid by this trouble, and my patrol was riding a pattern up northeast, when we broke off to come here. Depends on the injured, I suspect.”
She said thoughtfully, “Lakewalkers don’t run the hotel, do they? It’s Glassforge folks, right?”
“Right.”
“What all jobs do they do in a hotel?”
He raised his brows. “Chambermaid, cook, scullion, horse boy, handyman, laundress… lots of things.”
“I could do some of that. Maybe I could get work there.”
Dag tensed. “Did Petti tell you about her cousin?”
“Cousin?” She peered up at him without guile.
Evidently not. “No—never mind. The couple that run the place have owned it for years; it’s built on the site of an old inn, I think, which was his father’s before. Mari would know. It’s brick, three floors high, very fine. They burn brick as well as glass in Glassforge, you know.”
She nodded. “I saw some houses in Lumpton Market once, they say were built from Glassforge brick. Must have been quite a job hauling it.”
He shifted a little beneath her. “In any case, there’ll be no work for you till you stop fainting when you jump up. Some days yet, I expect. If you eat up and rest.”
“I suppose,” she said doubtfully. “But I don’t have much money.”
“My patrol will put you up,” he said firmly. “We owe you for a malice, remember.” We owe you for your sacrifice.
“Yes, all right, but I need to look ahead, now I’m on my own. I’m glad I met all those Horsefords. Nice folks. Maybe they’ll introduce me around, help get me a start.”
Would she not go home? Neither the picture of her dragging back to the realm of Stupid Sunny nor the notion of her as a Glassforge chambermaid pleased him much. “Best see what Mari has to say about that knife, before making plans.”
“Mm.” Her eyes darkened, and she huddled down again.
The peace of the woodland descended again, easing Dag’s spirit. The light and air and solitude, the placid mare moving warmly beneath him, and Fawn curled against him with her ground slowly releasing its accumulation of anguish, put him wholly in a present that required nothing more of him, nor he of it. Released, for a moment, from an endless chain of duty and task, tautly pulling him into a weary future not chosen, merely accepted. r />
“How’re you doing?” he murmured into Fawn’s hair. “Pain?”
“No worse than when I was sitting up at breakfast, anyhow. Better than last night. This is all right.”
“Good.”
“Dag…” She hesitated.
“Mm?”
“What do Lakewalker women do who get in a fix like mine?”
The question baffled him. “Which fix?”
She gave a small snort. “I suppose I have been collecting troubles, lately. A baby and no husband was the one I was thinking of. Grass widowhood.”
He could sense the grating of grief and guilt through her with that reminder. “It doesn’t exactly work like that, for us.”
She frowned. “Are young Lakewalkers all really, really… um… virtuous?”
He laughed softly. “No, if by virtuous you just mean keeping their trousers buttoned. Other virtues are more in demand. But young is young, farmer or Lakewalker. Pretty much everyone goes through an awkward period of fumbling around finding things out.”
“You said a woman invites a man to her tent.”
“If he’s a lucky man.”
“Then how do…” She trailed off in confusion.
He finally figured out what she was asking. “Oh. It’s our grounds, again. The time of the month when a woman can conceive shows as a beautiful pattern in her ground. If the time and place are wrong for a child, she and her man just pleasure each other in ways that don’t lead to children.”
Fawn’s silence following this extended for a quite a long time. Then she said, “What?”
“Which what?”
“How do people… people can do that? How?”
Dag swallowed uneasily. How much could this girl not know? By the evidence so far, quite a lot, he reflected ruefully. How far back did he need to begin?
“Well—hands, for one.”
“Hands?”
“Touching each other, till they trade release. Tongues and mouths and other things, too.”
She blinked. “Release?”
“Touch each other as you’d touch yourself, only with a better angle and company and, well, just better all around. Less… lonely.”