He restoppered his bottle.
“Shouldn’t you use that too?” she asked.
“Oh. Yeah.” Cursorily, he turned the cloth again and swiped it over his face. He missed about half the marks.
“Why did you call me Little Spark?”
“When you were hiding above me in that apple tree yesterday, that’s how I thought of you.”
“I didn’t think you could see me. You never looked up!”
“You didn’t act as though to wanted to be seen. It only seemed polite.” He added, “I thought that pretty farm was your home.”
“It was pretty, wasn’t it? But I only stopped there for water. I was walking to Glassforge.”
“From Lumpton?”
And points north. “Yes.”
He, at least, did not say anything about, It’s a long way for such short legs. He did say, inevitably, “Family there?”
She almost said yes, then realized he might possibly intend to take her there, which could prove awkward. “No. I was going there to look for work.” She straightened her spine. “I’m a grass widow.”
A slow blink; his face went blank for a rather long moment. He finally said, in an oddly cautious tone, “Pardon, missus… but do you know what grass widow means?”
“A new widow,” she replied promptly, then hesitated. “There was a woman came up from Glassforge to our village, once. She took in sewing and made cord and netting. She had the most beautiful little boy. My uncles called her a grass widow.” Another too-quiet pause. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
He scratched his rat’s nest of dark hair. “Well… yes and no. It’s a farmer term for a woman pregnant or with a child in tow with no husband in sight anywhere. It’s more polite than, um, less polite terms. But it’s not altogether kind.”
Fawn flushed.
He said even more apologetically, “I didn’t mean to embarrass you. It just seemed I ought to check.”
She swallowed. “Thank you.” It seems I told the truth despite myself, then.
“And your little girl?” he said.
“What?” said Fawn sharply.
He motioned at her. “The one you bear now.”
Flat panic stopped her breath. I don’t show! How can he know? And how could he know, in any case, if the fruit of that really, really ill-considered and now deeply regretted frantic fumble with Sunny Sawman at his sister’s spring wedding party was going to be a boy or a girl, anyhow?
He seemed to realize he’d made some mistake, but to be uncertain what it was. His gesture wavered, turning to open-handed earnestness. “It was what attracted the mud-man. Your present state. It was almost certainly why they grabbed you. If the other assault seemed an afterthought, it likely was.”
“How can you—what—why?”
His lips parted for a moment, then, visibly, he changed whatever he’d been about to say to: “Nothing’s going to happen to you now.” He packed up his cloths. Anyone else might have tied the corners together, but he whipped a bit of cord around them that he somehow managed to wind into a pull-knot one-handed.
He put his right hand on the log and shoved himself to his feet. “I either need to put that body up a tree or pile some rocks on it, so the scavengers don’t get to it before someone can pick it up. He might have people.” He looked around vaguely. “Then decide what to do with you.”
“Put me back on the road. Or just point me to it. I can find it.”
He shook his head. “Those might not be the only fugitives. Not all the bandits might have been in the camp we took, or they might have had more than one hideout. And the malice is still out there, unless my patrol has got ahead of me, which I don’t think is possible. My people were combing the hills to the south of Glassforge, and now I think the lair’s northeast. This is no good time or place for you, especially, to be wandering about on your own.” He bit his lip and went on almost as if talking to himself, “Body can wait. Got to put you somewhere safe. Pick up the track again, find the lair, get back to my patrol quick as I can. Absent gods, I’m tired. Mistake to sit down. Can you ride behind me, do you think?”
She almost missed the question in his mumble. I’m tired too. “On your horse? Yes, but—”
“Good.”
He went to his mount and caught up the reins, but instead of coming back to her, led it to the creek. She trailed along again, partly curious, partly not wanting to let him out of her sight.
He evidently decided a tree would be faster for stowing his prey. He tossed a rope up over the crotch of a big sycamore that overhung the creek, using his horse to haul the body up it. He climbed up to be sure the corpse was securely wedged and to retrieve his rope. He moved so efficiently, Fawn could scarcely spot the extra motions and accommodations he made for his one-handed state.
Dag pressed his tired horse over the last ridge and was rewarded on the other side by finding a double-rutted track bumping along the creek bottom. “Ah, good,” he said aloud. “It’s been a while since I patrolled down this way, but I recall a good-sized farm tucked up at the head of this valley.”
The girl clinging behind his cantle remained too quiet, the same wary silence she’d maintained since he’d discussed her pregnant state. His groundsense, extended to utmost sensitivity in search for hidden threats, was battered by her nearby churning emotions; but the thoughts that drove them remained, as ever, opaque. He had maybe been too indiscreet. Farmers who found out much about Lakewalker groundsense tended to call it the evil eye, or black magic, and accuse patrollers of mind reading, cheating in trade, or worse. It was always trouble.
If he found enough people at this farm, he would leave her in their care, with strong warnings about the half-hunt-half-war presently going on in their hills. If there weren’t enough, he must try to persuade them to light out for Glassforge or some other spot where they might find safety in numbers till this malice was taught mortality. If he knew farmers, they wouldn’t want to go, and he sighed in anticipation of a dreary and thankless argument.
But the mere thought of a pregnant woman of any height or age wandering about in blithe ignorance anywhere near a malice’s lair gave him gruesome horrors. No wonder she’d shone so brightly in his groundsense, with so much life happening in her. Although he suspected Fawn would have been scarcely less vivid even before this conception. But she would attract a malice’s attention the way a fire drew moths.
By the time they’d straightened out the definition of grass widow, he had been fairly sure he had no need to offer her condolences. Farmer bed customs made very little sense, sometimes, unless one believed Mari’s theories about their childbearing being all mixed up with. their pretense of owning land. She had some very tart remarks on farmer women’s lack of control of their own fertility, as well. Generally in conjunction with lectures to young patrollers of both sexes about the need to keep their trousers buttoned while in farmer territory.
Old patrollers, too.
Details of a dead husband had been conspicuously absent in Fawn’s speech. Dag could understand grief robbing someone of words, but grief, too, seemed missing in her. Anger, fear, tense determination, yes. Shock from the recent terrifying attack upon her. Loneliness and homesickness. But not the anguish of a soul ripped in half. Strangely lacking, too, was the profound satisfaction such life-giving usually engendered among Lakewalker women he’d known. Farmers, feh. Dag knew why his own people were all a little crazed, but what excuse did farmers have?
He was roused from his weary brooding as they passed out of the woods and the valley farm came into sight. He was instantly ill at ease. The lack of cows and horses and goats and sheep struck him first, then the broken-down places in the split-rail fence lining the pasture. Then the absence of farm dogs, who should have been barking annoyingly around his horse by now. He stood in his stirrups as they plodded up the lane. House and barn, both built of weathered gray planks, were standing—and standing open—but smoke rose in a thin trickle from the char and ashes of an outbuilding.
“What is it?” asked Fawn, the first words she’d spoken for an hour.
“Trouble, I think.” He added after a moment, “Trouble past.” Nothing human flared in the range of Dag’s perceptions—nor anything non-human either. “The place is completely deserted.”
He pulled up his horse in front of the house, swung his leg over its neck, and jumped down. “Move up. Take the reins,” he told Fawn. “Don’t get down yet.”
She scrambled forward from her perch on his saddlebags, staring around wide-eyed. “What about you?”
“Going to scout around.”
He made a quick pass through the house, a rambling two-story structure with additions built on to additions. The place seemed stripped of small objects of any value. Items too big to carry—beds, clothes chests—were frequently knocked over or split. Every glass window was broken out, senselessly. Dag had an idea how hard those improvements had been to come by, carefully saved for by some hopeful farmwife, packed in straw up from Glassforge over the rutted lanes. The kitchen pantry was stripped of food.
The barn was empty of animals; hay was left, some grain might be gone. Behind the barn on the manure pile, he at last found the bodies of three farm dogs, slashed and hacked about. He eyed the smoldering outbuilding in passing, charred timbers sticking out of the ash like black bones. Someone would need to look through it for other bones, later. He returned to his horse.
Fawn was gazing around warily as she took in the disturbing details. Dag leaned against Copperhead’s warm shoulder and swiped his hand through his hair.
“The place was raided by the bandits—or someone—about three days ago, I judge,” he told her. “No bodies.”
“That’s good—yes?” she said, dark eyes growing unsure at whatever expression was leaking onto his features. He couldn’t think that it was anything but exhaustion.
“Maybe. But if the people had run away, or been run off, news of this should have reached Glassforge by now. My patrol had no such word as of yesterday evening.”
“Where did they all go, then?” she asked.
“Taken, I’m afraid. If this malice is trying to take farmer slaves already, it’s growing fast.”
“What—slaves for what?”
“Not sure the malice even knows, yet. It’s a sort of instinct with malices. It’ll figure it out fast enough, though. I’m running out of time.” He was growing dizzy with fatigue. Was he also growing stupid with fatigue?
He continued, “I’d give almost anything for two hours of sleep right now, except two hours of light. I need to get back to the trail while I still have daylight to see it. I think…” His voice slowed. “I think this place is as safe as any and safer than most. They’ve hit it once, it’s already stripped of everything valuable—they won’t be back too soon. I’m thinking maybe I could leave you here anyway. If anyone comes, you can tell them—no. First, if anyone comes, hide, till you are sure they’re all-right folks. Then come out and tell them Dag has a message for his patrol, he thinks the malice is holed up northeast of town, not south. If patrollers come, do you think you could show them to where the tracks led off? And that boy’s—bandit’s—body,” he added in afterthought.
She squinted at the wooded hills. “I’m not sure I could find my way back to it, the route you took.”
“There’s an easier way. This lane”—he waved at the track they’d ridden up—“goes back to the straight road in about four miles. Turn left, and I think the path your mud-man took east from it is about three miles on.”
“Oh,” she said more eagerly, “I could find that, sure.”
“Good, then.”
She had no fear, blast and blight it. He could change that… So did he want her to be terrified out of her mind, frozen witless? She was already sliding down off the horse, looking pleased to have a task within her capacity.
“What’s so dangerous about the mud-men?” she asked, as he gathered his reins and prepared to mount once more.
He hesitated a long moment. “They’ll eat you,” he said at last. After everything else is all over, that is.
“Oh.”
Subdued and impressed. And, more important, believing him. Well, it hadn’t been a lie. Maybe it would make her just cautious enough. He found his stirrup and pushed up, trying not to dwell on the contrast between this hard saddle and a feather bed. There had been one unslashed feather mattress left inside the farmhouse. He’d noticed it particularly, while shoving aside a little fantasy about falling into it face-first. He swung his horse around.
“Dag… ?”
He turned at once to look over his shoulder. Big brown eyes stared up at him from a face like a bruised flower.
“Don’t let them eat you, either.”
Involuntarily, his lips turned up; she smiled brightly back through her darkening contusions. It gave him an odd feeling in his stomach, which he prudently did not attempt to name. Heartened despite all, he raised his carved hand in salute and cantered back down the lane.
Feeling bereft, Fawn watched the patroller vanish into the tunnel of trees at the edge of the fields. The silence of this homestead, stripped of animals and people, was eerie and oppressive, once she noticed it. She squinted upward. The sun had not even topped the arch of the sky for noon. It seemed years since dawn.
She sighed and ventured into the house. She walked all around it, footsteps echoing, feeling as though she intruded on some stranger’s grief. The senseless mess the raiders had left in their wake seemed overwhelming, taken in all at once. She came back to the kitchen and stood there shivering a little. Well, if the house was too much, what about one room? I could fix one room, yes.
She braced herself and started by turning back upright anything that would still stand, shelf and table and a couple of chairs. What was broken beyond mending she hauled outside, starting a pile at one end of the porch. Then she swept the floor clear of broken plates and glass and spilled flour and drying food. She swept the porch too, while she was at it.
Beneath a worn old rag rug, ignored by the invaders, she found a trapdoor with a rope handle. She shook the rug over the porch rail, returned, and stared worriedly at the trap. I don’t think Dag saw this.
She bit her lip, then took a bucket with a broken handle outside and collected a few live coals from the still-smoldering whatever-it-had-been, and started a little fire in the kitchen hearth. From it, she lit a candle stub found in the back of a drawer. She pulled up the trapdoor by its rope, wincing at the groaning of its hinges, swallowed, and stared at the ladder into the dark hole. Could there be anyone still hiding down there? Big spiders?… Bodies? She took a deep breath and descended.
When she turned and held up the candle, her lips parted in astonishment. The cellar was lined with shelves, and on them, untouched, were row upon row of glass jars, many sealed with hot rock wax and covered with cloth bound with twine. Food storage for a farm full of hungry people. A year of labor lined up—Fawn knew exactly how much work, too, as preserving boiled foodstuffs under wax seals had been one of her most satisfying tasks back home. None of the jars were labeled, but her eye had no trouble picking out and identifying the contents. Fruit preserves. Vinegar pickles. Corn relish. Stew meat. A barrel in the corner proved to hold several sacks of flour. Another held last year’s apples packed in straw, terribly wrinkly and by now only suitable for cooking, but not rotted. She was stirred to enthusiasm, and action.
Most of the jars were big, meant for a crowd, but she found three smaller ones, of dark purple fruit, corn relish, and what she trusted was stew meat, and hauled them up into the light. A kerchief full of flour, as well. A single iron pan, which she found kicked into a corner under a fallen shelf, was all that was left of the tools of this workplace, but with a little ingenuity she soon had flatbread cooking in it over her fire. The jar of meat proved to be, probably, pork cooked to flinders with onions and herbs, which she heated up after she’d freed the pan of her bread circles.
She caught up on days of scant rations, th
en, replete, set aside portions made up for Dag when he returned. Clearly, judging from his lady patrol leader and his general build, he was the sort of fellow you had to capture, hog-tie, and make remember to eat. Was he just a goer, or did he live too much inside his own head to notice his body’s needs? And what all else was that head furnished with? He seemed driven. Considering the almost casual physical courage he’d displayed so far, it was unsettling to consider what he might fear that pushed him along so unceasingly. Well, if I were as tall as a tree, maybe I’d be brave too. A skinny tree. Upon consideration, she wrapped the meat and the preserves in rolls of flatbread so that he might eat while riding, because when he came back, it was likely he’d be in a hurry still.
If he came back. He hadn’t actually said. The thought made a disappointed cold spot in her belly. Now you’re being stupid. Stop it. The cure for bad sad thoughts was busyness, right enough, but she was getting dreadfully tired.
In one of the other rooms she found an abandoned sewing basket, also overlooked by the raiders, probably because the mending that topped it looked like rags. They’d entirely missed the valuable tools inside, sharp scissors and good thimbles and a collection of fine iron needles. Were the blight bogle’s—malice’s—mud-men all men then? Did it make any mud-women? It seemed not.
She decided she would sew up some of the slashed feather ticks in payment for the food, so it wouldn’t feel so stolen. Sewing was not her best skill, but straight seams would be simple enough, and it would put an end to the messy, desolate feather wrack drifting about the place. She hauled the ticks out onto the porch, for the light, and so she could watch down the lane for a tall—for whoever. Needle and thread and fine repetitive work made a soothing rhythm under her hands. In the quiet, her mind circled back to this morning’s terror. Dwelling on it started to make her feel sick and shaky again. As an alternative, she wrenched her thoughts to Lakewalkers.