Arkady was less impressed. “It’s rather crude. The range is short, and the firing rate is slow. A Lakewalker bow maker could craft a much finer one.”
Dag pursed his lips. “A lovely unbreakable longbow, yes—in about two weeks, plus a week to recover. But I’ve seen those Tripoint artisans’ shops. Once they were set up for it, they could likely turn out one of those crossbows in a day. More than one, if they organized their hands.”
Arkady sniffed. “Quick and cheap.”
“Yeah, but if they can turn out twenty to our one, it wouldn’t matter if a few broke or didn’t work quite square. They could just swap out, and still be miles ahead. And that’s no poor instrument as it stands—it’s as good a working as my cuff bow, which has held up for years with just minor repairs.” Dag considered his specially adapted bow, crafted to bolt into his wrist cuff in place of his hook, which had turned him into a tolerable archer again after his maiming. And his Tripoint-made arm harness generally, which had gifted him back his life as a patroller.
He dug in his pocket, found a copper cray, and handed the coin to Arkady. “Look closely at this.”
Arkady, mystified, accepted it.
“If you found this somewhere, not knowing what it was, how would you judge the metalwork? ”
“Well . . . the raised image of the crayfish is actually quite fine. And the lettering, of course, so tiny, but clear to read”—Arkady squinted—“Silver Shoals City Mint, One Cray. And making things perfectly round is harder than it looks, I suppose.”
“Aye. Yet when we all visited the mint at Silver Shoals, back when we were coming downriver on the Fetch, we saw the machine that stamps these out a hundred at a time. One of these disks is a little work of art.
Tens of thousands of ’em . . . become farmer magic.”
Arkady raised his brows; Dag plowed on. “They’re counters, memories of trade and labor that a man can put in his pocket and carry across a continent. They make things move. With my groundsense, I can summon my horse from a mile away. With enough of these, the folks at Silver Shoals can summon a forty-mule tea caravan from eight hundred miles away. And the ground density and complexity of a big river city like Silver Shoals is a making in its own right.”
“You see a farmer town as a making? ” said Barr, his forehead wrinkling at this new thought.
“I do.”
“What about a Lakewalker camp, then? ”
“That, too, of course.”
Arkady made to hand the coin back; Dag grinned and said, “Keep it. There’s plenty more where that came from.” He paused a moment to contemplate the ratcheting, thwack, and laughter of the crossbow practice, and his smile faded. “Now imagine a city like Silver Shoals or Tripoint turning out those crossbows the way they turn out coins, and putting them into the hands of thousands of farmer boys like ours over there. And now imagine a city like that, and all those boys and all their bows falling into the grip of a malice. Blight, you don’t even have to imagine. I saw the Raintree Lakewalkers last summer put on the run by a bunch of farmers even less well organized and equipped than that. The Raintree malice was wasting its farmer troops right and left from not knowing how to handle ’em yet, but it would have learned better, if we’d given it more time.”
Sumac leaned forward on the fence to tilt her face at him, eyes cool and shrewd. “Huh. So there was more of a bee up your butt when you left Hickory Lake than just the way the Tent Redwing treated your farmer bride, wasn’t there, Uncle Dag? ”
Arkady winced at the crude but vivid turn of phrase, but by the tightening of his mouth, it was plain that he followed the argument.
“I wouldn’t have learned that from Papa,” Sumac went on. “He made out you were just besotted. I think Fairbolt gave me a hint there was more to it. And so did Mari.”
“Fairbolt and I talked about the wider problems, just before I left,” said Dag. “He understood. The shape of the world is shifting under us, and we can’t go on standing still and not fall. Finding our new footing won’t be a task for one man to finish, but it’s surely a task one man can start.” He took a breath. “I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing, but I do know I’m walking in the right direction.”
Rase hadn’t said a word, but he was listening. At least that.
———
Spring peepers, the noisiest frog per half inch that Dag knew of, had taken up their earsplitting chorus in the farm’s woodlot and pond when he rounded the corner of the barn to make his bedtime patrol. He stopped short when Whit called unexpectedly over the racket, “Wait up, Dag!”
His tent-brother, a lantern swinging from his hand, fell in beside him. Whit cocked his head, listening to the peepers. “Maybe I could stuff cotton in my ears tonight. I’m sure glad I didn’t have to court Berry by squatting with my naked tail in a puddle and screaming for hours till she took pity on me.”
Dag choked on a laugh. “You just had to put that picture in my head, didn’t you? Maybe that’s why the lady peepers pick their mates. To shut them up.”
“That makes a persuasive sort of sense, you know? ”
Dag started forward once more, only to stop again when Whit said, “Dag—does Fawn seem a little peaked to you? Not quite her usual cheerful self? ”
Concerned, Dag turned to face him. “Does she seem so to you? Seeing her every day, I might not notice subtler changes. And of course her ground is so bright and busy right now with its making, it tends to overwhelm everything else. I’d thought she was holding up real well, all things considered, but if you think not, maybe I should . . .”
“Huh? ” said Whit. “Making? ”
“Didn’t she tell you yet? ”
“Tell me what? ”
Well . . . Dag supposed he had an equal right to this announcement.
“We’re expecting a child”—would it be coaxing lumps from fate to say our first child?—“in the early winter. Fawn says she’s hoping it’ll be around my birthday, though I think that might be a bit early.”
Whit stepped back a pace, eyes and mouth both wide, before he laughed in astonishment. “Hey! I’ll be an uncle! And Berry will be an aunt! How about that? Oh, I can’t wait to tell them at home.” His black brows drew in. “Wait a minute. What of all those tricks you were telling me about, before Berry and I got married, for delaying things? ”
Dag hoped Whit couldn’t see the heat in his cheeks in this dimness.
“Well. Nobody said they were perfect tricks. Accidents happen even to Lakewalkers, you know.”
“I guess!”
“I was, um . . . distracted.”
Whit, blight him, sniggered. Dag ignored him with what dignity he could muster and trod off once more, Whit tagging after.
“Well, if she’s increasing, that accounts for it,” said Whit, sounding satisfied to have his mystery solved. “Short-tempered, too, I bet, heh.”
“Not noticeably,” Dag growled.
They walked on in silence for a few moments after that.
An accident? Or accidentally on purpose? Dag hoped his own mind wasn’t playing tricks on him to that extent. What threat had New Moon Cutoff offered him, after all, to make him want to claim his wife so irrevocably at just that moment? A threat of ease? He had to admit, the offer of a life like Arkady’s gentle, protected usefulness was a real temptation, as much for the usefulness as for the protection. But not there, not in the south.
Dag counted time in his head. All those weeks and miles gone by already, and the tiny fire within Fawn’s womb had not faded or faltered, but had clung with dogged, Spark-like determination. Maybe it’ll be a girl, he allowed himself to think. Strong like her mama. Maybe it was finally safe to let himself start thinking of that new spark as a real person, original and astonishing. Maybe. Oh, my heart. It almost hurt to have it stretched so far beyond its former—safe, secret, shriveled—boundaries.
Yet by whatever chance they had arrived, he was not sorry to be on this road.
———
Five day
s later, Dag was rethinking that belief.
It hadn’t been wrong, merely much too simpleminded. This was nothing like the northward leg he’d pictured back when he and Fawn had left Hickory Lake—a vision that actually took him some effort to recall—just the two of them, a lingering spring, and plenty of bedroll time together. Yet the whole point of this journey had been to put fresh pictures in their heads, because the old ones hadn’t seemed up to the new tasks they faced. He could hardly complain because his scheme was working to excess.
He turned in his saddle to look back over the cavalcade. Sixteen people and twenty-five animals made nearly a full-size patrol, without a patrol’s training. He wasn’t quite sure how he’d been elected patrol leader. Still, his old system of giving as few orders as possible, because every time you did people would come to expect them, and then badger for them, and then grow too stiff to move without them, seemed to apply here as well.
This disparate clump of folks was blending better than he’d hoped.
The river crew was used to frequent dealings with strangers, which helped ease the less traveled Alligator Hat boys. Sumac accepted the Bluefields as her esteemed uncle’s tent-kin with barely a bump, and Rase wouldn’t dare say boo to her, so that settled him. Arkady kept his own counsel as usual, but Dag knew he was taking it all in.
Berry, Calla, and Fawn had swiftly formed a sisterhood, and it was only now, after watching them pass tasks smoothly from hand to hand, helping one another and laughing together over various female jokes, that Dag realized how painfully isolated Fawn had been at New Moon Cutoff. The medicine tent had tolerated her for Dag’s sake, but not one Lakewalker woman there had truly taken her up to teach her the ways of their inner world. Which led him to a very unexpected contemplation of Sumac as odd woman out in this company, neither farmer woman nor patroller man. Maybe that was why she rode so often beside odd-man Arkady.
But Fawn’s eyes, wide with wonder as the company climbed day by day up into the true mountains, made his every effort worth it. The hillsides tilted up higher and steeper until, she noted with a flatlander’s alarm, the sky had shrunk by half, as if stolen away. Tiny rivulets trickled over cliffs to fall like spun thread into secret crevices lined with pink splashes of mountain laurel. Fern fiddleheads unfurled into delicate fronds around dark and abundant springs. Green, ankle-high umbrella apples sheltered spring beauties and bloodroot, and the white and pink trillium after which Fawn’s mother had been named cascaded in waves down the slopes, all familiar northern wildflowers that made her smile in recognition.
“I finally see why you wouldn’t let us call those hills around Glassforge mountains,” she told Dag.
“There are mountains up in northeast Seagate even bigger than these,” Dag said. “So tall it’s winter on top all year round, and the snow and ice never melt off.”
“You’re pulling my leg!” said Finch.
“Nope. Seen it with my own eyes,” said Dag. “Floating up all white against the blue summer sky, the peaks and ridges like something out of a dream.”
“I wonder if you could make a trade in that ice,” said Whit thoughtfully.
“Pack it down in the summer and sell it to folks.”
“It would be a lot of work, climbing a mountain that high,” said Fawn in doubt. “And ice is heavy. Maybe it could be slid down somehow . . .”
“Actually,” said Dag, “folks in those parts cut ice from their ponds in the winter and store it in cellars packed in straw. It lasts longer than you’d think.”
“That sounds a bit more practical,” said Fawn.
“Huh,” said Whit. “The things you learn travelin’. I might try that at home.”
Once he’d carefully described what they would be up against, Dag let the farmer boys sort themselves out to tackle the first big mountain pass. That dawn, the four pack animals were unloaded and added to the wagon traces, and the wagon’s cargo reduced. Bo was left at the foot of the pass to guard their gear, because he really wasn’t quite as recovered from the belly stab of last fall as he made out, and Hod set to guard Bo. The plan was to make it to the top by midday and down as far as the first good stopping point, then send some of the boys and the unloaded pack animals back to Bo’s camp for the night. The other half of the party would rest up till they arrived next day, then continue the almost equally painstaking descent, using rocks and logs to help brake the wagon’s wheels and prevent a disastrous runaway. After that would be another four days of relatively easy travel up another long, running valley before they had to do the drill again.
Everything went according to plan till they were halfway up the hill at midmorning, and came upon another wagon blocking the road.
Dag, flanked by Indigo, rode around it to encounter a bizarre sight.
The team hitched to it consisted of three mules and a skinny horse, blowing and marbled with wet and dried white sweat; one of the mules, a wheeler, was down on its knees, tangled in the traces. A woman knelt next to it, weeping, a burning brand in her hand.
A rough, weak voice issued from the depths of the wagon’s raised canvas cover: “Light its fool tail on fire! That’ll get it up!”
“Missus, what are you doing to that poor mule? ” cried Indigo in outrage.
She turned up a red, tear-streaked face, crisscrossed by brown hair falling from its topknot in messy strands. She might have been any age between an exhausted twenty and an equally exhausted thirty, her shirt sweat-stained and skirt dirty. “It’s fallen, and it won’t rise and pull.”
“I can see that,” said Indigo. “If you got that rig up this far with just those spavined beasts, it’s likely spent. You’re crazy to try to drag a wagon that size up this road with only two pairs! Our wagon has five pairs and it’s barely making the grade.”
“It’s all we have. One mule died two days back, so we put the horse in. They have to get us up. They’re all we have . . .”
“Who you talkin’ to out there, Vio? ” came the hoarse male voice again. “Don’t you go talking to strangers . . . !” From under the stuffy canvas, a child’s voice began crying.
Dag reluctantly opened his groundsense as the man lurched out to the driver’s box on his knees. His face was fish-belly white, his arms shaking as they propped him up. He peered around suspiciously. In addition to the man, the wagon seemed to hold two children. A half-grown girl, also sick, lay on a pallet. A toddler boy was tied inside by some sort of harness, likely to keep him from falling over the side and under the wheels, and he fretted crossly at the restraint. He’d likely howled before and would howl again, but just at the moment was still working up to the next spate.
The woman’s gaze drifted to Dag. She recoiled. “Grouse, help, there’s a Lakewalker fellow on this road!”
“Where? What—” The man staggered back inside, then crawled out onto the box waving a boar spear. “Keep away, you! You won’t have our bones!”
“Is he crazy?” muttered Indigo.
“Fevered, I think,” said Dag. Not that he couldn’t be crazy as well.
Dag wheeled Copperhead out of range of the wavering spear point, and bellowed back down the road, where Sage’s wagon had halted and the other riders were starting to jam up, “Fawn! Berry! I need you here!”
The two women rode up and dismounted, taking in the scene, and Dag backed off slightly to avoid unnerving the distraught travelers further. Vio burst into ragged sobs at the sight of such friendly female faces. The man slumped to his knees behind the box, bent over the seat, still clutching the spear he could barely lift. Under Fawn’s soothing murmurs and Berry’s crisp questions, it wasn’t long before their tale tumbled out.
The Basswoods were a poor couple with no due-shares from a village south of the Hardboil who had fled their life of drudgery in hopes of the rumored free land in Oleana. Sage and Finch left their animals and walked forward in time to hear most of the sad story. Fawn looked over their rickety rig with a shrewd eye.
“You two are a mite underequipped for homesteading
. It’s good land, mind, but it takes a lot of hard labor for better than a year, usually, before you could expect to live off it. Though I suppose if you could make it to the Grace Valley, you could get day work there and build up your supplies.”
“That’s the life we just left!” said Vio.
Grouse growled from his slump, “Not going back. Not going back to be scorned and made mock of!”
“Well,” said Berry the ex–boat boss, who for all her youthful blond looks didn’t suffer fools gladly, “if you can’t go up and you won’t go back, it looks like you’ll just have to set and starve on this here hillside. Which’ll save you steps, I reckon. But don’t set that silly mule on fire. It can’t tow you up this mountain nohow.”
“It’s best if you turn around now,” said Dag, reluctant to draw attention to his scary Lakewalker self, but feeling the need to voice support of Berry. “Even if you somehow made it to the top here, there are two more passes farther along the Trace that are as bad or worse. You’ll founder.”
“Anyways, you still have to shift your rig to the side so’s others can get by,” said Berry firmly.
Vio’s weeping increased. Inside the wagon the children, Plum and Owlet, heard their mother’s distress and began to cry along.
Dag saw the sympathy in Fawn’s eye, and guessed what was coming.
“Sage,” she said, “we’re bringing half our animals back down for another go anyhow. What if you brought your team back later and hitched it on with theirs? Their animals could have a rest while they waited. Then, with seven pairs to pull, this wagon would go up the hill in jig time.”
Indigo scratched his head. “Actually, if we hung together to the next pass, we could hitch on all our mules to each wagon in turn, and wouldn’t have to do all that shuffling around with the packhorses.”
Vio stopped sniveling and looked up in hope. “Would you? Could we? Oh, please, say yes, Grouse!”