“Do you think that’s why he’s so…I don’t know how to say it—tidy? Maybe turmoil hurts him in his ground.”
He raised his brows at her. “Could be, Spark.”
She cuddled in closer, planting a kiss on his collarbone. His hand tightened on her hip. Before they gave over talking in favor of other sorts of exchange, she said, “So, what should I write to Whit and Berry?”
He sighed uncertainly. “What do you want to do, Spark?”
She went still beneath his warm grip, stemming her first thought before it could leap off her tongue. I want to go home made no sense. The West Blue farmhouse would belong to her eldest brother’s wife, in due course. Dag had been all but banished from Hickory Lake. All the home she had was right here beneath her, a square of blanket on somebody else’s floor. And Dag. It was enough for two.
But not for three.
Or maybe even more; twins ran in Fawn’s family. Two years in this place? It seemed a huge stretch of time to her, though Dag no doubt saw it as a hiccup in his much longer existence. A lot could happen in two years. Births. Deaths. Both.
Her thoughts were spinning too wide and loose to snag sense. She coiled them in. A day, a week, a month, that was all she could plan right now. “I’ve seen the rivers, and it was all good except for that one mile. And I’ve seen the sea. I’d still like to see the Trace in that lingerin’ spring you…”—she caught the word promised before it could escape to wound him—“told me about. Whichever spring that turns out to be.”
He ducked his head, but didn’t speak.
Arkady had said how much time it would take to turn Dag into a real medicine maker. He hadn’t exactly said outright that Dag and his farmer bride were invited to stay here that long. Was that I’d give you two years an observation or an offer?
She drew breath. “I’ll write Whit and Berry that we’re not coming back to the Fetch, anyhow.” That floating home might already be passed to its new owner, their things transferred to the keelboat. “Is it possible to send a letter from here all the way up to Clearcreek?”
Dag pursed his lips, seeming to check his mental map—courier routes and camp locations, likely. “Yes. No guarantee of how quick it’d get there, though.”
Fawn nodded understanding. It was a slow, hard slog to wrestle a keelboat upriver: four months or more from Graymouth to Tripoint, compared to the six or so weeks it took to float down. The overland route on the Tripoint Trace cut off the corner of the river route, many miles shorter, quicker for the horsed or the lightly burdened, but unfriendly to heavy cargo. They could leave New Moon weeks or even months from now and still beat Whit and Berry…home, her thought faltered. Or to Clearcreek, anyhow. Where Whit at least had achieved a real home now, with Berry and Hawthorn. She and Dag would be welcome guests there, Fawn had no doubt. She swallowed. “I’ll tell him if we don’t all meet up back at Clearcreek by strawberry season, to look for another letter.”
Dag nodded again.
It was plain that tonight even he couldn’t answer the question Dag, what will happen to us? She didn’t ask it. She tilted back her head instead, finding his lips for a wordless kiss.
Dag took Fawn along with him to Vayve’s place to work on his new sharing knife, feigning to need her clever fingers even more than he actually did. By the time Vayve had watched Fawn help carve and polish the cured femur, wait in apprehensive but attentive silence while Dag anchored the involution into the bone, and slice his skin with a hot knife to let his blood trickle onto the blade for bonding, the maker had lost her rigidity at having a farmer in her work shack. Another little victory for Fawn’s good nature and bright ground; or, considering how far into the core of Lakewalker secrets this making was, maybe not so little.
It didn’t take Dag as long to recover from the shuddering pain of setting this involution as it had when he’d done Crane’s knife—if not elegant, at least this one was not so anxiously overbuilt. He set Fawn to burning his name and the donor’s into the sides of the bone with an awl heated in a candle flame, then borrowed her birthday walnut back from her skirt pocket to place before Vayve.
Vayve’s lips pursed as she took it up and examined it. “What was this? Practice in setting involutions? It’s far too dense, if so.”
Dag shook his head. “I’d another notion altogether. Hoped you might have some ideas. It’s been in my mind for a while that I’d like to make something for Faw—farmers that would work to protect them from malices like ground veiling does a patroller. Not the same way, mind; I don’t see how farmers could twist their grounds sideways to the world the way we do. It would have to be something else. Something any good maker could produce.”
Vayve looked startled. “You would have Lakewalker makers expend themselves creating these shields for farmers? How could we afford the time?”
“Make and sell them, like other groundworked objects.”
“You know we only sell trivial things. These shields of yours—if they could be made at all—would not be trivial work.”
“So, don’t sell them for a trivial price.” Dag glanced at his knife on the workbench, its plain lines echoing the bone from which it had just emerged, then over at another blank Vayve had in progress, hung on the wall. The carving on that blade was elaborate. Later, it might be decorated with shell inlay or colored stones, the hilt wrapped with patterned leather. Some designs were exclusive to certain tents or camps, proclaiming the knife’s origin to the educated eye; you could always tell southern work at a glance, that way. Great pains and pride went into the makings. In the north, Dag thought, it was mostly just pain. There’s your spare time, Vayve. Don’t you see it?
Fawn put in, “Dag started off with the notion of shielding just me, and only then thought of farmers generally. But I reckon such shields might work to protect Lakewalker youngsters, too. Like the nineteen lost at Bonemarsh. Because it wasn’t only Greenspring hit with that sorrow. Stands to reason.”
Vayve fell suddenly silent.
So did Dag, blinking. Of course. Of course…! The intractable problem of how to persuade Lakewalker makers to be interested in this wild notion of his evaporated with startling suddenness, right before Dag’s eyes. Vayve’s ground roiled with new thought.
Why hadn’t he taken his idea that one step further? Aside from the fact that his head had been stuffed so full of new things these past months it felt like bursting, and he was so dizzy with it all he didn’t know if he was coming or going. Maybe it was for the same reason no Lakewalkers had taken any step—they already had a solution to the problem, or thought they did. A young Lakewalker’s tent-kin or patrol mentors were all intent on teaching ground veiling. Why tackle a problem sideways in chancy experiments that could cost lives when you already had a time-proven system?
Dag took an unsteady breath and went on: “I was thinking that an involution might either be expanded into, or anchor, some sort of slippery shield that a malice couldn’t get a grip on. At least for long enough for the farmer—or youngster—to run away. If an involution can hold a dying ground, why not a living one?”
Vayve’s brows climbed. “But a knife’s involution breaks when it’s brought in contact with a malice.”
Dag ducked his head. “But it doesn’t break from the outside. It breaks from the inside, from the affinity of the dying ground with the malice nearby. It’s a sort of a vibration. I didn’t realize that, for all the twenty-six knives that had passed through my hand to their ends, till I held one that had no affinity with a malice.”
Dag took a long breath, and began the explanation, again, of how his former bonded knife had become charged with the death of Fawn’s unborn child at Glassforge, and the tale of its final fate in Raintree. Vayve asked far more, and more detailed, questions about the events than Arkady had. She proved especially fascinated with his account of the malice’s mud-man magery as seen from the inside.
Dag explained, “I recognized it as an involution of a sort, too, but huge, and so complex—anchored in the array of
groundlocked makers the malice had slaved together. It didn’t just sit there passive like a knife’s involution. It was living off the makers, in a sense. It was the first I realized that magery is an alive thing.
“I’m not sure just where a ground shield would get such aliveness, though. And it couldn’t be working all the time, or it would wear out too quick. I’m thinking it would need to come awake only when challenged, the way a knife only breaks when it actually enters a malice.”
“Well,” said Vayve slowly, “there would be four possible sources of ground in that moment. The involution itself, the person being shielded, the immediate surroundings, or the malice itself.”
Dag frowned. “I don’t see how you could put enough strength into an involution to last more ’n a moment, if it came alive like the magery I saw in Raintree.”
“It would be clever if you could pull it from the malice itself,” mused Vayve. “Like grabbing an attacker’s arm and pulling him off balance.”
“More like grabbing an attacker’s arm and pulling it off,” said Dag, “but no. You don’t want malice ground getting in you or on you. It’s a deadly poison. Blight itself.”
“The surroundings could be anything. No way to anticipate them,” said Vayve. “That leaves the person being shielded.”
“That seems…circular,” said Dag, trying to picture this.
“If the malice’s touch spurred your shield to going,” said Fawn, “how would you rein it in?”
Dag frowned. “I expect it would run down on its own pretty quick.”
“If it was using up a person’s ground to live, wouldn’t that be sort of fatal?”
“Um…” said Dag, scratching the back of his head.
They debated involutions and groundwork for upwards of an hour, till the light falling through the open door of the work shack and Dag’s grumbling stomach reminded him that their dinner basket had likely arrived at Arkady’s place. They had not solved any of the problems, but Dag’s unsettlement felt curiously heartening. Maybe he’d only stepped back or sideways, and not ahead, but at least he hadn’t been dancing alone. Fawn was right. Makers need other makers. Like Dag’s knife-maker brother Dar, Vayve had plainly been doing the same task over and over in the same way for a long time; unlike Dar, her mind hadn’t set solid.
“Come around again if you think of anything else,” she told Dag with a friendly smile as he and Fawn made their way down her porch steps.
He smiled back. “You too.”
The breeze whispered from the south. The slanting sun burned through the damp air with surprising strength. Fawn could just picture the full spring that would come on in not many weeks more, when the fat buds and shy shoots all unfurled. In any case, it was warm enough this afternoon to sit outside on Arkady’s roofless porch overlooking the lake. Seated on the bench pushed up to the plank table, she crouched over her task, her tongue caught between her teeth, tracing with her curved steel cutter around Dag’s new bonded knife laid upon a leather scrap. The southern Lakewalkers made their knife sheaths of elaborate tooled leather, inlaid sometimes with silver or even gold, but this one would be plain, in the northern style. Simple and fierce, like her thoughts. She tried to make it her best work, like holding yourself up stiff and straight in pride before the eyes of an enemy.
Arkady wandered out of the house with a mug of tea in his hand, peered for a moment over her shoulder, then drifted to the porch rail, leaning on it to gaze down over the slope. Thirty paces below, Dag sat cross-legged on the stubby dock, his back to the house, bent over his own task.
“What is he doing down there?” Arkady muttered querulously. “What does he have in those sacks?”
“A bag of nuts,” replied Fawn, not looking up from the cut she was finishing, “and a box of mice. And a glass jar.”
“Mice!”
“He’s not ground-ripping them!” she added hastily as Arkady straightened up. “He promised me he’d be careful about that.” She’d walked down to observe Dag’s progress a short while ago. She’d brought him the nuts and the jar, but made him catch his own mice. There were limits to wifely support. Although the sight of several mice marching out of the nearby woods in a ragged line and jumping into the box under Dag’s direction had been a memory to treasure. “He says he’s about to give up trying to make a shield for the whole body, like that groundworked leather coat he once had that he claimed would turn arrows. The idea sort of worked, but then the mice couldn’t run or breathe.” Forcing a second trip to the woods for more mice, earlier, and silencing Fawn’s doubts about the enterprise. Dag could make lots of little trials quickly this way, work through the mistakes and dead ends. And scale up to, say, her later on. Much later on. “He’s gone back to just trying for ground shielding.”
“Madness,” Arkady muttered.
“If he can make it work,” Fawn pointed out loyally, “it could save thousands of lives.”
“Thousands,” Arkady breathed. “Gods.” He leaned and sipped his tea again, staring down the slope with an unreadable expression.
“When your husband first turned up at my gates,” Arkady continued after a long pause, “I took him for a simple man, if not a simpleton outright. Shabby, grubby, with that northern mumble that sounds like he has a mouth full of pebbles…”
“He’s only so word-stiff when he’s feeling shy and uncertain,” Fawn defended. “He can talk like a stump speaker when the mood gets on him. And he likes being clean as much as the next man”—well, unless the next man was Arkady—“he just doesn’t waste time pining for things he can’t get right then. He’s good at enduring.”
“Indeed,” murmured Arkady. He swallowed more tea. “I’ve spent my whole life in three camps, you know. I’ve traveled between them, but never beyond them.”
Fawn’s brows flew up in surprise. “What, you never rode down to look at the sea? Or Graymouth? And them so close!”
Arkady tilted his free hand back and forth. “My chosen realm runs beneath the skin. It seemed a vast enough hinterland for me.” He stared again down the slope. “Dag, though…walks with a foot in each world. He straddles things. Outside and inside. Patroller and maker. North and south.” He glanced at her. “Lakewalker and farmer. Knife maker and medicine maker, gods. He may be the least simple man I’ve ever met.”
Fawn had no argument with that. She bent her head for another cut, finished it, and said, “It goes with his knack for mending things that are broken, I guess. Bowls. Bones. Hearts. Worlds, maybe. To fix things you first have to walk all around them, see them whole.”
“And this all somehow comes down to sitting on my dock tormenting mice?” Arkady almost ran his hand through his hair. He did clench his nape knot. “What is he doing?” he repeated. Abandoning his mug on the railing, he thumped down the porch steps and strode down the slope. Fawn watched him stand by Dag, speak, wave his arms. Dag’s hand returned a level gesture. When she looked up from her next cut, Arkady was sitting cross-legged too, glowering at the jar into which Dag was lowering a wriggling mouse by its tail. They seemed to be still talking. Debating. But when Dag bent over again in concentration, Arkady did too.
Fawn lined up her pieces and picked up her square-nosed awl to make holes for the stitching to come. She would stain the leather black with walnut juice, she decided, and bleach the binding threads pale in contrast. She glanced at the bone knife she’d helped fashion with her own hands, gods spare her heart. Her mortal foe would go most elegantly garbed in mourning colors, soft as whispers against Dag’s breastbone when he suspended the sheath from the cord around his neck. Her rival’s dark dress would be sewn well, to last for years. Decades. Longer, if Fawn had her wish.
If wishes were horses, we all would ride.
She leaned forward and pressed the first pair of holes through the leather.
9
The Oleana boys returned from patrol in a cold afternoon rain, last gasp of the southern winter. Dag had just put another piece of split wood on the fire that warmed Arkady??
?s main room where they’d all clustered, Dag reading old casebooks, Arkady writing in a new one, Fawn knitting. The partners were heralded by the thump and shuffle of steps on the porch, and Remo’s voice: “Better leave our boots out here, and everything else till it dries. You know how Arkady is about his floors.” A grunt of agreement. A female voice said, “I’ll just stand in the doorway, then.” Fawn set aside her handwork and looked up in happy welcome. Dag straightened and turned his head curiously.
The door swung open and the patrollers entered, stomping and blowing. Remo wore wet socks, toes and heels peeking through the holes, and Barr wore none, his feet pale and cold, joints red where they’d rubbed in his boots. Both had hair plastered to their heads by the rain. Their wet jackets had apparently been hung on the row of pegs outside the door, so shirts and vests were not overly sodden except around their necks, but their trousers were flecked with mire in the pattern made by splashing hooves. Neeta, her boots muddy, stopped on the threshold. She wore a sensible hat with a brim that shed the rain beyond her jacket neck, and bore a laden withy basket.
“Welcome back,” said Dag, puzzled by the dark mood that hung about the partners. Neeta, though equally damp, smiled across at him as cheerfully as a spring flower.
“I won’t come in,” she called from the doorway. “My tent will be expecting me. But the patrol wanted you to have this, Dag.” She hefted the basket.
He raised his brows, going over to take it from her. It seemed to contain a large smoked ham and some glass jars of what might be fruit preserves, wrapped in cloth. “Well…thank the patrol for me,” he said, a little nonplussed.
She grinned back at him, her cheeks flushing pink with the cold. Her silver-blue eyes sparkled like stars in a sunset sky. “It’s the least we can do, sir. There’s this farmer’s market we always stop in at on the last day of patrol, you see, when we’re homeward bound. It’s a bit of a tradition. Well. I’m letting in the cold air, aren’t I.” What from any other girl might have been an embarrassed giggle came out more of a silvery trill. “Enjoy, sir!” She remained staring him keenly up and down for another moment before she withdrew and let the door snick closed behind her.