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 days 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 pains
taking 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!”
The fevered man mumbled something about Kill us in our beds, which his wife ignored in her fresh concentration on Indigo. “Grouse’ll make better sense when this bog ague spell passes off. One more day, I promise, and he’ll be back on his pins. Oh, please…oh my, so cruel, oh, you shouldn’t ought to have said it if you didn’t mean it…!”
Which was how, that night, they all ended up camped at the top of the pass in a chill fog, instead of lower down in some more pleasant location, and Dag and Arkady were pressed into trying to force bog-ague remedy into a half-delirious man who fought them every step. Grouse’s terror took the form of swearing and abuse, mainly. His wife was helpless in the face of it, but Berry lent a hand, and a voice, that settled him as swiftly as a drunken keeler. Arkady was less taken aback than Dag expected; his prior experience with difficult sick farmers seemed to be wider than he’d quite let on.
Dag walked his perimeter patrol wondering if anybody was going to stumble over a precipice while trying to take a piss tonight, and if Arkady had any headache remedies in his pack. Strong ones…
He paused, arrested by the feel of horses and riders coming up the trail behind them. Honest folks had little reason to dare the Trace after dark, and sensible ones none, here in this mist only made more blurry by the meager light of a half-moon. Bandits preyed on travelers in these unpeopled stretches. He extended his groundsense anxiously.
A very familiar ground bumped his.
Dag strode down the road in time to see three riders loom up out of the milky haze. Remo. And Neeta. And Tavia.
“Absent gods, Dag!” Remo’s aggravated voice echoed weirdly in the damp air. “It’s blighted time we caught up with you!”
16
Dag was able to avoid the confrontation that night only because Arkady was already asleep in his bedroll, but in consequence he and Arkady were cornered by Neeta and her little company at first light the next morning. It would be optimistic to call it sunup; it was more of a brightening fog. Water droplets beaded on blankets, gear, and in everyone’s hair, dank and chill. The crackling flames of the patroller breakfast fire, not quite out of earshot of the farmers’ wagons, seemed wan and pale, much like the people clustered around it. In this orange-and-gray light even Arkady looked unshaved, road-worn, and bleary.
“I thought we’d catch up with you before you’d reached the Barrens,” Neeta explained earnestly. “We might have, too, if only we’d been allowed an earlier start.”
Remo s
aid to Dag, “We wasted the first five days on Antan Bullrush’s attempt to wait you out. I told him Arkady might be bluffing, but you wouldn’t be. When he finally let me ride out to the Bridger farm to check, you were already four days down the road.”
“Yes,” said Neeta, “and then we wasted another two days arguing about it all. It took the camp council to finally overrule the captain. We should have gone after you courier-style, and swapped out the horses along the way, but Antan wouldn’t even authorize that.”
“We had good luck in the road and weather,” said Dag. I pushed us along. He wished he’d had a few more days to push; the farther, the better.
“Anyway,” said Neeta, “you’ve no need now to travel another foot north. We’ve won!”
Arkady squinted curiously. Barr, lurking at his shoulder, frowned.
“I’m pledged to the north, and to my Bluefield tent-kin,” said Dag. “And these farmer youngsters are relying on me to be their guide on this road, which is all new to them. I’ve more or less promised to see them safe to the Grace Valley, leastways.” He gave Arkady a hooded glance. “Naturally, I hope Arkady will ride on with us. I haven’t even begun to show him all the north has to offer. There’s a lot to see and learn, yet.”
Neeta said, “No, sir, you don’t understand! I mean we’ve won you everything. Dag to be let back in camp, and tent-rights despite the farmer girl, and the medicine booth at the farmer’s market! Maker Challa’s actually become very interested in that, since you’ve shown her all about your unbeguilement trick.”
Arkady blinked. So did Dag.
Barr looked around. “I have a better idea. Why don’t you all come north with us? At least for a while. We’re better’n halfway there, and I was told last fall not to come home without you, Remo. I’ve a suspicion nothing about Pearl Riffle Camp will look the same to me, but I’d like to finish up proper, before making a clean start doing…whatever else. You might, too.”