“Did a little surgical ground-ripping on some mud-bats. That’s how we all ended up here and not as meat in the malice’s lair. Arkady, we’re saved! Someone’s done for the malice!”
“Yes, we saw.” Tavia nodded vigorously. “There are dying mud-bats scattered all over the valley. We passed two on the way here.”
“Where’s Fawn? And the others,” Dag added conscientiously.
Arkady and Tavia looked at each other in a way Dag didn’t much like. Arkady said, “After you three were carried away, we made it to the trees, and the attack broke off. A mud-bat tried to take Barr, too, but it dropped him and shattered his leg. I put it back together as best I could, but there was no moving him far, so Sumac had me, Barr, and Rase hide up in a cave. Of sorts. Sumac decided she’d take everyone else west over the ridge, try to reach Laurel Gap.”
Best patrol procedure, get the children and women out of range of the malice, spread the warning. Or, efficiently, both at once. “Good for her.” Was Fawn safe on her way to the Lakewalker camp, then?
Evidently not, for Arkady added, “After that, Calla had better tell the tale.”
The half-blood girl took a deep breath. “We were partway up the hill last night, trying to cross that saddle, when the mud-bats came back. The malice came with them. It was flying.”
Dag’s belly chilled, but he reminded himself that however appalling this malice’s form, it was dead now.
“It looked sort of like a mud-bat, only bigger and, and…more beautiful, I suppose. Once you’d seen it, you wouldn’t ever mistake it for anything else, not for a second.”
Dag nodded understanding.
“It took our minds. It was the strangest sensation. Like I was calm on top, but screaming underneath.” Her tremors were long gone, in this bright afternoon, but Dag sensed a bone-deep exhaustion left in their wake; a familiar state, after dealing with the terror of a malice.
“It didn’t keep hold of her mind the way it did ours, though,” said Indigo. He, too, was pale with more than the night’s exertions.
Calla scowled in memory. “It was like all these wild ideas kept fading in and out of my thoughts. Arkady thinks I was trying to veil myself.”
“Anyway,” Indigo went on, “the mud-bats chased Sumac and Remo and Neeta off, and Fawn and Whit and Berry got away, too.” He seemed about to say more, but swallowed instead.
“Together?” Dag asked in hope. Was Fawn safe with Sumac?
Indigo shook his head. “They ran opposite ways. We think those walnut shields of yours must have worked.”
“The malice marched the rest of us north up the Trace in the night,” Calla continued, “but I kept falling back. Dragging as much as I dared.”
“I kept trying to make her keep up,” said Indigo. “It seemed like my own idea at the time. It was just…something we had to do. But we got farther and farther behind the others, and then…it was like my mind cleared. Then we turned tail and ran.”
“I hoped we could find Arkady, and that the Lakewalkers would protect us,” said Calla. “I’ve never been so scared. We were searching along the ridge about where I thought Sumac had put him, when Neeta found us instead. She was all by herself. She said the patrollers had veiled themselves and shook off the mud-bats, and hid up in a cranny. Sumac was frantic by then, but finally decided someone still had to warn Laurel Gap Camp. So she took Remo and lit out westward, and left Neeta to hunt for Fawn and try to get her back to Arkady.”
“But Neeta said she couldn’t,” said Indigo. “Find Fawn and Whit and Berry, that is. She said it was a good sign, because if her groundsense couldn’t find them, neither could the malice’s. She hoped they’d have the sense to stay hid.”
Dag ran his hand through his hair, and tried not to scream. “Then what?”
“I came out of the cave to fetch water, and found Neeta and these two blundering around,” said Tavia. “I’d reached Arkady a couple of hours before.”
“Tavia was our first word of your fate,” Arkady told Dag. “It was a relief to know the local patrol was on the hunt, but absent gods, what a mess.”
Tavia went on, “We were trying to decide what was best to do for you, since we didn’t have near enough hands to carry an injured man down this ridge, or any better place to hide him if we did. And then we saw the first dying mud-bat, and then, well, the whole situation was changed.”
“It was plain it was going to be easier to get the medicine maker to the injured than the other way around,” said Arkady. “Or so I thought, before I climbed this benighted mountain. I left Barr with Rase, which I don’t quite like, but they’ve no need to hide themselves now. They should be all right.”
Tavia said eagerly, “Neeta recovered her horse, so she decided she’d ride north and try to find the others, wherever they’d gone after Calla and Indigo got away, and maybe make contact with the local patrollers, get us more help.”
All as good and sensible as it could be, under the difficult circumstances, but where was Fawn? Plainly, no one here knew.
Dag led the party around to their near-cave under the ledge. Arkady knelt down by Pakko, opening his ground to the man’s injury in that keen daunting way of his. “Interesting,” he murmured.
Dag, familiar by now with that particular tone of voice, sincerely hoped his sprained ankle would qualify as boring. He made introductions, which he hoped the glazed-eyed Pakko understood, and went on, “I didn’t think it was good for the break to sit untreated this long, with his muscles in spasms around it like that, but while I’d have been willing to go in after the bone alignment, I wasn’t too sure of those disrupted nerve cords.”
“Right on all counts,” said Arkady. He sat back on his heels and frowned at Dag. “You should be a patient right now, not an assistant, but need drives all. His skin is unbroken, bar some abrasion, and I’d like to keep it that way. That means we do it all by groundsetting techniques. I want you to do the heavy work, go in and carefully realign the two vertebrae, and place ground reinforcements across the fracture lines. Are you ready?”
Now? Dag’s relief having arrived, now he wanted to go search for his wife, blight it! And child. Yet Fawn wasn’t out there alone, he reminded himself. She’d had her kin with her…his thought snaked on, when last seen. Dag eyed the helpless, hurting Pakko, and controlled his frenzy of impatience. Fawn’s phrase, Soonest begun, soonest done, drifted through his head. “Just a moment.” Carefully, he sat on Pakko’s other side, laid his bad leg out, undid his arm harness, and set it aside.
While Dag was pulling body, mind, and ground together, Arkady called, “Tavia, Calla, Indigo, set up camp here. We won’t be moving this patient tonight. It wants six fit fellows, and we’re going to need to fashion a rigid board carrier to tie him to, first.”
Pakko swallowed, and said, “If I’m not going to walk again, sir”—he did not say aloud, but Dag understood, If I’m just going to be lying in a bedroll pissing myself—“I’d rather you found my knife.”
Arkady gave him an enigmatic look. “You’ll have time to make that choice later. Ready, Dag?”
Arkady could scout the lay of his land and choose his tactics as swiftly as Dag, and for the same reason: forty years of experience. Despite his weariness, Dag found himself relaxing into that trusted leadership. He stretched his fingers, real and ghostly; sight and sound dropped away as he sank into the shared hinterland of flowing ground.
It was not healing so much as making ready to heal. Pain moved with hot red violence. Muscles cried. The sculpted bones themselves were cool, solid, reassuring, yet like strange lace down and in, alive with blood both flowing and blocked, bruised and clotted. Arkady handled the much more delicate nerves, like ropes and whips and threads of fire, down and in, down and in…
“Hold up,” Dag murmured, following with a ground-touch; Arkady gasped and broke out of his beginning ground lock. Dag couldn’t have fallen into a lock right now if all their lives had depended on it; his heart was too outwardly drawn, wild to regain the worl
d and all it held. It made him a good anchor, he supposed. What Arkady was doing was complicated, a fiendishly difficult task accomplished with as much grace as any dance, and a strange sort of pleasure to observe just in its own right, apart from any consequences.
“Thanks,” muttered Arkady. “Good job. You can pull out now…”
Dag inhaled, blinked, sat up as their mountainside refuge rushed back into his senses. How much time had gone by? The sun seemed notably lower.
“He passed out a while back,” reported Calla, wiping Pakko’s clammy face with a damp cloth.
“I’m not surprised,” said Dag, and rolled away, pale and shaking. That was good! he thought with elation. Gods, he liked this work. Magery at full stretch. Allowable magery. He crawled to prop his shoulders up against the cool rock wall of the overhang, and let other people do everything else for a few minutes. Tavia brought him water, and a dried strip of ruddy New Moon plunkin.
Surely this discharged his last obligation to fate; as he was Pakko’s good luck, perhaps someone else would be Fawn’s, passing the debt around. Now it was Dag’s turn to pursue his own ends. And no one had better get in his way.
Just as soon as I can stand up.
“Will Pakko walk again?” asked Tavia diffidently.
Dag shook his head. “Too early to say. It’ll be a week before the swelling goes down enough to tell the permanent damage. But he’ll live to see his wife again.”
When Arkady, at length, rolled back and propped his own shoulders, looking much like a wet rag, Dag said, “I need to go look for Fawn.”
“Tomorrow,” said Arkady. “I promise we’ll get you down off this mountain first turn.”
“I can get myself down.”
Arkady made a rude noise. “How, fall? I grant you it would be quick.”
Dag touched his left arm. “Something’s not right.”
Arkady’s gaze flicked, quick and keen; he frowned, but did not argue that particular point. It disturbed Dag that he did not. “I suppose I can’t stop you, short of tying you up.”
“That wouldn’t stop me, either.”
“Absent gods, Dag, if you’ve half the sense of a plunkin, you’ll wait for help.”
I am the help. Dag frowned.
“And falling downhill or not, it would be dark by the time you could get to the wagons,” Arkady added. “I suppose that’s the one known meeting place, at this point. Otherwise you’ll have this whole valley to search.”
“Mm,” said Dag trying to think it through. Everyone here was just as exhausted and short of sleep as he was. Calla was also missing a spouse. Dag would have quashed any half-crippled patroller of his who suggested a jaunt so plunkin-brained. Still…he touched his marriage cord again, rubbing it through the rips in his shirt, but it gave him no further enlightenment. Changed, yes, but what did that mean? Perhaps his and Fawn’s questionable cord weaving was simply running down naturally.
No. This is wrong.
Dag found an unexpected ally in Owlet, who had awakened during the groundsetting session. Flustered by the influx of strangers, the child began crying again for his mama. Dag ruthlessly let him. Tavia quickly handed him off to Calla, who had no better luck calming him. Arkady, returning from washing up in the streamlet, winced at the noise.
“Best to get this child back to his family,” Dag observed over the ruckus. “Before he cries himself sick or takes a tumble down the hill. There’s no need to keep him up here in the cold another night.”
“Who are you volunteering?” said Tavia. “You couldn’t carry him!”
“I could,” said Indigo unexpectedly. “Go with Dag and help look for the Basswoods.” A glance exchanged with Calla added, And Sage and Finch and Ash.
“Huh.” Tavia rubbed a hand over her weary face. “I guess Calla and me between us would be enough help out up here tonight. I mean, with Arkady and all.”
Calla added, bouncing the child to no other effect than to give the wails a waver, “His parents have to be crazy with worry and grief right now. Cruel to leave them that way any longer than needed.”
“Where would you look?” said Arkady, weakening under the onslaught.
“There’s been a tail of smoke coming up from the woods near the Trace all day, ’bout eight, ten miles north, looks like,” said Dag. “I’ve been checking it. Seems like a campfire, and on the route Calla and Indigo said our folks took. If not our people, it’s some people, who might have seen them.”
“And you plan to walk two miles down this hill, cross a river, walk another mile to the road and more miles down it, with a sprained ankle, before dark?” inquired Arkady. “Lugging this little screamer? You’re not heroic, Dag, you’re mad.”
Getting there. For the tenth time today, Dag hobbled to the drop-off and cast his groundsense out to its farthest, thinnest reach.
For the first time today, he received a response: far below, a long, plaintive whinny echoed up the ravine-slashed slopes.
Dag grinned. “Who said anything about walking? Seems my ride’s turned up. If Indigo can get me down this hill as far as I can summon Copperhead up, I’m back in the saddle.”
To Dag’s surprise, his saddle was still on Copperhead’s back, though his saddlebags were gone, scraped off somewhere in the woods. He’d have to spend a day hunting for them, not for the first time in his career. Not to mention his war knife, lost in the clash. Later. Copperhead hadn’t managed to pull off his bridle, and his bit was slimy and crusted with browsing. His mane and tail were full of burs. But in all, the horse was in vastly better shape than his owner.
Bemused, Dag handed back the blanket he’d begged from Indigo, with which he’d planned to pad the gelding’s murderously serrated backbone. “You didn’t unsaddle the horses before turning them loose?”
“The others, sure!” Indigo, indignant, stepped prudently out of range of cow kicks as Dag led his mount to the nearest fallen log. “This one ran off after he dumped you in the fight. We never caught him.”
“Embarrassed, I hope. Eh, old fellow?” Dag scrubbed the chestnut ears; Copperhead snorted green slobber and rubbed to be relieved of his bridle, in vain. He laid his ears back in protest as Dag tightened his girth. But Dag made sure the horse sensed this was no time for tricks. It was an awkward heave to get himself up, but Dag blew out his breath in relief as his haunches settled into their accustomed place once more, and he allowed his throbbing right foot to dangle. He hurt all over, and his vision seemed to pulse in time with the pain in his ankle. Arkady, though also exhausted and still disapproving, had spared him a small ground reinforcement to his sprain before he’d left, muttering, I suppose Sumac’s halfway to Laurel Gap by now, to which Dag had replied, I’ll keep an eye out.
Dag lowered his hook, toward which Owlet reached out grimy hands; swinging from it had been a game they’d invented earlier in the day, which had worked for a while to turn wails to giggles. “Upsy-daisy, little brother.” Indigo boosted him upward, and Dag tucked him in the blanket and disposed him as securely as possible before him in the saddle, left arm wrapping his little chest. Owlet made a noise halfway between fascination and dismay at this elevated view of the world.
Dag glanced out across the river valley, and said to Indigo, “Copperhead will outpace you.”
“I didn’t figure you’d be waiting.” Indigo helped Dag slip his stick under his saddle flap.
“Do you want to follow, or go back up to Arkady’s camp with Calla?”
Indigo shook his head. “I’ll check the wagons, first. They really are the sensible meeting point. If no one’s there yet, I may follow you up the Trace. Or I may just flop down and wait. But north’s your best bet, right enough.”
Dag nodded, and turned Copperhead westward with the pressure of his knees. It was slow work picking through the woods, spitting out spiderwebs, but they found a river crossing that didn’t come up higher than the horse’s belly just as the rim of the sun touched the western ridge. Dag reckoned the luminous mountain twilight would last
till he reached the source of that smoke curl up the road; after that…well, it would depend on what he found. There was a very real possibility that he might be attempting to deliver Owlet to parents ground-ripped and dead in a ditch.
He tried for optimism; it was equally likely that the bat-malice had been mustering farmer troops to meet an attack from the patrollers operating to the north, in which case it would have been conserving its captives, not feeding on them. His optimism faltered with the thought, I hope our folks didn’t run into the patrollers before the malice went down. Although that might well have been how the malice had met its end, because clearly the creature had not been tied to its initial lair. Dag had been on the other side of that scenario, a couple of times, fighting mind-slaved farmers. He didn’t have to imagine the horrors; he could just call up the memories. He jerked up his mazed brain as if it were a balky horse. No. We’re not having that here.
When they reached the road, Dag turned Copperhead north and touched him into his long, rocking lope; of the horse’s many defects, that gait was not one. Owlet squealed with astonishment and glee as his curls ruffled in the wind. At least one of us three is happy. Actually, Copperhead didn’t altogether seem to mind stretching his legs, and Dag let him stretch them a little farther. As a result, Dag came within groundsense range of the smoke camp while the sky was still bright.
Yes! he thought as he touched the first familiar farmer ground. Still half a mile out, he let blowing Copperhead drop to a walk, and began hurriedly counting heads. Bo, Hawthorn, Hod, good. Sage—oh, Calla, everything’s going to be all right for you now. Finch and Ash. The Basswoods, very distressed, but absent-gods-be-thanked Plum was still with them. He’d been especially worried for Plum, a high-ground-density morsel of little use as a soldier. A great many strangers, or near strangers—he was almost sure he recognized some of the tea-caravan muleteers they’d been playing leapfrog with for weeks. He sorted through again. Were those dim smudges Whit and Berry, behind their shields? Surely there was a third? Yes, dimmer still.