Kisses renewed, on her forehead, cheekbones, chin, mouth at last. This is better. She was still stiff and hurting under her collarbone and in the track of the gouges across her shoulder blade from the mud-bat’s claws, but beneath her shirt, Calla’s plasters seemed to be holding, tugging on her tender skin when she moved. She had still been able to carve…they had…wait, what…?
“Dag! There was this huge bat-malice—it flew—but we got it!” She paused, worked her throat to clear the croak. “Whit got it, would you ever believe? And your shields, they must’ve worked! All those poor mice didn’t die in vain…” Her free hand searched her neck for her hair-and-walnut necklace. Best birthday present ever.
“Yes, yes, and yes, Spark.” A fierce hug with this last, which she didn’t quite like as much as usual, because the weight of it brought back her stifling nightmare—had she been asleep? Knocked unconscious?
“I knew you couldn’t be dead—you looked too mad to die, when those awful flying mud-bats were carryin’ you off upside down and backwards.” At her wriggle, his grip finally loosened enough for her to sit up. “Hey, is this evening? It was morning—did I sleep all day? I don’t feel so good. Was I out cold? Why am I all over dirt? My hair…” Her fingers, feeling among the dirt clumps, encountered a long, sticky, cool object that she withdrew from her curls with difficulty. An earthworm, big ol’ nightcrawler. She flung it from her with a heartfelt Eew! “Did Whit put worms in my hair while I was asleep? I’ll get him…” Her fingers searched her scalp in renewed alarm.
Bo’s voice, broken and maundering as if he’d been drinking again—“Sorry, I’m so sorry…” Amazed murmurs joined with Bo’s mumble, and Fawn looked up from the circle of Dag’s arms to find their tender reunion had an audience, crowding up around them: Bo and Hawthorn and Hod, Ash and Finch and Sage, unfamiliar Trace travelers—no, wait, she thought she recognized some of the tea caravan muleteers, nice fellows, if a bit rough around the edges.
Whit shouldered through the mob, crying, “Buried her? Buried her! What’d you want to go and do a stupid thing like that for?” He knelt and pulled her away from Dag long enough to give her a hard and quite unprecedented brotherly hug. Dag tolerated this briefly, with a weird benign smile, then drew her back.
“Whit,” said Fawn in suspicion, “did you stick that fishin’ worm in my hair? You’d reckon a fellow your age would’ve outgrown such things!”
A muleteer’s voice rose in a quaver. “He raised her! That Lakewalker sorcerer raised her up from the grave!”
“Don’t think about it,” muttered Dag into her now worm-free hair. “Don’t think about it.” As if to protect her from nightmare visions—hers, or his?
Another muleteer, one of the young ones—what was his name? Spruce, that was it—went to one knee on their other side, and held out a hand quivering in entreaty. “Mister, Mister Lakewalker Bluefield, sir…would you raise my brother too? He’s younger’n me, it was his first trip, and I surely do dread taking the word of this back to our mama…oh, please!”
Dag stared back in bewilderment, his face as blank as if someone had hit him over the head with a shovel. Only Fawn felt his flinch as some realization slotted in. “Oh. No, you don’t understand. Absent gods. No one is that good a medicine maker. Fawn was never dead in the first place. You blighted fools buried her alive.” His arms trembled, tightened. “I can’t help your brother. I’m sorry.”
Fawn began to piece it together. She supposed she ought to be horrified, but really, her outrage echoed Whit’s. “You buried me and didn’t even wait for Dag? Bo!”
“We thought for sure he was a goner, too,” Bo said in shaky apology.
“You could tell by my marriage cord he wasn’t! We told you that before!”
“Mebbe one o’ those other Lakewalkers could’ve, but we didn’t have none of them. Nobody thought to ask that girl who rode by, Neeta, she was in such a hurry ’bout that hurt patroller stuck up on the hill.”
Dag gave Bo a sharp glance, but he was distracted by the muleteer pulling on the remains of his sleeve.
“Please, sir, he weren’t but twenty years old, and dead without a mark on him. Just like her…” The muleteer nodded eagerly at Fawn.
Dismay, pity, and horror chased one another across Dag’s face.
“And my friend Bootjack…?” said another muleteer, joining the first down on one knee. Fawn and Dag were suddenly surrounded by a mob of supplicating men. One tried to reach out to touch her, but his hand fell back, daunted by Dag’s renewed clutch and glare.
“You don’t understand,” Dag repeated, and under his breath: “Oh gods, I’ll have to talk.”
Beleaguered, Dag began a halting explanation of ground, malices, the walnut shields, and his hopes for supplying the defense to more farmers than just his Bluefield tent-kin. Someone gathered up the discarded necklaces and placed them in a pile at his knee; at Fawn’s urging, they were passed around the crowd so that the men might grasp with their hands what they did not quite take in through their ears. Some looked very interested, though the close friends and kin of the dead muleteers plainly wanted a different answer, and kept trying to get it through amending their questions. Bo and Whit and the Alligator Hat boys all testified to the parts they’d seen, which seemed to help; between that and Dag’s obvious exhaustion, the press around them eased from dangerous desperation to mere disappointment. One or two stared at Fawn in a lingering alarm that seemed disproportionate to her small, rumpled self.
Her small, rumpled, filthy, triumphant self. She and Whit and Berry deserved the bow-down of all bow-downs, Fawn thought. So when the argument about walnut shields and raising the dead ran down at last, she clambered up, eager to show Dag the remains of their malice.
The cool spring night spun crookedly around her head as she straightened; she groped for Dag’s arm, which he wrapped around her again, dropping his stick to do so. Only then did she discover what Dag had done to his ankle. His bare right foot was twice its normal size, colored a streaked deep purple that would have looked fine on a petunia but was very wrong for human skin. She led him in a mutual stagger over to show off the decaying traces of the wings—Dag made sure to warn everyone not to touch the poisonous blight of the malice’s remains, and no souvenir taking, either. He plainly didn’t even want to camp so close to it, but the deepening dark and everyone’s utter exhaustion looked to keep them all planted in this clearing till morning.
Everyone in Sumac’s party had carried light bedrolls and food with them, for the failed flight to Laurel Gap, and most folks had hung on to them despite their forced malice march. While Dag looked after his horse with the help of Sage, being careful not to let Fawn out of his sight, she nibbled a piece of hardtack till her stomach settled, then was able to get down a couple of strips of dried plunkin. The meal made her cold shakiness pass off. She was reminded of the very first time she had met Dag, with his firm belief in grub as a cure for shock, and smiled a little.
Her bedroll had contained a wedge of soap, and despite the hour she wanted a bath above all things. They borrowed a lantern from one of the muleteers and made their way across the road and around a crook in the creek to a pool of sorts. It was too chilly for lingering; they stripped down and splashed quick, although Fawn soaped up and rinsed her hair twice, holding her breath and shaking her head underwater, to be sure. She fussed over Dag’s ankle, not to mention his impressive new collection of gouges and bruises, and he fussed over her shoulder. They could do no more with their filthy clothes than whack them against a tree trunk and shake them out before skinning damply back into them. It would be better when they got back to the wagons and their gear. Meanwhile, this…helped.
It wasn’t till they were lying down together between two thin blankets on the grass that her mind began to turn over the events of the past day, imagining other, grimmer outcomes. Then she cried, muffled in Dag’s shoulder. Mostly, he just held her, but then, he’d hardly let her out of his arms since…since she’d…been dug up out of
her grave. Which seemed horror enough, till she dwelled on not being dug up. To have come all this way, and survived so much, only to be killed on the last leg, not by bandits or mud-men or malices, but just by an ignorant misunderstanding…
“Shh,” he murmured into her hair, when her shudders renewed.
She swallowed to control her sniffling—was she crying too much?—and managed, “Is the baby all right after all that, can you tell?”
Under her hands she could feel the familiar stillness of his concentration as he went deep with his groundsense. “Yes, seems to be,” he said, coming back up and blinking at her, eyes a mere gleam in the firelight and shadows. “Far as I can tell, leastways. She’s no bigger than your little finger yet, you know. But I’ll have Arkady check when we meet up again, for luck.”
Fawn melted with relief. But—“She? You sure, now?”
“Yep,” he said, and if his voice was tinged with a faint, smug glee, well, that was all right by her. As she shivered again, he said blandly, “We’ll name her Mari.”
His gentle teasing was a deliberate distraction from her grave thoughts, and she was grateful for it. “Hey, shouldn’t you ask me about that?” She cogitated. “What about Nattie?”
“Dirla’s a nice name for a smart strong girl. Or Sumac.”
“Too confusing, if Sumac’s going to be around with Arkady. Maybe for later.”
“Later,” he murmured. “Ah. I like later.”
“No baby animals, that’s for sure. I do sometimes wonder what my parents were thinking.” They’d certainly never pictured her as a grown-up woman—then or later. “Can you imagine a grandmother still named Fawn?”
“With great delight.”
She snickered, and poked him fondly. “Just don’t you ever start saying, Yes, Deer.”
She could feel his smile in her curls, and finally grew warm enough to stop shivering. She wondered when a thin bedroll on plain grass had started to seem such unutterable luxury. As long as Dag is in it with me, and we’re safe. The safety, not the coverlet, was the true source of her comfort, she realized. And the comfort of all the folks with them, too, so nearly lost to one another, sleeping close in blanketed lumps around the fire tonight for more than warmth. She cuddled in harder and, for all her hurts and wobbling thoughts, slept.
23
Dag woke in gray light to the sort of drowned lethargy that generally followed great struggles. Yeah, I’ve been here before. He wasn’t so weary that he didn’t reach out to reassure himself that Fawn was still in their bedroll, warm and asleep under his hand as she should be. His hazy mind shuddered over all the might-have-beens that he’d forbidden her to dwell on last night, and it struck him anew how very little interest he had in saving a world that didn’t have her in it.
Well, and Berry and Whit and the rest of Tent Bluefield. And their friends, and they needed their neighbors, he supposed, and the tangle widened ever outward and he was back to where he’d started. Maybe a fellow didn’t have to love the whole world—Grouse’s voice, raised in complaint about something across the clearing, grated on his ear—maybe just one short heartening person would do. Dag stared up through new beech leaves at the pale blue sky. It would be a clear, warm day once the valley mist burned off.
Fawn stirred and sat up, looking dauntingly perky, all things considered. After supporting his hobble to the woods to take care of the morning necessities, she parked him back on the blanket with his purple foot prominently displayed, which served admirably to fend off any other demands upon him. Was it malingering, when you really couldn’t hardly stand up? He was in any case content to lie low behind this excuse and watch the others deal with the day.
A couple of stray muleteers had arrived in the night, and a few more came with the dawn, with yet more recovered mules in tow. One beast, unfortunately, had another body draped over it. In addition to the muleteers, the camp included a trio of trappers who had been captured by the malice while taking their furs south to Mutton Hash, and another family of five grown siblings and their mama who’d been snatched while heading north for homesteading. They all assembled to pay what brief respects could be devised. The gaping maw in the earth that Fawn had escaped was filled after all, which made her sober all over again.
Dag was glad for the delay when Neeta rode into the clearing, guiding a half patrol from Laurel Gap detailed to bring Pakko down off the ridge. Her shock at finding Fawn afoot was swiftly cloaked by her closing ground. She looked almost more taken aback to find Dag.
“I thought you’d still be up on the mountain with Arkady! I brought extra fellows to help carry you!”
“I came down on my own. Copperhead did the rest.” I’ll deal with you later. He couldn’t do it now, so soon after yesterday; he was too exhausted, and didn’t trust himself. At the very least, he wanted Sumac with him, for all sorts of good reasons including a check on his wits. But the uproar that ensued when the dozen Lakewakers trailing Neeta discovered just who had taken down the fearsome flying malice that had scattered three of their patrols across the upper valley, and how, was sufficient diversion.
Dag hardly had to open his mouth. Twenty-five farmer eyewitnesses plus Fawn, Berry, and Whit were couriers enough to carry the tale. Everyone was led around to marvel at the tattered wings, handle the walnut necklaces, see and touch the pieces of the spent sharing bolt—collected by Berry and preserved in a cloth—and be marched through all the steps of the dawn ambush, Whit brandishing his crossbow and acting it out. Dag, limping after with his stick, had to allow that farmers and Lakewalkers were sure talking to one another now. And, better still, listening.
A field medicine maker traveling with the patrol cornered Dag back on his blanket, intent on the walnut necklaces. While Dag wasn’t quite up to a live demonstration, the young maker did seem to follow his descriptions, and promised to carry them back to her camp medicine and knife makers. She was excited about unbeguilement, too. Dag attempted to show her, and at the same time relieve one of his worries, by having her put a general reinforcement against infection into Fawn’s shoulder, but the maker was so open to the farmer heroine of the hour that she didn’t leave a beguilement for Dag to clear. He considered, grimly, having Neeta work an example, but…no.
“You can pass the word amongst your makers,” he told the young woman. “Anyone who wants to learn how to unbeguile or make these shields can find me and Maker Waterbirch at Berry Bluefield’s place just outside Clearcreek, up on the Grace River. We’ll take all comers. We haven’t quite worked all the kinks out of the groundwork yet, mind…could be a few more folks chewing on the problem is just what it needs.”
In all, it was noon before the Laurel Gap patrollers cantered off again, with many backward glances, and an hour after that till Dag’s own party assembled itself for the long walk back to their wagons. Dag rode Copperhead with Owlet chirping on his lap, Fawn clinging behind, though after a time she climbed down and put Plum up instead, relieving Ash from playing pack pony. It was still light out when their straggling company arrived to find Indigo in calm possession of their abandoned goods, firewood collected and tea water on the boil, with a couple of the mules and his riding horse rounded up already.
Whit led two of the boys and one of the mules off to collect Rase and Barr out of their hidey-hole. Arriving back, they laid out Barr on the blanket next to Dag, where, Dag had to admit, Barr’s busted leg far outshone his bent ankle. The groundwork Arkady had done on the break made Dag whistle.
They’d not finished dinner when the Laurel Gap patrol came in leading their mounts, six men hand-carrying Pakko on a rigid litter, Arkady supervising. Calla ran crying and laughing for Sage and her brother, and they exchanged heartfelt hugs. Tavia strolled after, looking tired. With darkness descending, the patrollers made camp for the night beside the farmers, and there followed much swapping and repeating of tales all round. Arkady made an admirably authoritative lecturer. Dag, thinking about the fad for wash-pan hats and cook-pot helmets along the upper Grace, not to me
ntion his unwanted new reputation for raising the dead, had no illusions about how their story would twist as it spread, but at least it would start straight.
Arkady wanted to keep Pakko under his eye a little longer, so the next day was welcomed as one of rest by the Laurel Gap patrollers, who were exhausted from their own strains. Their breathless tales of the fight at the north end of the valley, with their rising realization that a routine patrol had become an emergency, then a looming disaster, felt all too recognizable to Dag. Calla and Fawn helped Arkady with caring for Pakko, whose fellow patrollers in turn helped the farmers find their scattered animals, so that all the surviving beasts were retrieved by nightfall in fine fettle from their bout of freedom.
The wait proved a benefit, for the next morning, while Arkady, the patrol leader, and the patrol medicine maker were still debating rival merits of a hand versus a horse litter for transporting a spinal fracture, Sumac and Remo arrived. They rode strange horses, and two new patrollers accompanied them.
Sumac and Arkady more or less flung themselves at each other, which raised a few eyebrows from those who’d only seen Arkady in his austere mood. Dag grinned. One of the young patrollers turned out to be Pakko’s son.
“The day after the malice scattered us, me ’n Remo hadn’t made but fifteen miles cross-country,” Sumac explained, “all frantic and footsore. We’d just found the patrol trail over the next ridge west when we ran into reinforcements on their way from Laurel Gap. So getting the word out was already a done deal, which if I’d have known…well. Anyway, we joined up with them and circled back into this valley. When we caught up with the patrols north of here, news was spreading that the malice was brought down, which we could tell from the dying mud-bats we found. Pakko’s son had been in the first relief patrol, and was pretty distraught at the tales of his papa being carried off like you were, Dag. Then the word came, which I guess Neeta brought, that his papa had been found hurt. So we volunteered to guide him here in exchange for a ride, which speeded things up considerably.” She and Arkady exchanged rather loopy smirks. Well earned, in Dag’s opinion.