On impulse, Dag shifted his stump across and slammed it down beside both their arms. Something flashed in his groundsense, strong and sharp. Othan cried out and recoiled.
“Oh!” said Hoharie.
“A ghost hand,” said Dag grimly. “A ground hand. Like that.” His whole forearm was hot with new ground, snatched from the boy. His ghost hand, so briefly perceptible, was gone again. He was shaking, but if he put his arms out of sight below the table, it would only draw more attention to his trembling. He forced himself to sit still.
The apprentice was holding his own right arm to his chest, rubbing it and looking wide-eyed. “Ow,” he said simply. “What was that? I mean—I didn’t do—did I do anything?”
“Sorry. I’m sorry,” mumbled Dag. “I shouldn’t have done that.” That was new. New and disturbing, and far too much like malice magic for Dag’s comfort. Although perhaps there was only one kind of groundwork, after all. Was it theft, to take something someone was trying with all his heart to press upon you?
“My arm is cold,” complained Othan. “But—did it help? Did I actually do any healing, Hoharie?”
Hoharie ran her hands over both her apprentice’s arm and Dag’s, her frown replaced by an oddly expressionless look. “Yes. There’s an extremely dense ground reinforcement here.”
Othan looked heartened, although he was still chafing his own forearm.
Dag wriggled his fingers; his arm barely ached. “I can feel the heat of it.”
Hoharie, watching them both with equal attention, talked her apprentice through a light resplinting of Dag’s arm. Othan gave the flaking, smelly skin a wash first, to Dag’s intense gratitude. The boy’s own right arm was decidedly weak; he fumbled the wrappings twice, and Hoharie had to help him tie off the knots.
“Is he going to be all right?” Dag asked cautiously, nodding at Othan.
“In a few days, I expect,” said Hoharie. “That was a much stronger ground reinforcement than I normally let my apprentices attempt.”
Othan smiled proudly, although his eyes were still a trifle confused. Hoharie dismissed him with thanks, closed the door behind him, and slid back into the seat across from Dag. She eyed him narrowly.
“Hoharie,” said Dag plaintively, “what’s happening to me?”
“Not sure.” She hesitated. “Have you ever been tested for a maker?”
“Yes, ages ago. I’d no knack nor patience for it, but my groundsense range was a mile, so they let me go for a patroller. Which was what I’d desperately wanted anyway.”
“What was that, nigh on forty years ago? Have you been tested lately?”
“No interest, no point. Such talents don’t change after youth…do they?”
“Nothing alive is unchanging.” Her eyes had gone silvery with interest—or was that covetousness? “I will say, that was no ghost, Dag. That was one of the live-est things I’ve ever seen. Could it do shaped reinforcements, I wonder?”
Did she think of training him as a medicine maker, in the sort of subtle groundwork that she herself did? Dag was taken aback. “Dar’s the maker in my family.”
“So?” Her shrewd look that went with this made him shift uncomfortably.
“I don’t control this. It’s more like it works me.”
“What, you can’t remember how wobbly you were when your groundsense first came in? Some days, my apprentices are all over the map. Some days I still am, for that matter.”
“Fifty-five’s a bit old for an apprentice, don’t you think?” Hoharie herself was younger than Dag by a decade. He could remember when she’d been an apprentice. “And any road—a maker needs two good hands.” He waved his left, by way of a reminder.
She started to speak, but then sat back, frowning over this last.
“Patrolling’s what I do. Always have. I’m good at it.” A shiver of fear troubled him at the thought of stopping, which was odd, since hunting malices should be the scariest task there was. But he remembered his own words from Glassforge: None of us could do the job without all of us, so all of us are owed. Makers and patrollers alike, all were essential. All essential, all expendable.
Hoharie shrugged surrender, and said, “In any case, come back and see me tomorrow. I want to look at that arm again.” She added after a moment, “Both of them.”
“I’d take it kindly.” He gestured with his sling. “Do I really still need this splint, now?”
“Yes, to remind you not to try anything foolish. Speaking of experience. You patrollers are all alike, in some ways. Give that ground reinforcement some time to work, and we’ll see.”
Dag nodded, rose, and let himself out, conscious of Hoharie’s curious gaze following him.
6
D ag returned from the medicine tent reluctant to speak of the unsettling incident with the maker’s apprentice, but in any case, no one asked; instead, five persons took the chance to tell him that he needed to teach his wife to swim. Dag thought the idea fine, but Fawn seemed to find the fact that he still wore splints and a sling to be a great relief to her mind.
“Well, you certainly can’t go swimming with that rig on,” she said firmly. “When will you have it off, did they say?”
“Soon.”
She relaxed, and he did not clarify that soon could well mean tomorrow.
Sarri’s little boy, having been coaxed earlier into hauling rocks for their fire pit and warmly praised for his efforts by his fathers, had crept back to the task, toddling across the clearing with stones as big as his little fingers could clutch and flinging them in with great determination. It set off a small crisis when his excess offerings were removed. His outraged tears were diverted by a treat from Fawn’s dwindling store of farm fare, and Dag, grinning, hauled him back to his assorted parents. That evening, Dag and Fawn boiled tea water on their first home fire, even if supper was cold plunkin again. Fawn looked as though she was finally beginning to understand all the plunkin jokes.
They burned the rinds and sat together by the crackling flames, watching through the trees as the sunset light faded on the farther shore. For all his weary unease, Dag still found it a pleasure just to look at the play of light and shadow across Fawn’s features, the shine and spring of her hair, the gleam of her dark eyes. He wondered if gazing upon her face through time would be like watching sunsets, never quite the same twice yet unfailing in joy.
As the shadows deepened, the tree frogs in the woods piped a raucous descant to the deep croaking of bullfrogs hidden in the rushes. At last it was time to wave good night across the campsite at the others turning in, and drop the tent flap. By the light of a good beeswax candle, a gift from Sarri, they undressed and lay down in their bedroll. A few hours in Fawn’s company had soothed Dag’s strained nerves, but he must still have looked tense and absent, for she ran her hand along his face, and said, “You look tired. Do you…want to…?”
“I could grow less tired.” He kissed her curls away from her face and let his ground ease open a trifle. “Hm.”
“Hm?”
“Your ground is very pretty tonight. Glittery. I think your days of fertility are starting up.”
“Oh!” She sat up on one elbow. “Am I getting better, then?”
“Yes, but…” He sat half-up as well. “From what Mari said, you should be healing up inside at about the same rate as outside. Ground and flesh are still deep-damaged, and will recover slowly. From these”—he touched his lips to the carmine dimples in her neck—“my guess is your womb’s not ready to risk a child yet, nor will be for some months.”
“No. Nor is the rest of me, really.” She rolled back and stared up at their hide roof. “I never thought to have a baby in a tent, though I suppose Lakewalker ladies do. We’re not prepared for winter or anything, really. Not enough”—her hands waved uncertainly—“things.”
“We travel lighter than farmers.”
“I saw the inside of Sarri’s cabin. Tent. She doesn’t travel all that light. Not with children.”
“Well, that?
??s so. When all of Dar and Omba’s children were home, shifting camp in season was a major undertaking. I usually tried to be out on patrol,” he admitted ruefully.
Fawn sighed in uncertainty, and continued, “It’s past midsummer. Time to be making and saving. Getting ready for the cold and the dark.”
“Believe me, there is a steady stream of plunkins on their way to winter stores in Bearsford even as we speak. I used to ride that route as a horse boy in the summers, before I was old enough to go for patroller. Though in this season, it’s easier to move the folks to the food than the food to the folks.”
“Only plunkin?”
“The fruit and nuts will be coming on soon. A lot of the pigs we eat here. One per tent per season, so with four tents on this site, that makes four pig-roasts. Fish. Turkey, of course, and the hunters bring in venison from the woods on the mainland. I used to do that as a boy, too, and sometimes I go out with them between patrols. I’ll show you how Stores works tomorrow.”
She glanced up at him, catching her lower lip with her white teeth. “Dag—what’s our plan, here?” One small hand reached out to trace over his splinted arm. “What happens to me when you go back out on patrol? Because Mari and Razi and Utau—everyone I know—will all be gone then, too.”
He hardly needed groundsense to feel the apprehension in her. “By then, I figure, you’ll be better acquainted with Sarri and Cattagus and Mari’s daughter and her family. Cattagus is Sarri’s uncle, by the way—he’s an Otter by birth, as if you couldn’t tell. My plan is to lie up quiet, get folks used to the idea of you. They will in time, I figure, like they grew used to Sarri’s having two husbands.”
And yet…normally, when patrollers went out, they could be sure their spouses would be looked after in their absences, first by their families, then by their patrol comrades, then by the whole community. It was a trust Dag had always taken for granted, as solid as rock under his feet. It was deeply disturbing to imagine that trust instead cracking like misjudged ice.
He went on in a casual voice, “I think I might skip the next patrol going out and take some of my unused camp time. Plenty to do here. Sometimes, between patrols, I help Omba train her young horses, get them used to a big man up. She mostly has a flock of girls for apprentices, see.”
Fawn looked unconvinced. “Do you suppose Dar and your mama will be speaking to you again by then?”
Dag shrugged. “The next move is up to them. It’s plain Dar doesn’t like this marriage, but he detests rows. He’ll let it pass unless he’s pressed to act. Mama…had her warning. She has ways of making me crazy, and I suppose the reverse is true, but she’s not stupid. And she’d be the last person on the lake to invite the camp council to tell her what to do. She’ll keep it in the family. All we need do is let time go by and not borrow trouble.”
She eased back in reassurance, but there remained a dark streak in her spirit, interlaced with the fresh brightness from her recovering body. Dag suspected the strangeness of it all was beginning to accumulate. He’d seen homesickness devastate young patrollers far less dislocated than Fawn, and he resolved to find familiar tasks for her hands tomorrow. Yes, let her be as busy as she was used to being, till her balance grew steadier.
Meanwhile—here inside Tent Bluefield—the task to hand was surely growing less frantic and more familiar, but no less enchanting for all of that. Back to taking turns. He sought her tender lips in a kiss, opening his heart to all the intricacy of her ground, dark and light together.
Dag vanished for a couple of hours the next morning, but returned for lunch—plunkin again, but he didn’t seem to mind. Then, as promised, he took Fawn to the mysterious Stores. This proved to be a set of long sheds tucked into the woods, down the road past the patroller headquarters. Inside one, they found what appeared to be a woman clerk; at any rate, she sat at a table scratching in a ledger with a quill, surrounded by shelves crammed with more ledgers. A toddler lay asleep in a sort of wooden pen next to her. More sets of shelves, ceiling-high, marched back in rows the length of the building. The dim air smelled of leather and herbs and less-identifiable things.
While Fawn walked up and down the rows of shelves, staring at the goods with which they were crammed, Dag engaged the woman in a low-voiced consultation, which involved dragging out several more ledgers and marking off and initialing lists therein. At one point Dag said, “You still have those?” in a voice of surprise, laughed, and dipped the quill to mark some more. His splints, Fawn noticed, hardly seemed to slow him down today, and he was constantly taking his arm out of the sling.
Dag then led Fawn up and down the rows and had her help him collect furs and other leather goods according to some scheme of his own. A half dozen beautiful dark brown pelts looking like the coats of some extraordinary ferret-shaped creature he explained as coming from mink, small woodland predators from north of the Dead Lake; an exquisite white pelt, soft as whipped cream, was from a winter fox, but it was like no fox fur Fawn had ever seen or touched. These, he said, could be bride-gifts for Mama and Aunt Nattie, and Fawn had to agree they were marvelously better than the local hides they’d rejected back at Lumpton Market.
“Every patrol usually brings back something,” Dag explained. “It varies with where they’ve been and what opportunities they’ve found. Whatever part of his or her share a patroller doesn’t want or can’t use is turned over to Stores, and the patroller gets a credit for them, either to draw the equivalent item out later or trade for something of use. Excess accumulations are taken down to farmer country to trade for other things we need. After all my years of patrolling, I have a long credit at Stores. You be thinking about what you want, Spark, and chances are we can find something like.”
“Cooking ware?” she said hopefully.
“Next building over,” he promised.
One at a time, he pulled three more folded hides from dusty back shelves, and Fawn staggered under the weight of each as they took them to the clerk’s table to be signed out. He also, after judicious study, selected a sturdy packsaddle in good condition from a rack of such horse gear. They hauled it all out through the double doors onto the end porch.
Dag prodded the three big bundles with his toe. “Now these,” he said, “are actually my own. Bit surprised to still find them here. Two were sent down from Luthlia after I came home, and the other I picked up about three years back during a winter season I spent patrolling in the far south. This one, I figure for your papa. Go ahead and unroll it.”
Fawn picked apart the stiff, dry rawhide cords and unfolded what appeared to be an enormous wolf skin. “My word, Dag! This thing must have been as big as a horse!”
“Very nearly.”
She frowned. “You can’t tell me that was a natural beast.”
“No. Mud wolf. The very one they found me under at Wolf Ridge, I’m told. My surviving tent-brothers—you’d say brothers-in-law—skinned and tanned it for me. Never had the heart to tell them I didn’t want it. I put it in Stores thinking someone would take it off, but there it’s sat ever since.”
She wondered if this same beast had savaged his left hand. “It would make a rug for our whole parlor, back in West Blue. But it would be rather horrible, knowing how you came by it.”
“I admit I’ve no desire to look at it. Depending on how your papa feels about me by now, he might wish it hadn’t stopped gnawing on me so soon, but on the whole I think I won’t explain its history. The other two are worth a look as well.”
Fawn unfolded the second big pelt, and recoiled. Heavy black leather in a shape altogether too human was scantily covered with long, ratty gray hair; the mask of the thing, which had a manlike look, still had the fanged jaw attached.
“Another mud wolf. Different version. Fast and vicious, and they moved like shadows in the dark. That one for Reed and Rush, I think,” said Dag.
“Dag, that’s evil.” Fawn thought it through. “Good choice.”
Dag chuckled. “Give them something to wonder about, I figure.” br />
“It’ll give them nightmares, I should imagine!” Or was that, I hope? “Did you kill it?” And for pity’s sake, how?
Dag squinted at the mummified horror. “Probably. If not that one, plenty like it.”
Fawn refolded and bound up both old hides, and undid the third. It was thinner and more supple, and hairless. She unrolled and kept unrolling, her brows rising in astonishment, until fully nine feet of…of whatever it was lay out on the porch floor. The fine leather had a beautiful pattern, almost like snakeskin magnified, and gleamed smoothly under her hand, bronze green shading to rich red-brown. For all that the animal was as long as a horse, it seemed to have had short, stubby legs; wicked black claws still dangled from their ends. The jaws of this one, too, had been set back in place after tanning, and were frankly unbelievable, like a stretched-out bear trap made of teeth.
“What kind of malice made that? And what poor creature was it made from?”
“Not a mud-man at all. It’s an alligator—a southern swamp lizard. A real, natural animal. We think. Unless one of our ancestor-mages got really drunk. Malices do not, thank all the absent gods, emerge too often so far south of the Dead Lake, but what happens when they do get hold of these fellows is scarcely to be imagined. The southern wetlands are one of the places you want to do your patrolling in winter, because cold makes the alligators, and the alligator-men, sluggish. That one we just caught on an ordinary hunting and trapping run, though.”
“Ordinary? It looks as if it could eat a man in two bites!”
“They’re a danger along the shores of the channels. They lie in the water like logs, but they can move fast when they want. They clamp onto their prey and drag it down into the water to drown, and rip it up later, after it rots a bit.” He bent and ran his fingers along the shiny hide. “I should think your papa and Whit could both get a pair of boots out of this one, and belts and something for your mama as well.”