“Here’s the fork. If Dag doesn’t love you enough, he’ll choose the patrol. And if he loves you beyond all sense—he’ll choose the patrol. Because you’re standing in the center of that world he’s sent to save, and if he doesn’t save it, he doesn’t save you, either. When Fairbolt called on him the other night with the news from Raintree, how long did it take your bridegroom to decide to go off and leave you? All alone, with no friends or kin?”
Not very long, Fawn did not say aloud. Her mouth had grown too dry for speech.
“And it wouldn’t make a whit of difference if you were Lakewalker born, or a hundred times prettier, or writhing in birth bed, or crying at his child’s deathbed, or in agony on your own. Patrollers turn and go all the same. You can’t win this one.” She sat back and favored Fawn with a slow blink, cold as any snake. “Neither could I. So take your foolish knitting and go away.”
Fawn swallowed. “They’re good socks. Maybe Omba would like to have them.”
Cumbia set her jaw. “You’re a touch hard of listening, aren’t you, girl?” And then plucked up the little bundle and tossed it into the fire pit smoldering a few yards away.
Fawn almost screamed aloud. Three days of work! She dove after it. It had not yet caught, but the dry cotton smoked against the red coals, and a stray end of the jaunty woolen yarn winked in scarlet sparks, curling up and starting to blacken. She leaned in and snatched it back out, brushing off a smear of soot and glowing bits from the browning edge, drawing in her breath sharply at the burning bite of them. Her blue skirt had muddy patches from where her knees had thumped down, and she scrubbed at them as she rose, glaring uselessly at Cumbia.
It wasn’t just the pain of the burn on her fingers that started tears in Fawn’s eyes. She choked out, “Dag said it would be useless to try and talk to you.”
“Should have listened to him, too, eh?” said Cumbia. Her face was nearly expressionless.
“I guess,” returned Fawn shortly. Her bright theory that letting Cumbia vent might clear the air seemed singularly foolish now. She wanted to shoot some devastating last word over her shoulder as she stalked off, hurting as she’d been hurt, but she was far too shaken to think of any. She wanted only to escape.
“Go, then,” said Cumbia, as if she could hear her.
Fawn clutched the knit bundle in her unburned hand and marched away. She didn’t let her shoulders bow till she was out of sight on the road and having to pick her footfalls among the drying puddles. Her stomach shuddered, and this island seemed abruptly lonely and strange, hostile and pinched, despite the bright morning air. Oppressive, like a house turned prison. She sniffed angrily, feeling stupid stupid stupid, and smeared away the drops on her lashes with the back of her hand, then turned it to capture the cooling moisture on her throbbing fingers. A reddening line crossed three of them; she thought one might be starting to blister. Mama or Aunt Nattie would have dabbed the spots with butter, made soothing murmurs, and maybe kissed them. Fawn wasn’t too sure about the butter—in any case, she had none in the tiny cache of food that passed for her larder—but the rest of the remedy she missed desperately. Not to be had. Ever again. The thought made her want to bawl far more than the little pain in her hand.
She’d gone to Cumbia to try to head off the clash with the camp council at its apparent root. To save Dag. She had not only failed, she might have made it even worse. Cumbia and Dar could have no doubt now of what an easy target Dag’s farmer wife was. Why did I think I could help him? Stupid…
In her home campsite—in Mari’s and Sarri’s campsite, Fawn corrected this thought—Cattagus was still sitting over his leatherwork, now stitching a diminutive slipper held up nearly to his nose, poking rawhide cords in and out of the holes he’d made with his awl. Tesy had gone off somewhere, though Cattagus was apparently keeping an eye on her brother, presently penned in a little corral and diverted with a pair of alarmed turtles; he was tapping on a shell and calling the creature to come out. As Fawn crossed the clearing, Cattagus put down his work and looked at her shrewdly. She recalled Cumbia’s shot about walking around naked and wondered if all her efforts to put on a brave face were useless; if any Lakewalker looking at her could see what a seething mess she really was. Likely.
To her surprise, Cattagus beckoned her over. She stopped by his table, and he leaned on one elbow, regarding her rather ironically, and wheezed, “So, where have you been, girlie?”
“Went to talk to Cumbia,” Fawn admitted. “Tried, anyhow.”
“Burn your fingers, did you?”
Fawn hastily pulled her hand from her licking tongue and hid it behind her back. “She threw the socks I’d brought her for a present in the fire. Should have just let them burn, I guess, but I couldn’t stand the waste.”
“That what you been crouching over all these past three days?”
“Pretty much.”
“Huh. Let’s see. No, girlie, the burn,” he added impatiently as she thrust out her scorched bundle. She gave him her other hand; he held it in his dry, thick fingers, and his gray head bent slightly. He was dressed as usual in nothing but the short trousers and sandals that were his summer uniform, and she was conscious of the smell of him, a mix of old man and lake green, not unpleasant at this concentration, and very Cattagus. Would Dag smell like that when he grew as old? She thought she could learn to like it.
Fawn stared at her rejected knitting as Cattagus kneaded her palm. “Do you think Mari would like those socks? They’re too big for me and too small for Dag, but they’re good for under riding boots. If she’s not too proud to take work from a stupid farmer,” she added bitterly. “Or Cumbia’s castoffs.”
“That last might actually be a draw,” said Cattagus, with his whistling chuckle.
He released her hand, which had stopped throbbing; Fawn peeked at the red marks, which had faded to pink instead of raising blisters as she’d thought they would. He does healing groundwork like Dag. “Thank you,” she said gratefully. Cattagus nodded, picked up the socks, and set them beyond his leather scraps, signifying acceptance of the gift, and Fawn blinked back eye-fog again.
Fawn turned away, then turned back, blurting, “Cumbia said because I can’t veil my ground it’s just like walking around naked.”
“Well,” said Cattagus in a slow, judicious drawl, “Cumbia tends to be a bit on the tight side, herself. Full of things she doesn’t want others to see. Most folks our age just give up and be what they are.”
Fawn tilted her head, considering this. “Older farm folk can be like that, some of them. Well, not with their grounds, of course, but with clothes, and what they do and say.”
“Cumbia’s still tryin’ to fix the world, I’m afraid. She’d have been a relentless patroller. Thank the absent gods she went for a maker.” He appeared to lose himself in a vision of patrolling with a younger Cumbia, and shuddered.
“What does she make? Particularly?”
“Rope and cord that does not break. Very much in demand for folks’ boats and sailboats, y’see. And other key uses.”
“Oh. So…so she was making magic when I, um, interrupted her…?”
“No great thing if you did, she’s been doing it for so long. Wouldn’t have slowed her a bit if you’d been someone she wanted to see.”
“I was not that,” Fawn sighed. She blinked, trying to recapture her thought. “So do Lakewalkers go about with their grounds open, too?”
“If they’re relaxed, or wishful to take in the world around them at its fullest, aye. Too, lots of folks have short groundsense ranges. So you’re out of their sight, so to speak, at any little distance, even if you’re flaring.”
But everyone in this campsite, the children excepted, had long groundsense ranges. She had a sudden horrible thought. “But when Dag and I, when Dag opens up to me…um.”
Cutting off her words was no help; Cattagus was chuckling downright evilly. Leaving no doubt that he’d caught her meaning, he said, “Me, I cheer for Dag. Even though Mari hits me. Those Red
wing women are a stern sisterhood, I can tell you.” He added to her hot blush, “It’s this breath-thing, y’see. Puts me out of the action myself, mostly. ’Bout all I can do these days is wave on the luckier ones.”
Fawn’s blush deepened, but she dimly recognized that he had handed her back this intimate revelation by way of turnabout: even-all. Cruelty and kindness, how could one morning hold so much of both? “Folks is folks, I guess,” she said.
Cattagus nodded. “Always have been. Always will be. That’s better.”
She realized she had grown much calmer; her throat no longer ached. She touched the cord on her left wrist, and nodded to Cattagus’s. “Is Mari all right this morning? Too?”
“So far.” His eyes narrowed at her cord. “Dag did something to yours, didn’t he? Or…to you.”
Fawn nodded, though she flushed again to recall the exact circumstances. But Cattagus, while he could be shrewd or crude, was not mean-minded, and seemed unlikely to press her for private details. “I got my ground to go into Dag’s cord all right, by a…a trick, I guess, when we wove them, but I couldn’t sense his. So he did some extra groundwork on mine just before he left. It’s good to know I could find him, if I had to. Or he me, I suppose.”
Cattagus opened his mouth, stopped. Blinked. “Beg pardon?”
She held up her wrist, closed her eyes, and turned about. Opening them, she found herself facing west into the woods. “That way. It’s pretty vague, but I reckon, if I got closer, the sense of just where he is would grow tighter. It did the other morning when he was nearby, anyhow.” She turned and looked in surprise at Cattagus’s climbing brows. “Don’t everyone’s cords do that?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
Cattagus rubbed his nose. “Wasn’t exactly the cord he did the work on, I think. Best not to mention that trick to anyone else till he gets back.”
“Why not?”
“Um. Well. Let’s just say, if Dag wants to add any complications to his argument with the camp council, let him pick and choose them himself.”
There was an undercurrent, but in what direction it flowed Fawn could scarcely guess. “All right,” she said doubtfully. Wistful, she stared west again. “When do you think they’ll come back?”
He shrugged. “No knowing.” But his eyes seemed to know too much.
Fawn nodded, not so much in agreement as silent sympathy, and took herself off to her tent. She needed to think of a new project for her hands. Not knitting. The sun was climbing toward noon. She hoped it lit Dag’s path, wherever it was now winding.
Dead silence, thought Dag, was never a truer phrase.
The high summer sun beat down on a winter landscape. The marshland open to his gaze looked as if it had suffered a week of killing frost. What should have been high green stands of reeds lay flattened and tangled, browning. The line of planted poplars along which his patrol was ghosting looked ghostly themselves, yellowing leaves spinning down one by one in the breezeless air. The air itself was hot, moist, close as only a Raintree summer could be, but devoid of the whine and whirr of insects, empty of birdcalls. It was a blight indeed when even the mosquitoes lay dead, floating with rafts of miscellaneous pond wrack in long, gray smears atop the blank water. The undersides of a couple of dead turtles made dim yellow patches in the murk. The blue sky reflected there in crooked strips, weird contrast to the scum.
The blighted soil nipped at his feet, yet without the deeper sucking drain on his ground that marked land long occupied by a malice. More; Dag could not feel that dry shock in his midsection, like the reverberation of some great blow to the body, that told him a malice lay near. Cautiously, he stood up for a better view of the ruined Lakewalker village that lay along the shore across a quarter mile of open water.
Crouched down in the dead and dying weeds behind Dag, Mari hissed nervous warning.
“It’s not here,” he breathed to her.
She frowned, nodded acceptance of this, but whispered back, “Its slaves might still be.”
He dared to open his groundsense just a little, swallowing against the nausea induced by so much recent blight beating against him. When he was sure he wasn’t going to vomit, he opened himself further. Nothing fluttered in his perception but a few distraught blackbirds, fled from the earlier disruption, returning to search futilely for mates or nests.
“There’s nothing alive for a mile—wait.” He hunkered down again. A few hundred paces beyond the village, in a boggy stretch along the shore, something swirled in his senses, a familiar concentration of distorted ground. Ground around the patch seemed to seep toward it, creeping through the soil like draining water. He narrowed his eyes, searched more carefully.
“I believe there’s a mud-man nursery planted beyond the camp. It doesn’t seem to have guards just now, though. But there’s something else.”
Mari’s brows twitched up, and her frown deepened. “You’d think it would be watched. If anything was.”
Dag considered the possibility of a cleverly baited trap. That would seem to credit this malice with an unlikely degree of foresight, however. He hand-signaled Mari, who passed the order silently, and the patrol took up its stealthy, painfully slow, veiled approach once more, skirting through the scant cover around the edge of this lakelike section of the larger marsh until it reached the abandoned village, or what was left of it.
Perhaps ninety or a hundred dwellings were strung along the lakeside or back from it in kin clusters, home till lately of a community of over a thousand Lakewalkers, with another thousand souls scattered more widely around Bonemarsh. A dozen tent-cabins were burned to the ground; the recent rain had extinguished all coals. Signs of hasty flight were all around, but aside from the burned tents there was only a little mindless destruction. Dag did not see or smell corpses, only partly reassuring, as ground-ripped bodies were sometimes very slow to rot. Still, he permitted himself the hope that most here had escaped, fleeing southward. Lakewalkers knew how to pick up and run. Then he wondered what that little farmer town the malice was supposed to have come up under looked like right now. What would Spark have done if…he cut off the wrenching thought.
He reached the log wall of the last tent standing and peered uncertainly toward the boggy patch a couple hundred paces off. Back from it, a thicket of scrubby trees—willow, slim green ash, vicious trithorned honey locust—shaded something dark about their boles that he could barely make out with his eye. He opened his groundsense again, flinched, then snapped it back.
“Mari. Codo. To me,” he said over his shoulder.
Mari was at his side at once; Codo, the oldest patroller here but for Mari, slid forward in a moment and joined them.
“There’s somebody under those trees,” Dag murmured. “Not mud-men, not farmer slaves. I think it’s some of us. Something’s very wrong.”
“Alive?” asked Mari, peering too. The half dozen figures didn’t move.
“Yes, but…extend your groundsenses. Carefully. Don’t get caught up. See if it’s anything you recognize.” Because I think I do.
Codo gave him a dry glance from under gray brows, silent commentary on Dag’s earlier repeated insistence that no one open their grounds without a direct order. Both he and Mari stared with eyes opened, then closed.
“Not seen anything like that before,” muttered Mari. “Unconscious?”
“Groundlocked…?” said Codo.
“Ah. Yes. That’s it,” said Mari. “But why are they…”
Dag re-counted—six with his eyes, five with his groundsense. Which suggested one was a corpse. “I think they’re tied to those trees.” He turned to Mari’s partner Dirla, hovering anxiously. “The rest of you stay back. Codo, Mari, come with me.”
There was no cover between here and the stand of scrub. Dag gave up the fraying pretense of stealth and walked openly forward, Codo and Mari right on his heels.
The Bonemarsh Lakewalkers were indeed bound to the thicker tree boles, slumped or half-hanging. They appeared unconscious.
Three men and three women, older for the most part; they seemed makers, not patrollers, if Dag could guess from their look and the remains of their clothing. Some bore signs of physical struggle, bruises and cuts, others did not. One woman was dead, waxy and still; Dag hesitated to touch her to check for the stiffness, or lack of it, that would tell him how long. But not very long, he suspected. Late again, old patroller.
Codo hissed and drew his knife, starting for the ropes that bound the prisoners.
“Wait,” said Dag.
“Eh?” Codo scowled at him.
“Dag, what is this?” asked Mari. “Do you know?”
“Aye, I think so. A new malice has to stay by its mud-man nursery to keep them growing, part of what keeps it tied to its lair even after it’s no longer sessile. This malice has gotten strong enough to…to farm out the task. It’s linked up these makers to make its mud-men for it, while it goes…off.” Dag glanced southward uneasily.
Codo breathed a silent whistle through pursed lips.
“Can we break them out of their groundlock?” said Mari, eyes narrowing.
“Not sure, but wait. What I don’t know is how much of a sense the malice has of them, at whatever distance it’s gone now. If we fool with them, with this groundwork, might be an announcement that we’re here, behind it.”
“Dag, you can’t be thinking of leaving them!” said Codo in a shocked voice. Mari looked not so much shocked as grim.
“Wait,” Dag repeated, and turned to walk toward the boggy patch. The other two exchanged glances and followed.