Fairbolt’s attention and questions grew keener when they described the mix-up with Dag’s malice-killing sharing knives. How Dag, going down under the malice’s guard of mud-men, had tossed the knife pouch to Fawn, how she’d stuck the monster first with the wrong, unprimed knife, then with the right one, shattering it in its use. How the terrifying creature had dissolved, leaving the first knife so strangely charged with the mortality of Fawn’s unborn daughter.
By the time they were half-through, Mari had pulled up a chair, and Dag leaned against the table. Fawn found she preferred to stand, though she had to lock her knees against an unwelcome trembling. Fairbolt did not, to Fawn’s relief, inquire into the messy aftermath of that fight; his interest seemed to end with the mortal knives.
“You are planning to show this to Dar,” Fairbolt said when they’d finished, nodding to the knife still in his lap; from his tone Fawn wasn’t sure if this was query or command.
“Yes.”
“Let me know what he says.” He hesitated. “Assuming the other matter doesn’t affect his judgment?” He jerked his head toward Dag’s left arm.
“I have no idea what Dar will think of my marriage”—Dag’s tone seemed to add, nor do I care, but he didn’t say it aloud—“but I would expect him to speak straight on his craft, regardless. If I have doubts after, I can always seek another opinion. There are half a dozen knife makers around this lake.”
“Of lesser skill,” said Fairbolt, watching him closely.
“That’s why I’m going to Dar first. Or at all.”
Fairbolt started to hand the knife back to Dag but, at Dag’s gesture, returned it to Fawn. She put the cord back over her head and hid the sheath away again between her breasts.
Fairbolt, almost eye to eye with her, watched this coolly. “That knife doesn’t make you some sort of honorary Lakewalker, you know, girl.”
Dag frowned. But before he could say anything, Fawn, despite the heat flushing through her, replied calmly, “I know that, sir.” She leaned in toward him, and deepened her voice. “I’m a farmer girl and proud of it, and if that’s good enough for Dag, the rest of you can go jump in your lake. Just so you know this thing I have slung around my neck wasn’t an honorary death.” She nodded curtly and stood straight.
A little to her surprise, he did not grow offended, merely thoughtful, if that was what rubbing his lips that way signified. He stood up with a grunt that reminded her of a tired Dag, and strode across the room to the far side of the fireplace.
Covering the whole surface between the chimney stone and the outer wall and nearly floor to ceiling was a panel made of some very soft wood. It was painted with a large grid pattern, each marked with a place name. Fawn realized, looking at the names she recognized, that it was a sort of map, if lines on a map could be pulled about and squared off, of parts of the hinterland—all the parts, she suspected. To the left-hand side was a separate column of squares, labeled Two Bridge Island, Heron Island, Beaver Sigh, Bearsford, and Sick List. And, above them all, a smaller circle in red paint labeled Missing.
About a third of the squares had hard wooden pegs stuck in them. Most of them were in groups of sixteen to twenty-five, and Fawn realized she was looking at patrols—some squares were full of little holes as though they might have been lately emptied. Each peg had a name inked onto the side in tiny, meticulous writing, and a number on its end. Some of the pegs had wooden buttons, like coins with holes bored in the middle, hung on them by twisted wires, one or two or sometimes more threaded in a stack. The buttons, too, were numbered.
“Oh!” she said in surprise. “These are all your patrollers!” There must have been five or six hundred pegs in all. She leaned closer to search for names she recognized.
Fairbolt raised his brows. “That’s right. A patrol leader can keep a patrol in mind, but once you get to be a company or camp captain, well, one head can’t hold them all. Or at least, mine can’t.”
“That’s clever! You can see everything all at once, pretty nearly.” She realized she needed to look more closely at Two Bridge Island for names. “Ah, there’s Mari. And Razi and Utau, they’re home with Sarri, oh good. Where’s Dirla?”
“Beaver Sigh,” said Dag, watching her pore over the display. “That’s another island.”
“Mm? Oh, yes, there she is, too. I hope she’s happy. Does she have a regular sweetheart? Or sweethearts? What are the little buttons for?”
Mari answered. “For the patrollers who are carrying sharing knives. Not everyone has one, but every patrol that goes out needs to have two or more.”
“Oh. Yes, that makes sense. Because it wouldn’t do a bit of good to find a malice and have no knife on hand. And you might find another malice, after. Or have an accident.” Dag had spoken with a shudder of the ignominy of accidentally breaking a sharing knife, and now she understood. She hesitated, thinking of her own spectacular, if peculiar, sharing knife accident. “Why are they numbered?”
Dag said, “The camp captain keeps a book with records of the owners and donors, for if a knife is used. To send the acknowledgments to the kinfolk, or know where to send the pieces if they chance to be recovered.”
Fawn frowned. “Is that why the patrollers are numbered, too?”
“Very like. There’s another set of books with all the names and next of kin, and other details someone might want to know about any particular patroller in an emergency. Or when the emergency is over.”
“Mm,” said Fawn, her frown deepening as she pictured this. She set her hands on her hips and peered at the board, imagining all those lives—and deaths—moving over the landscape. “Do you connect the pegs to people’s grounds, like marriage cords? Could you?”
“No,” said Dag.
“Does she always go on like this?” asked Fairbolt. She glanced up to find him staring at her rather as she’d been staring at the patroller board.
“More or less, yes,” said Dag.
“I’m sorry!” Fawn clapped her hand to her mouth in apology. “Did I ask too many questions?”
Fairbolt gave her a funny look. “No.” He reached up and took a peg out of the Missing circle, one of two jutting there. He held it out at arm’s length, squinting briefly at the fine print on the side, and grunted satisfaction. “I suppose this comes off, now.” With surprising delicacy, his thick fingers unwound its wire and teased off one numbered button. The second he frowned at, but twisted back into place. “I never met the Luthlia folks; never got up that way. You be taking care of the honors on this one, Dag?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Thanks.” He held the peg in his palm as if weighing it.
Dag reached up and touched the remaining peg in the red circle. “Still no word of Thel.” It didn’t sound like a question.
“No,” sighed Fairbolt.
“It’s been near two years, Fairbolt,” Mari observed dispassionately. “You could likely take it down.”
“It’s not like the board’s out of room up there, now is it?” Fairbolt sniffed, stared unreadably at Dag, gave the peg in his hand a toss, and bent down and thrust it decisively into the square marked Sick List.
He straightened up and turned back to Dag. “Stop in at the medicine tent. Let me know what they say about the arm. Come see me after you have that talk with Dar.” He made a vague gesture of dismissal, but then added, “Where are you going next?”
“Dar.” Dag added more reluctantly, “Mother.”
Mari snorted. “What are you going to say to Cumbia about that?” She nodded at his arm cord.
Dag shrugged. “What’s to say? I’m not ashamed, I’m not sorry, and I’m not backing down.”
“She’ll spit.”
“Likely.” He smiled grimly. “Want to come watch?”
Mari rolled her eyes. “I think I want to go back out on patrol. Fairbolt, you need volunteers?”
“Always, but not you today. Go along home to Cattagus. Your stray has turned up; you’ve no more excuse to loiter here harassing me.”
br />
“Eh,” she said, whether in agreement or disagreement Fawn could not tell. She cast a vague sort of salute at Fairbolt and Dag, murmured, “Good luck, child,” at Fawn, in a rather-too-ironical voice, and took herself out.
Dag made to follow, but stopped with a look of inquiry when Fairbolt said, “Dag.”
“Sir?”
“Eighteen years ago,” said Fairbolt, “you persuaded me to take a chance on you. I never had cause to regret it.”
Till now? Fawn wondered if he meant to imply.
“I don’t care to defend this in the camp council. See that it doesn’t boil up that high, eh?”
“I’ll try not,” said Dag.
Fairbolt returned a provisional sort of nod, and Fawn followed Dag out.
Missus Captain Crow was gone from the outer room. Outside, the sky had turned a flat gray, the water of the lake a pewter color, and the humidity had become oppressive. As they made their way down the porch steps to where the horses were tied, Dag sighed. “Well. That could have gone worse.”
Fawn recognized her own words tossed back to her, and remembered Dag’s. “Really?”
His lips twitched; it wasn’t much of a smile, but at least it was a real one, and not one of those grimaces with the emphasis on the grim he’d mostly had inside. “Really. Fairbolt could have pulled my peg and chucked it in the fire. Then all my problems would have been not his problems anymore.”
“What, he could have made you not a patroller?”
“That’s right.”
Fawn gasped. “Oh, no! And I said all those mouthy things to him! You should have warned me! But he made me mad, talking over the top of my head.” She added after a moment’s reflection, “You all three did.”
“Mm,” said Dag. He pulled her into his left arm and rested his chin on her curls for a moment. “I imagine so. Things were moving pretty fast there for a while.”
She wondered if the patrollers had all been saying things to one another through their groundsenses that she hadn’t caught. For sure, she felt there was a good deal back there she hadn’t caught.
“As for Fairbolt, you won’t offend him by standing up to him, even if you’re wrong, but especially if you’re right. His back’s broad enough to bear correction. He doesn’t much care for folks who go belly-up to him to his face then whine about it behind his back, though.”
“Well…stands to reason, that.”
“Indeed. You didn’t make a bad impression on him, Spark. In fact, judging from the results, you made a pretty good impression.”
“Well, that’s a relief.” She paused in puzzlement. “What results?”
“He put my peg in the sick box. Still a patroller. The camp council deals with any arguments the families can’t solve, or arguments that come up between clan heads. But any active patroller, the council has to go through the camp captain to deal with. It’s like he’s clan head to all of us. I won’t say Fairbolt will or even can protect me from any consequences of this”—he shrugged his left arm to indicate his marriage cord—“but leastways he’s keeping that possibility open for now.”
Fawn turned to untie the horses, considering this. The tailpiece seemed to be that it was Dag’s job—and hers?—to keep the consequences from getting too out of hand. As she scrambled up on Grace, she saw under some pear trees at a little distance Mari sitting on a trestle table swinging her legs, and Massape Crow on the bench beside her. Mari seemed to be talking heatedly, by the way she was waving her arms, and Massape had her head cocked in apparent fascination. Fawn didn’t think she needed groundsense to guess the subject under discussion, even without the curious glances the pair cast their way.
Dag had wrapped Copperhead’s reins around his hook. Now he led the horse beside the porch and used the steps for a mounting block, settling into the saddle with a tired grunt. He jerked his chin by way of a come-along gesture and led them onto the shore road, heading back east.
3
F awn turned in her saddle to look as they passed the woodland road they’d come in on, and turned again as the shore road bent out toward a wooden bridge spanning a channel about sixty feet across. The next island spread west, bounding the arm of the lake across from the patroller headquarters. Past the bridge, its farther shoreline curved north and the lake beyond opened out for a square mile. In the distance she could see a few narrow boats being paddled, and another with a small triangular sail. The island reached by the bridge had only a scattering of trees; between them horses and goats and a few sheep grazed, and beneath them more black pigs dozed.
“Mare Island?” Fawn guessed.
“Yep. It and Foal Island, which you can’t see beyond the far end over there”—Dag waved vaguely northwest—“are our main pastures. No need to build fences, you see.”
“I do. Clever. Is there a Stallion Island?”
Dag smiled. “More or less. Most of the studs are kept over on Walnut Island”—he pointed to a low green bump across the open lake patch—“which works fine until one of the fellows gets excited and ambitious and tries to swim across in the night. Then there’s some sorting out to do.”
The shore road swung back into the trees, passing behind the clusters of log buildings along the lake bank. After a scant quarter mile, Dag pulled up Copperhead and frowned at a clearing enclosing just two buildings. The lake glimmered dully beyond in the hot afternoon’s flat light. “Tent Redwing,” Dag said.
“Well”—Fawn took a breath—“this is it, I guess.”
“Not quite. Everyone seems to be out. But leastways we can drop off our saddles and bags and take the horses back to pasture.”
They rode into the clearing. The two buildings were set facing each other at an angle opening toward the lake, both with long sides gaping under deerhide awnings. Other deerhide rolls along the eaves looked as though they could be dropped down to provide more wall at need. Houses and porches seemed to be floored with planks, not dirt, at least. Fawn tried to think simple, not squalid. A stone-lined fire pit lay in the clearing between the two structures—Fawn still could not make herself think of them as tents—in addition to the central fireplaces that could apparently heat both the outer and the enclosed inner chambers. Seats of stumps or sawn-off logs were dotted about; in summer, no doubt almost all work was done outdoors.
She hopped down and helped unsaddle, dealing with the straps and buckles; Dag with his hook hauled the gear from the horses’ backs and dumped it on the plank porch of the house on the right. He scratched the back of his head gently.
“Not sure where Mama’s got off to. Dar’s likely at the bone shack. And if Omba’s not out on Mare Island, it’ll be a first. Dig down in the bottom of my saddlebags, Spark, and find those strings of horseshoes.”
Fawn did so, discovering two bunches of new horseshoes tied together, a dozen each. “My word, no wonder your bags were so heavy! How long have you been carting these around in there?”
“Since we left Glassforge. Present for Omba. Hickory Lake’s a rich camp in some ways, but we have few metals in these parts, except for a little copper-working near Bearsford. All our iron has to be traded for from other camps, mostly around Tripoint. Though we’ve been getting more from farmer sources in the hills beyond Glassforge, lately.” He grinned briefly. “When a certain young exchange patroller from Tripoint walking the hinterlands arrived at Massape Crow and said, That’s far enough, it’s told his bride-gift string of horses came in from back home staggering under loads of iron. It made the Crows rich and Fairbolt famous, back in the day.”
Fawn led Grace to a log seat and climbed up bareback, and Dag hooked her up the horseshoe bundles, which she twisted about each other and laid over her lap. He climbed up on Copperhead in turn, and they went back out to the road and returned to the bridge.
At the far end of the span he dismounted again to unhook a rope loop from the board gate, open it for Fawn, and shut it again behind them. He did not bother remounting, but led them instead toward a long shed that lay a hundred paces o
r so away. Fawn slid off Grace, managing not to drop the horseshoes, and Dag hooked off both bridles, flopping them over his shoulder. Copperhead scooted away at once, and after a moment’s doubt, Grace followed, soon putting her head down to crop grass.
Of all of his relatives, Dag had talked most freely about his brother’s wife, the Waterstrider sister who’d changed her name for her mother-in-law’s sake. In order of increasing reticence came his grandfather, remembered with nostalgia from scenes of Dag’s youth; Dar, of whom Dag spoke with cool respect; his father, tinged with distance and regret; and, in a pool of silence at the center, his mother. Every conversation Fawn had tried to lead toward her, Dag had led away. About Omba—horse trainer, mare midwife, maker of harness, and, it appeared, farrier—there had been no such problem.
As they rounded the corner of the shed and stepped under its wooden overhang, Fawn had no trouble recognizing Omba, for she came striding out of a door crying, “Dag! Finally!” She was not so thin as Mari, and quite a bit shorter, though still as tall as any man in Fawn’s family; Fawn would have guessed her age at fifty or so, which meant she was likely fifteen years older than that. She was dressed much like a patroller woman, and Fawn finally decided that the trousers were just Lakewalker riding garb, period. Her skin, though tanned and weathered, was paler than Dag’s, and her eyes a pretty silvery blue. Her dark hair, shot with a few white streaks, ran down her back in a single swift plait, without ornament. She caught sight of the sling, planted her hands on her hips, and said, “Absent gods, brother, what have you done to your right arm!” And then, after a momentary pause, “Absent gods, Dag, what have you done to your left arm?”
Dag gave her a nod of greeting, his smile lopsided. “Hello, Omba. Brought you something.” He gestured Fawn forward; she held out the horseshoes.