Against the wall in Sarri’s cabin stood a simple vertical loom loaded with work in progress, some tough-looking tight-woven fabric Fawn recognized from Lakewalker riding trousers. Fawn wondered at the thread; Sarri explained it was from the ever-useful plunkin, the stems of which, when retted, yielded up a long, strong, durable fiber, which accounted for the retting cradle in the lake. Fawn didn’t see a spinning wheel. Little furniture met her eye, apart from some trestle tables and the common upended-log seats. There were no bed frames inside at all; by the bundles of bedding stacked along a wall, it seemed Lakewalkers slept in bedrolls even at home, and Fawn realized why Dag had taken so happily to the floor of Aunt Nattie’s weaving room.
They went outside again to find that Dag and the cart had returned. Besides their saddles and bridles, a sword in a worn leather sheath, and a spear, it held only one trunk.
“Is this all you have?” Fawn asked him, as he set it all in a pile beside the tent for later stowage. The trunk hardly seemed large enough to contain, for example, surprise kitchen tackle. It barely seemed large enough for spare boots.
Dag stretched his back and grimaced. “My winter gear’s in storage at Bearsford.”
Fawn suspected it amounted to little more.
He added, “I also have my camp credit. You’ll see tomorrow how that works.”
And he was off again, dragging the emptied cart with his hook.
“What shall I do?” Fawn asked rather desperately after him.
“Take a rest!” he called unhelpfully over his shoulder, and turned onto the road.
Rest? She’d been resting, or at least, traveling, which while not restful was certainly not useful work. Her hand traced her wrist cord, and she looked up at the two Lakewalker women, looking down—dubiously?—at her. Sarri’s cord, she saw, was two cords wrapped around each other.
“I aim to be a good wife to Dag,” Fawn said resolutely, then her voice wavered. “But I don’t know what that means here. Mama trained me up. If this were a farm, I could run it. I could make soap and candles, but I have no tallow or anything to make lye in. I can cook and preserve, but there’s no jars and no storage cellars. If I had a cow, I could milk her, and make cheese and butter, if I had a churn. Aunt Nattie gave me spindles and knitting needles and scissors and needles and pins. Never saw a man more in need of socks than Dag, and I could make good ones, but I have no fiber. I can keep accounts, and make a fair ink, but there’s no paper nor anything to record.” Although those turkeys, she considered, could be forced to yield up quills. “I have knowing hands, but no tools. There must be more for me to do here than sit and eat plunkin!”
Mari smiled. “Let me tell you, farmer child, when you come back from weeks out on patrol, you’re right glad to sit and eat plunkin for a time. Even Dag is.” She added after a moment’s reflection, “For about three days, then he’s back badgering Fairbolt for a place in the next patrol going out. Fairbolt figures that the reason he has three times the malice kills of anyone else is that he spends twice the time looking for ’em.”
Sarri said curiously, “What accounts for the rest?”
“Fairbolt wishes he knew.” Mari scratched her head and regarded Fawn in bemusement. “Yeah, Dag said you’d get resty-testy if anyone tried to make you sit still. You two may have more in common than you look.”
Fawn said plaintively, “Can you show me how to go on? Please, I’ll do anything. I’ll even crack nuts.” One of her most hated tedious chores back home.
“We’re a bit between on that one,” said Sarri, with a lopsided smile. “The old falls are rotten and the new ones are too green. We leave ’em for the pigs to clean up, just this season. In a month, now, when the elderberries and the fruit trees come on, we’ll all be busy. Cattagus and his wine-making, and nuts in plenty. Rope and baskets, now, that’s for doing.”
“I know how to make baskets,” said Fawn eagerly, “if I had something to make them of.”
“When that next batch of retting’s done, I’ll be glad for help with the spinning,” said Sarri judiciously.
“Good! When?”
“Next week.”
Fawn sighed. Razi and Utau were just finishing digging a fire pit in front of their tent, and Tesy and her brother were being kept usefully busy hauling stones to line it. Maybe Fawn could at least go gather more deadfall for their future fire. While her back was turned, she noticed, a split-wood basket with three fresh plunkins in it had appeared under her awning.
“Go along, fire-eater,” said Mari, sounding amused. “Take a rest till Dag gets back from the medicine tent. Go for a swim.”
Fawn hesitated. “In that big lake?” Naked?
Mari and Sarri stared at each other. “Where else?” said Sarri. “It’s safe to dive off the end of the dock; the water’s well over your head there.”
This sounded the opposite of safe to Fawn.
Mari added, “Don’t dive off the sides, though, or we’ll have to pull your head out of the mud like a plunkin.”
“I, um…” Fawn swallowed, and continued in a much smaller voice, “don’t know how to swim.”
Mari’s brows shot up; Sarri pursed her lips. Both of them gazed at Fawn as though she were a freak of nature like a two-headed calf. That is, even more than most Lakewalkers looked at her that way. Fawn reddened.
“Does Dag know this?” demanded Sarri.
“I…I don’t know.” Would being so readily drownable disqualify one from being a Lakewalker’s spouse? When she’d said she wanted to be taught how to go on here, she hadn’t imagined swimming lessons being at the top of anyone’s list.
“Dag,” said Mari in a definite voice, “needs to know this.” And added, to Fawn’s increasing alarm, “Right away!”
The Two Bridge Island medicine tent was in fact three cabins with its own dock a few hundred paces past patroller headquarters. It seemed not very busy this morning, Dag saw as he neared after dropping the cart at Stores. Only a couple of horses were hitched to the rails out front. Good. No pestilence this week, no patrols dragging home too many smashed-up comrades.
As he mounted the porch to the main building, he met Saun coming out. Ah, one smashed-up comrade, then—if clearly on the path to recovery. The boy looked well, standing up straight and moving only a little stiffly, although he was looking down and touching his chest gingerly. Saun’s face lit with delight as he glanced up and saw Dag, which turned to the usual consternation as he took in the sling.
“Dag, man! They said you were missing, then there was a crazy rumor going around you’d come back with the little farmer girl—married, if you can believe! Some people!” His voice trailed off in an oh as he took in the cord wrapping Dag’s left arm, just visible below his rolled-up sleeve and above his arm-harness strap.
“We got back yesterday afternoon,” said Dag, letting the last remark pass. “And you? Last I saw, you were bundled up in a wagon heading south from Glassforge.”
“When I could ride again, one of the Log Hollow fellows brought me up to rendezvous with Mari’s patrol, and they brought me home. Medicine maker says I can go out again when the patrol does if I rest up good the next couple of weeks. I’m still a little ouchy, but nothing too bad.” His stare returned to Dag’s left arm. “How did you…I mean, Fawn was cute and all, and she sure cheered you up, but…all right, there was the malice, maybe she…Dag, is your family going to accept this?”
“No.”
“Oh.” Saun fell silent in dismay. “If…what…where will you go?”
“That’s to be seen. We’ve set up our tent at Mari’s place for the moment.”
“I suppose that makes sense. Mari’s bound to defend her own…um.” Saun shook his head, looking wary and confused. “I never heard tell of anything like this. Well, there was a fellow they told me about down at Log Hollow. He got into big trouble a few years back for secretly passing goods and coin along to his farmer lover and her half-blood child, or children—I guess it had been going on for some time when they caught
up with him. He argued the goods were his, but the camp council maintained they were the camp’s, and it was theft. He wouldn’t back down, and they banished him.”
Dag tilted his head.
“It was no joke, Dag,” Saun said earnestly. “They stripped him to his skin before they turned him out. In the middle of winter. Nobody seemed to know what had happened to him after that, if he made it back to her, or…or what.”
He was staring at Dag in deep alarm, as if picturing his mentor so used. Was Saun’s hero worship of Dag finally to be called into question? Dag thought it a good thing if so, but not for this reason.
“Hardly the same situation, Saun.” For one thing, it’s summer. “In any case, I’ll handle it.”
Taking this heavy hint—anything lighter would not have penetrated, Dag thought—Saun managed an embarrassed laugh. “Yeah, I suppose you will.” After a moment he added in a more chipper tone, turning the subject, “I’m something in the same line myself. Well, of course not with a…I’m thinking of asking Fairbolt for a transfer to Log Hollow this fall. Reela”—Saun’s voice went suddenly shy—“said she’d wait for me.”
Dag recognized that sappy look; he’d seen it in his own shaving mirror. “Congratulations.”
“Nothing is fixed yet, you understand,” Saun said hastily. “Some people think I’m too young to be, well. Thinking about anything permanent. But how can you not, when…you know?”
Dag nodded sympathetically. Because either snickering or pity would be a tad hypocritical, coming from him just now. Was I ever that feckless? Dag was very much afraid the answer was yes. Possibly even without the rider at his age.
Saun brightened still further. “Well. Looks like you need the makers more than I did. I won’t hold you up. Maybe I’ll stop by and say hi to Fawn, later on.”
“I expect she’d be glad for a familiar face,” Dag allowed. “She’s had a rough welcome, I’m afraid.”
Saun gave a short nod and took himself off. When in camp, Saun stayed with a family farther down the shore who had a couple of their own children out on exchange patrol at present; Dag gathered that the boy, away from home for the first time, did not lack for mothering.
Dag pushed open the door and made his way into the anteroom. The familiar smell of herbs—sharp, musty, deep, pungent—was strong today, and he glanced through the open door to the next room on this side to see two apprentices processing medicines. Pots bubbled on the fire, piles of dried greenery were laid out on the big table in the room’s center, and one girl busied herself with a mortar. They were making up packets: for patrols, or to be sold to farmers for coin or trade goods. Dag didn’t doubt that some of what he smelled would end up in that shop at Lumpton Market, at double the price the Lakewalkers received for them.
Another apprentice looked up from the table crammed up to the anteroom’s window, where he was writing. He smiled at the patroller, regarding Dag’s sling with professional interest. But before he could speak, the door to the other chamber opened and a slight, middle-aged woman stepped out, her summer shift cinched at the waist by a belt holding half a dozen tools of her trade. She was rubbing her chest and frowning.
The medicine maker looked up. “Ah! Dag! I’ve been expecting you.”
“Hello, Hoharie. I saw Saun coming out just now. Is he going to be all right?”
“Yes, he’s coming along nicely. Thanks to you, he says. I understand you did some impressive emergency groundwork on him.” She eyed Dag in speculation, but at least she refrained from comment on his marriage cord.
“Nothing special. In and out for a quick match at a moment he needed it, was all.”
Her brows twitched, but she didn’t pursue the point further. “Well, come on in, let’s have a look at this.” She gestured at his sling. “How in the world have you managed?”
“I’ve had help.”
Dag followed her into her workroom, closing the door behind them. A tall bed, onto which he’d helped lift more than one hurt comrade over the years, stood out in the room’s center, but Hoharie gestured him to a chair beside a table, taking another around the corner from it. He slipped his arm out of its sling and laid it out, and she pulled a pair of sharp scissors from her belt and began undoing the wrappings. Upon inquiry, he favored her with a much-shortened tale of how he’d come by the injury back in Lumpton Market. She ran her hands up and down the bared forearm, and he could feel the press of her ground on his own, more invasive than the long probing fingers.
“Well, this is a clean break and a straight setting,” she reported. “Doing well, for what, two weeks?”
“Nearer three.” It seemed a lot more than that.
“If not for that”—she nodded at his hook—“I’d send you home to heal on your own, but you’d like these splints off sooner, I’d imagine.”
“Oh, yes.”
She smiled at his heartfelt drawl. “I’ve done all the groundwork I can for today on your young friend Saun, but my apprentice will be pleased to try.”
Dag gave this the grimace it deserved; she grinned back unrepentantly. “Come, Dag, they have to practice on someone. Youth to experience, experience to youth.” She tapped his arm cuff. “How’s the stump? Giving you any trouble?”
“No. Well…no.”
She sat back, eyeing him shrewdly. “In other words, yes. Off with the harness, let me see.”
“Not the stump itself,” he said, but let her unbuckle the harness and lay it aside, and run her experienced hands down his arm and over its callused end. “Well, it’s sometimes a little sore, but it’s not bad today.”
“I’ve seen it worse. So, go on…?”
He said cautiously, “Have you ever heard of a missing limb still having…ground?”
She rubbed her bony nose. “Phantom limbs?”
“Yes, just like that,” he said eagerly.
“Itching, pain, sensations? I’ve heard of it. It’s apparently very maddening, to have an itch that can’t be scratched.”
“No, not that. I knew about that. Met a man up in Luthlia once, must be twenty-five years back, who’d lost most of both feet to frostbite. Poor fellow used to complain bitterly about the itching, and his toes that he didn’t have anymore cramping. A little groundwork on the nerves of his legs usually cleared it right up. I mean the ground of missing limbs.”
“If something doesn’t exist, it can’t have a ground. I don’t know if someone could have an illusion of ground, like the illusion of an itch; folks have hallucinations about all sorts of bizarre things, though, so I don’t see why not.”
“A hallucination shouldn’t be able to do real groundwork.”
“Of course not.”
“Well, mine did. I did.”
“What’s this tale?” She sat back, staring.
He took a breath and described the incident with the glass bowl in the Bluefield parlor, leaving out the ruckus that had led up to it and concentrating on the mending itself. “The most of it was done, I swear, with the ground of my left hand.” He thumped his left arm on the table. “Which isn’t there. I was deathly sick after, though, and cold all through for an hour.”
She scowled in thought. “It sounds as though you drew ground from your whole body. Which would be reasonable. Why it should take that form to project itself, well, your theory about your right arm being lost to use forcing a, um”—she waved her hands—“some sort of compensation seems like a fair one. Sounds like a pretty spectacular one, I admit. Has it happened again?”
“Couple of times.” Dag wasn’t about to explain the circumstances. “But I can’t make it happen at will. It’s not even reliably driven by my own tension. It’s just random, or so it seems to me.”
“Can you do it now?”
Dag tried, concentrating so hard his brow furrowed. Nothing. He shook his head.
Hoharie bit her lip. “A funny form of ground projection, yes, maybe. Ground without matter, no.”
Dag finally said what he hadn’t wanted to say, even to himself. “Ma
lices are pure ground. Ground without matter.”
The medicine maker stared at him. “You’d know more about that than I would. I’ve never seen a malice.”
“All a malice’s material appearance is pure theft. They snatch ground itself, and matter through its ground, to shape at will. Or misshape.”
“I don’t know, Dag.” She shook her head. “I’ll have to think about this one.”
“I wish you would. I’m”—he cut off the word afraid—“very puzzled.”
She nodded shortly and rose to fetch her apprentice from the anteroom, introducing him as Othan. The lad looked thrilled, whether at being allowed to do a ground treatment upon the very interesting patroller, or simply at being allowed to do one at all, Dag couldn’t quite tell. Hoharie gave up her seat and stood observing with her arms folded. The apprentice sat down and determinedly began tracing his hands up and down Dag’s right arm.
“Hoharie,” he said after a moment, “I can’t get through the patroller’s ground veil.”
“Ease up, Dag,” Hoharie advised.
Dag had held himself close and tight ever since he’d crossed the bridge to the island yesterday. He really, really didn’t want to open himself up here. But it was going to be necessary. He tried.
Othan shook his head. “Still can’t get in.” The lad was starting to look distressed, as though he imagined the failure was his fault. He looked up. “Maybe you’d better try, ma’am?”
“I’m spent. Won’t be able to do a thing till tomorrow at the earliest. Ease up, Dag!”
“I can’t…”
“You are in a mood today.” She circled the table and frowned at them both; the apprentice cringed. “All right, try swapping it around. You reach, Dag. That should force you open.”
He nodded, and tried to reach into the lad’s ground. The strain of his own distaste for the task warred with his frantic desire, now that the opportunity was so provokingly close, of getting the blighted splints off for good. The apprentice was looking at him with the air of a whipped puppy, bewildered but still eager to please. He held his arm lightly atop Dag’s, face earnest, ground open as any gate.