“You’ve been patrolling for a long time,” she observed.
“Upwards of forty years. So? Cattagus walked for almost seventy. My grandfather, longer than that. It’s a life.”
“Ever think of another? Something more settled?”
“Not lately.” Or at least, not until this summer. He wasn’t about to try to describe how confused he’d become about his life since Glassforge.
“Anyone ever suggest medicine maker?”
“Yes, you, but you weren’t thinking it through.”
“I remember you complained about being too old to be an apprentice. May I point out, yours could be about the shortest apprenticeship on record? You already know all the herb-lore, from decades of patrol gathering. You know field aid on the practical side—possibly even more than I do. Your ground-matching skills are astonishing, as Saun has lived to testify to anyone who will listen.”
“Saun, you may have noticed, is a bit of an enthusiast. I wouldn’t take him too seriously, Hoharie.”
She shook her head. “I saw you do things with ground projection and manipulation, inside that groundlock, that I can still barely wrap my mind around. I examined Artin, after it was all over. You not only could do it, you could be good, Dag. A lot of people can patrol. Not near as many can do this level of making, fewer still such direct groundwork. I know—I scout for apprentices every year.”
“Be reasonable, Hoharie. Groundsense or no, a medicine maker needs two clever hands for, well, all sorts of tasks. You wouldn’t want me sewing up your torn trousers, let alone your torn skin. And the list goes on.”
“Indeed it does.” She smiled and leaned forward. “But—patrollers work in partnered pairs all the time. You’re used to it. And I get, from time to time, a youngster mad for medicine-making, and with clever hands, but a bit lacking on the groundsense side. You get along well with youngsters, even if you do scare them at first. I’m thinking—what about pairing you up with someone like that?”
Dag blinked. Then blinked again. Spark? She had the cleverest hands of anyone he’d ever met, and, absent gods knew, the wits and nerve for the task. His imagination and heart were both suddenly racing, tossing up pictures of the possibilities. They could work together right here at Hickory Lake, or at Bearsford Camp. Honorable, necessary, respected work, to win her a place here in her own right. He could be by her side every day. And every night. And once she was trained, they might do more…would Fawn like the notion? He would ask her at once. He grinned at Hoharie, and she brightened.
“I see you get the idea,” she said in a tone of satisfaction. “I’m so glad! As you might guess, I have someone in mind.”
“Yes.”
“Oh, did Othan talk to you?”
“Beg pardon?”
“It’s his younger brother, Osho. He’s not quite ready for it yet, mind, but neither are you. But if I knew he’d be pairing with you, I could admit him to training pretty soon.”
“Wait, what? No! I was thinking of Fawn.”
It was Hoharie’s turn to rock back, blinking. “But Dag—even if she’s still—she has no groundsense at all! A farmer can’t be a medicine maker. Or any kind of a maker.”
“Farmers are, in their own way, all the time. Midwives, bonesetters.”
“Certainly, but they can’t use our ways. I’m sure their skills are valuable, and of course better than nothing, but they just can’t.”
“I’d do that part. You said.”
“Dag…the sick and the hurt are vulnerable and touchy. I’m afraid a lot of folks wouldn’t trust or accept her. It would be one strange thing too many. There’s also the problem of her ground. I like Fawn, but having her ground always open around delicate groundwork, maybe distracting or interfering…no.”
It wouldn’t distract me, he thought of arguing. He settled his shoulders back on his cushion, his little burst of excitement draining away again, leaving his fatigue feeling worse by contrast. Instead, he asked, more slowly, “So why don’t we do more for farmers? No, I don’t mean the strong makers like you, you’re rare and needed here, but all of us. The patrols are out there all the time. We know and use a dozen little tricks amongst ourselves, that we could find ways to share. More than just selling plants and preparations. We could build up goodwill, over time.” He remembered Aunt Nattie’s tale of her twisted ankle. Just such a good deed had borne some fair fruit, even decades afterwards.
“Oh, Dag.” Hoharie shook her head. “Do you think no one’s tried it, tempted through pity? Or even friendship? It sounds so fine, but it only works as long as nothing goes wrong, as it inevitably must. That goodwill can turn to bad will in a heartbeat. Lakewalkers who let themselves get in over their heads trying to share such help have been beaten to death, or worse.”
“If it were…” His voice faltered. He didn’t have a counterargument for this one, as it was perfectly true. There has to be a better way was easy to say. It was a lot harder to picture exactly how.
Returning to her subject, Hoharie said, “Fairbolt doesn’t much want to give you up, but he would for this. He can see a lot of the same things I do. He’s watched you for a long time.”
“I owe Fairbolt”—Dag lifted his left arm—“everything, pretty much. My arm harness was his doing. He’d spotted something like it in Tripoint, see. A farmer artificer and a farmer bonesetter over there had got together to fix things like it for some folks who’d lost limbs in mining and forge accidents. Neither of them had a speck of groundsense, but they had ideas.”
Hoharie began to speak, but then turned her head; in a moment, Fawn popped around the tent’s open side, looking equally pleased and anxious. “Hoharie! I’m so glad you’re here. How is he doing? Mari was worried.”
As if Fawn didn’t expect her own worry to count with the medicine maker? And is she so wrong in that?
Hoharie smiled reassuringly. “He mostly needs time and rest and not to do fool things.”
Dag said plaintively, not to mention horizontally, “How can I do fool things when I can’t do anything?”
Hoharie gave his query the quelling eyebrow twitch it deserved, and went on to give Fawn a set of sensible instructions and suggestions, which added up to food, sleep, and mild camp chores when ready. Fawn listened earnestly, nodding. Dag was sure she’d remember every word. And be able to quote them back at him, likely.
Hoharie rose. “I’ll send Othan down in a couple of days to pull those stitches out.”
“I can do that myself,” said Dag.
“Well, don’t,” she returned. She glanced down at him. “Think about what I said, Dag. If your feet—or your heart—ache too much to walk another mile, you could do a world of good right here.”
“I will,” he said, unsettled. Hoharie waved and took herself out.
Frowning, Fawn flopped down on her knees beside him and ran a small hand over his brow. “Your eyebrows are all scrunched up. Are you in pain?” She smoothed away the furrows.
“No.” He caught the hand and kissed it. “Just tired, I guess.” He hesitated. “Thinkin’.”
“Is that the sort of thinkin’ where you sit like a bump for hours, and then jump sideways like a frog?”
He smiled despite himself. “Do I do that?”
“You do.”
“Well, I’m not jumping anywhere today.”
“Good.” She rewarded this resolve with a kiss, and then several more. It unlocked muscles in him that he hadn’t known were taut. One muscle, at least, remained limp, which would have disturbed him a lot more if he hadn’t been through such convalescences before. Must rest faster.
Dag spent the next three days mired in much the same glazed lassitude. He was driven from his bedroll at last not by a return of energy, but by a buildup of boredom. Out and about, he found unexpectedly intense competition for the sitting-down camp chores among the ailing—Utau, Cattagus, and himself. He watched Cattagus, moving at about the same rate he did, and wondered if this was what it was going to feel like to be old.
> There being no hides to scrape at the moment, and Utau and Razi having shrewdly been first in line to help Cattagus with his elderberries, Dag defaulted to nut-cracking; he had, after all, a built-in tool for it. He was awkward at first with the fiddly aspects, but grew less so. Fawn, who plainly thought the task the most tedious in the world, wrinkled her nose, but it exactly suited Dag’s mood, not requiring any thought beyond a vague philosophical contemplation of the subtle shapes of nuts and their shells. Walnuts. And hickory shells. Over and over, very reliably. They might resist him, but only rarely did they counterattack, the hickory being the more innately vicious.
Fawn kept him company, first spinning, then working on two pairs of new riding trousers, one for him and one for her, made of cloth shared by Sarri. Sitting with him in the shade of their awning one afternoon, she remarked, “I’d make you more arrows, but everyone’s quivers are full up.”
Dag poked at a particularly intractable nutshell. “Do you like making arrows better than making trousers?”
She shrugged. “It just feels more important. Patrollers need arrows.”
He sat back and contemplated this. “And we don’t need trousers? I think you have that the wrong way round, Spark. It’s poison ivy country out there, you know. Not to mention the nettles, thistles, burrs, thorns, and bitey bugs.”
She pursed her lips as she poked her needle slowly through the sturdy cloth. “For going into a fight, though. When it counts.”
“I still don’t agree. I’d want my trousers. In fact, if I were waked up out of my bedroll in a night attack, I think I’d go for them before my boots or my bow.”
“But patrollers sleep in their trousers, in camp,” she objected. “Although not in hotels,” she allowed in a tone of pleasurable reminiscence.
“That gives you a measure of importance, then, doesn’t it?” He batted his eyes at her. “I can just picture it, a whole patrol riding out armed to the teeth, all bare-assed. Do you have any idea what the jouncing in those saddles would do to all our tender bits? We’d never make it to the malice.”
“Agh! Now I’m picturing it!’ She bent over, laughing. “Stop! I’ll allow you the trousers.”
“And I’ll thank you with all my heart,” he assured her. “And with my tender bits.” Which made her dissolve into giggles again.
He could not remember when she’d last laughed like this, which sobered him. But he still smiled as he watched her take up her sewing once more. He decided he would very much like to thank her with his tender bits, if only they would get around to reporting for duty again. He sighed and took aim at another hickory shell.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, while he was still recuperating, Fawn’s monthly came on—a bad one, it seemed, alarmingly bloody. Dag, concerned, dragged Mari over to Tent Bluefield for a consultation; she was reassuringly unimpressed, and rattled off a gruesome string of what Dag decided were the female equivalent of old-patroller stories, about Much Worse Things She Had Seen.
“I don’t recall the young women on patrol having this much trouble,” he said nervously, hovering.
Mari eyed him. “That’s because girls with these sorts of troubles gener’lly don’t choose to become patrollers.”
“Oh. Makes sense, I guess…”
Softening, Mari allowed as how Fawn was likely still healing up inside, which from the state of the scars on her neck Dag guessed to be exactly the case, and that the problems should improve over the next months, and even unbent enough to give Fawn a tiny ground reinforcement in the afflicted area.
Dag thought back to his too-few years with Kauneo, how a married man’s life got all wound about in these intimate rhythms, and how they had sometimes annoyed him—till he’d been left to wish for them back. He dealt serenely, wrapping hot stones, and coaxing some of Cattagus’s best elderberry wine out of him and into Fawn, and her pains eased.
At last, one bright, quiet morning, Dag hauled his trunk out under the canopy for a writing desk and took on the task of his letter to Luthlia. At first he thought he would keep it painlessly short, a sentence or two simply locating each bone’s malice kill. He was so much in the habit of concealing the complications of the unintended priming; it seemed so impossible to set it out clearly; and the tale of Fawn and her lost babe seemed too inward a hurt to put before strangers’ eyes. Silence was easier. And yet…silence would seem to deny that a farmer girl had ever had any place in all this. He weighed the smooth shards of Kauneo’s bone in his hand one last time before wrapping them up in a square of good cloth that Fawn had hemmed, and changed his mind.
Instead he wrote out as complete an account of the chain of events, focusing on the knives, as he could manage, most especially not leaving out his belief of how the babe’s ground had found refuge from the malice. It was still so compressed he wasn’t sure but what it sounded incoherent or insane, but it was all the truth as he knew it. When he was done he let Fawn read it before he sealed it with some of Sarri’s beeswax. Her face grew solemn; she handed it back with a brief nod. “That’ll do for my part.”
She helped him wrap up the packet carefully, with an outer cover of deer leather secured by rawhide strings for protection, and he addressed it to Kauneo’s kin, ready for Razi to take up to the courier at patroller headquarters. He fingered the finished bundle, and said slowly, “So many memories…If souls exist, maybe they lie in the track of time we leave behind us. And not out ahead, and that’s why we can’t find them, not even with groundsense. We’re lookin’ in the wrong direction.”
Fawn smiled wryly into his eyes, leaned up, and kissed him soft. “Or maybe they’re right here,” she said.
Fairbolt turned up the next day. Dag had been half-expecting him. They found seats on a pair of stumps out in the walnut grove, out of earshot from the busy campsite.
“Razi says you’re feeling better,” Fairbolt remarked, looking Dag over keenly.
“My body’s moving again, anyway,” Dag allowed. “My groundsense range still isn’t doing too well. I don’t think Hoharie’s notion that it has to come all the way back before I patrol again is right, though. Halfway would be good as most.”
“It’s not about you going back on patrol, for which judgment I’ll be relying on Hoharie and not you, thanks. It’s about your camp council summons. I’ve been holding ’em off on the word that you’re still too injured and ill after Raintree, which is harder to make stick when it’s seen you are up and about. So you can expect it as soon as that Heron Island dredging fracas is sorted out.”
Dag hissed through his teeth. “After Raintree—after all Fawn and I did—they’re still after a camp council ruling against us? Hoharie, and I, and Bryn and Mallora and Ornig would all be dead and buried right now in blighted Bonemarsh if not for Fawn! Not to mention five good makers lost. This, on top of the Glassforge malice—what more could they possibly want from a farmer girl to prove herself worthy?” His outrage was chilled by a ripple of cold reflection—in forty years he had never been able to prove himself worthy, in certain eyes. He’d concluded sometime back that the problem was not in him, it was in those eyes, and no doing of his could ever fix it. Why should any doing of Fawn’s be different?
Fairbolt scratched his ear. “Yeah, I didn’t figure that news would sit too well with you.” He hesitated. “I owe an apology to Fawn, for trying to stop her here when you were calling her from out of that groundlock. It seems right cruel, in hindsight. I had no idea it was you behind her restiness that day.”
Dag’s brows drew down. “You been talking to Othan about the Bonemarsh groundlock?”
“I’ve been talking to everyone who was there, as I had the chance, trying to piece it all together.”
“Well, just for the scribe, it wasn’t me who told Fawn to put that knife in my leg, like, like some malice riding a farmer slave. She figured it out by her own wits!”
Fairbolt held up both palms in a gesture of surrender. “Be that as it may, how are you planning to handle this council challenge? I’ve discou
raged and delayed it about as much as I can without being bounced off your hearing myself for conflict of interest. And since I don’t mean to let myself get excluded from this one, the next move has to fall on you. Which is where it belongs anyway, I might point out.”
Dag bent, venting a weary sigh. “I don’t know, Fairbolt. My mind’s been working pretty slow since I got back. It feels like a bug stuck in honey, truth to tell.”
Fairbolt frowned curiously. “An effect of that peculiar blight you took on, do you think?”
“I…don’t know. It’s an effect of something.” Accumulation, maybe. He could feel it, building up in him, but he could not put a name to it.
“It wouldn’t hurt for you to tell more of your tale around, you know,” said Fairbolt. “I don’t think everyone rightly understands how much would be lost to this camp, and to Oleana, if you were banished.”
“What, brag and boast?” Dag made a face. “I should be let to keep Fawn because I’m special?”
“If you’re not willing to say it to your friends, how are you going to stand up in council and say it to your enemies?”
“Not my style, and an insult to boot to everyone who walks their miles all the same, without fanfare or thanks. Now, if you want me to argue that I should be let to keep Fawn because she’s special, I’m for it.”
“Mm,” said Fairbolt. If he was picturing this, the vision didn’t seem to bring him much joy.
Dag looked down, rubbing his sandal in the dirt. “There is this. If the continued existence of Hickory Lake Camp—or Oleana—or the wide green world—depends on just one man, we’ve already lost this long war.”
“Yet every malice kill comes, at the end, down to one man’s hand,” Fairbolt said, watching him.
“Not true. There’s a world balanced on that knife-edge. The hand of the patroller, yes. But held in it, the bone’s donor, and the heart’s donor, and the hand and eye and ground of the knife maker. And all the patrol backing up behind who got the patroller to that place. Patrollers, we hunt in packs. Then all the camp and kin behind them, who gave them the horses and the gear and the food to get there. And on and on. Not one man, Fairbolt. One man or another, yes.”