Omba’s face lit, and she pounced on the prize. “Do I need those!” She came to a dead halt again at the sight of the cord on Fawn’s wrist, and made a choked noise down in her throat. Her gaze rose to Fawn’s face, her eyes widening in something between disbelief and dismay. “You’re a farmer! You’re that farmer!”
For an instant, Fawn wondered if there was some Lakewalker significance to Dag’s tricking Omba into accepting this gift from Fawn’s hands, but she had no time or way to ask. She dipped her knees, and said breathlessly, “Hello, Omba. I’m Fawn. Dag’s wife.” She wasn’t about to make some broader claim such as, I’m your new sister; that would be for Omba to decide.
Omba wheeled toward Dag, her eyebrows climbing. “And what does that make you, Dag Redwing Hickory? Besides head down in the slit trench.”
“Fawn’s husband. Dag Bluefield…To-Be-Determined, at this point.”
Or would the effect instead be to make Dag not Omba’s brother anymore? Lakewalker tent customs continued to confuse Fawn.
“You seen Fairbolt yet?” asked Omba.
“Just came from there. Saw Mari there, too.”
“You told him about this?” She jerked her head toward Fawn.
“Certainly.”
“What did he do to you?”
“Put me on sick list.” Dag wriggled his sling. “That was the To-Be-Determined part, or so I took it.”
Omba blew out her breath in unflattering wonder. But not, Fawn thought, in hostility; she hung on tight to that realization. It did not seem as though Dag had taken her advice to start with the hardest ones first. By later today, not hostile might yet look pretty good.
“What did Mari say to you all, last night?” asked Dag.
“Oh, there was a scene. She came in asking if we’d heard from you, which was a jolt to start, since you were supposed to be with her. Then she said she’d sent you home from Glassforge weeks ago, and everyone was worried you’d been injured, but she said not. Is that right?” She stared at the sling.
“Was at the time. I collected this on the way. Go on.”
“Then she had this wild tale about some cutie farmer girl being mixed up in your latest malice kill”—her eyes went curiously to Fawn—“which I barely believed, but now, hm. And that you’d jumped the cliff with her, which your mama hotly denied the possibility of, while simultaneously yelling at Mari for letting it happen. I kept my mouth shut during that part. Though I did wish you well of it.”
“Thank you,” said Dag blandly.
“Ha. Though I never imagined…anyway. Mari said that you’d gone off with the farmer girl, supposed to deliver her home or something. She was afraid you’d met some mishap at the hands of her kin—she said she was picturing gelding. That must have been some cliff. When Mari and your mama got down to arguing over lapses from twenty-five years back, I slipped out. But Mari took Dar down to the dock after, to talk private. He wouldn’t say what she’d added, except that it was about bone craft, which even your mama knows by now is the sign she’ll get no more from him.”
It seemed Mari was still keeping the tale of the accident to the second sharing knife close. Nor had the term pregnant turned up in relation to Fawn, at least in front of Dag’s mama. Fawn felt suddenly more charitable to Mari.
“Oh, Dag,” sighed Omba. “This is going to top anything you’ve done ever.”
“Look on the bright side. Nothing you can do ever after will top this. The effect might even be retroactive.”
She gave a bemused nod. “I’ll grant you that.” She slung the horseshoes onto some pegs on the nearest post, and held up her hands palm out in a warding gesture. “I think I’ll just stay out of this one altogether if you don’t mind.”
“You’re welcome to try,” said Dag amiably. “We were just over to the tent to drop our things, but it was empty. Where is everyone?”
“Dar went to the shack to work, or hide out. Mari was worried sick for you, and that shook him more than he was willing to let on, I think. She actually said I’m sorry to your mother at one point last night.”
“And Mama?” said Dag.
“Out on raft duty. Rationing plunkins.”
Dag snorted. “I’ll bet.”
“They tried to convince her to stay ashore with her bad back, but she denied the back and went. There will be no vile plunkin ear chucking today.”
Now Fawn was lost. “Rationing plunkins? Is there a shortage?”
“No,” said Dag. “This time of year, they’re worse than in season—they’re in glut.”
Omba grinned. “Dar still waxes bitter about how she’d nurse her supply through the Bearsford camp, like there was some sort of prize for arriving at spring with the most winter store still in hand. And then make you all eat up the old ones before allowing any fresh ones.”
Dag’s lips quirked. “Oh, yeah.”
“Did she ever go through a famine?” Fawn asked. “That makes people funny about food, I hear tell.”
“Not as far as I know,” said Omba.
She’s speaking to me, oh good! Though people wishful to vent about their in-laws would bend the ear of anyone who’d listen, so it might not signify much.
“Not that the choices don’t get a bit narrow for everyone by late winter,” Omba continued. “She’s just like that. Always has been. I still remember the first summer Dar and I were courting, when you grew so tall, Dag. We thought you were going to starve. Half the camp conspired to slip you food on the sly.”
Dag laughed. “I was about ready to wrestle the goats for the splits and the mishaps. Those are feed plunkins,” he added to Fawn aside. “Can’t think why I didn’t. I wouldn’t be so shy nowadays.”
“It is a known fact that patrollers will eat anything.” Omba twitched a speculative eyebrow at Fawn that made her wonder if she ought to blush.
To quell that thought, Fawn asked instead, “Plunkin ear chucking?”
Dag explained, “When the plunkin heads are dredged up out of the lake bottom, they have two to six little cloves growing up the sides, about half the size of my hand. These are broken off and put back down in the mud to become next year’s crop. Plunked in, hence the name. There are always more ears than needed, so the excess gets fed to the goats and pigs. And there are always a lot of youngsters swimming and splashing around the harvesting rafts, and, well, excess plunkin ears make good projectiles, in a reasonably nonlethal sort of way. Especially if you have a good slingshot,” he added in a suddenly warmly reminiscent tone. He paused and cleared his throat. “The grown-ups disapprove of the waste, of course.”
“Well, some do,” said Omba. “Some remember their slingshots. Someone should have given one to your mother when she was a girl, maybe.”
“At her age, she’s not going to change.”
“You’ve made a change.”
Dag shrugged, and asked instead, “How’re Swallow and Darkling?”
Omba’s face brightened. “Wonderful well. That black colt’s going to be fit to go for a stud when he’s grown, I think. He’ll fetch you a good price. Or if you finally want to trade in Snakebrain over there for dog meat, you could ride him yourself. I’d train him up for you. You two’d look mighty fine, patrolling.”
“Mm, thanks, but no. Sometime tomorrow or the next day, soon as I have a chance, I want to pull them out of the herd. I’ll get a packsaddle for Swallow, and Darkling can trot at her heels. Send them down to West Blue with my bride-gifts to Fawn’s mama, which I am fearsome late presenting.”
“Your best horses!” said Omba in dismay.
Dag smiled a slow smile. “Why not? They gave me their best daughter.”
“But I’m their only daughter,” said Fawn.
“Saves argument there, eh?” said Dag.
Omba caught up her braid and rubbed the end. “To farmers! What do they know about Lakewalker horses? What if they try to make Swallow pull a plow? Or cut Darkling? Or…” Her face screwed up, as she evidently pictured even worse farmer misuse of the precious horses
.
“My family takes good care of our horses,” said Fawn stiffly. “Of all our animals.”
“They won’t understand,” said Omba.
“I will,” said Dag. He gave her a nod. “See you at dinner. Who’s cookin’?”
“Cumbia. You might want to grab a plunkin off the goats on the way, to fortify yourselves.”
“Thanks, but I guess we’ll survive.” He gestured Fawn away. She gave Omba another knee-dip and smile by way of farewell; the Lakewalker woman just shook her head and returned a sardonic wave. But not hostile, Fawn reminded herself.
As they reached the bridge again, Dag held the gate aside for a girl leading a couple of horses with pannier baskets piled high with plunkins; she gave him a nod of thanks. These plunkins did indeed seem to be mostly broken or weirdly misshapen or with odd discolorations. Fawn glanced back to see her walking along chirping and tossing out plunkins along her path, and a general movement among the goats and pigs toward this feast.
“Lakewalker animals eat plunkins too, do they?”
“Horses and cows and sheep can’t. The pigs and goats chomp them down. So will dogs.”
“I haven’t seen many dogs. I’d think you’d have more, for hunting and such. For hunting malices, even.”
“We don’t keep many. Dogs are more hazard than help on patrol. The malices snap them right up, and they have no defense. Except us, and if you’re trying to bring down a malice, it’d be no use to be distracted trying to protect a dog, especially if it’s turning on you itself.”
As they strolled back along the shore road, Fawn asked curiously, “Was your mother ever a patroller?”
“I think she had the training, way back when. All the youngsters at least get taken out on short trips around the camps. Patrollers are chosen for two things, mainly. General health and strength, and groundsense range. Not everyone can project their groundsense out far enough to be useful on patrol. The lack’s not considered a defect, necessarily; many’s the quite competent maker who can’t reach out much beyond his arm’s length.”
“Is Dar like that?”
“No, his range is almost as long as mine. He’s just even better at what he does with bones. What my mother always wanted, now…” He trailed off.
Volunteering useful information at last? No, evidently not. Fawn sighed and prompted, “Was what?”
“More children. Just didn’t work out that way for her, whether because Father was out on patrol too much, or they were just unlucky, or what, I don’t know. I should have been a girl. That was my immediate next lapse after arriving late. Or been eight other children. Or had eight other children, in a pinch, and not off in Luthlia or someplace, but here at Hickory Camp. My mother had a second chance with Dar and Omba’s children. She kind of commandeered them from Omba to raise; which I gather caused some friction at first, till Omba gave up and went to concentrate on her horses. They’d worked it all out by the time I got back from Luthlia minus the hand, anyway. There’s still just a little…I won’t call it bad feeling, but feeling, there over that.”
Mother-in-law versus daughter-in-law friction was common coin in Fawn’s world; she had no trouble following this. She wondered if Cumbia’s thwarted thirst for daughters would extend itself to a little farmer girl, dragged in off patrol like some awkward souvenir. She had taken in one daughter-in-law, quite against custom, after all. Some hope there?
“Dag,” she said suddenly, “where am I going to live?”
He looked over and raised his eyebrows at her. “With me.”
“Yes, but when you’re gone on patrol?”
Silence. It stretched rather too long.
“Dag?”
He sighed. “We’ll just have to see, Spark.”
They were nearly back to his family tent-cabins when Dag paused at a path leading into the woods. If he was checking anything with his groundsense, Fawn could not tell, but he jerked his chin in a come-along gesture and led right. The high straight boles, mostly hickory, gave a pale green shade in the shadowless light, as though they were walking into some underwater domain. The scrub was scant and low on the flat terrain. Fawn eyed the poison ivy and stuck to the center of the well-trodden path, lined here and there with whitewashed rocks.
About a hundred paces in, they came to a clearing. In the center was a small cabin, a real one with four sides, and, to Fawn’s surprise, glass windows. Even the patrol headquarters had only had parchment stretched on window frames. More disturbingly, human thighbones hung from the eaves, singly or in pairs, swaying gently in the air that soughed in the papery hickory leaves overhead. She tried not to imagine ghostly whispering voices in the branches.
Dag followed her wide gaze. “Those are curing.”
“Those folks look well beyond cure to me,” she muttered, which at least made his lips twitch.
“If Dar’s busy with something, don’t speak till he speaks to us,” Dag warned in a quiet voice. “Actually, the same applies even if it looks like he’s doing nothing.”
Fawn nodded vigorously. Putting the picture together from Dag’s oblique descriptions, she figured Dar was the closest thing to a real Lakewalker necromancer that existed. She could not picture being foolish enough to interrupt him in the midst of some sorcery.
A hickory husk, falling from above, made a clack and a clatter as it hit the shingle roof and rolled off, and Fawn jumped and grabbed Dag’s left arm tightly. He smiled reassuringly and led her around the building. On the narrower south side was a porch shading a wedged-open door. But the man they sought was outside, at the edge of the clearing. Working a simple sapling lathe, so ordinary and unsorcerous-looking as to make Fawn blink.
Dar was shorter and stockier than Dag, a solid middle-aged build, with a more rectangular face and broader jaw. He had his shirt off as he labored; his skin was coppery like Dag’s but not so varied in its sun-burnishing. His dark hair was drawn back in a Lakewalker-style mourning knot, which made Fawn wonder who for, since his wife Omba’s hadn’t been. If there was gray in it, she wasn’t close enough to see. One leg worked the lathe; the rope to the sapling turned a clamp holding a green-wood blank. Both hands held a curved knife and bore it inward, and pale yellow shavings peeled away to join a kicked-about pile below. Two finished bowls sat on a nearby stump. In the shavings pile lay discarded a partially carved, cracked blank, and another finished bowl that looked to Fawn perfectly fine.
His hands most drew her eye: strong and long-fingered like Dag’s, quick and careful. And what a very odd thing it was that it should feel so odd to see them in a pair, working together that way.
He glanced up from his carving. His eyes were a clear bronze-brown. He looked back down, evidently trying to keep working, but after another spin muttered something short under his breath and straightened up with a scowl, allowing the blank to wind down, then unclamped it and dropped it into the shavings pile. He tossed the knife in the general direction of the stump and turned to Dag.
“Sorry to interrupt,” said Dag, nodding to the half bowl. “I was told you wanted to see me immediately.”
“Yes! Dag, where have you been?”
“Been getting here. I had a few delays.” He made the sling-gesture.
For once, it did not divert his interrogator’s eye. Dar’s voice sharpened as his gaze locked on his brother’s left arm. “What fool thing have you gone and done? Or have you finally done something right?” He let his breath out in a hiss as his eyes raked over Fawn. “No. Too much to hope for.” His brow wrinkled as he frowned at her left wrist. “How did you do that?”
“Very well,” said Dag, earning an exasperated look.
Dar walked closer, staring down at Fawn in consternation. “So there really was a farmer-piglet.”
“Actually”—Dag’s voice suddenly went bone dry—“that would be my wife. Missus Fawn Bluefield. Fawn, meet Dar Redwing.”
Fawn attempted a tremulous smile. Her knees felt too weak to dip.
Dar stepped half a pace back. “Ye gods,
you’re serious about this!”
Dag’s voice dropped still further. “Deadly.”
They locked eyes for a moment, and Fawn had the maddening sense that some exchange had passed or was passing that, once again, she hadn’t caught, although it had seemed to spin off the rather insulting term piglet. Or, from the heated look in Dag’s eye, very insulting term, although she couldn’t see exactly why; chickie and filly and piglet and all such baby-animal terms being used interchangeably for little endearments, in Fawn’s experience. Perhaps it was the tone of voice that made the difference. Whatever it was, it was Dar who backed down, not apologizing but changing tack: “Fairbolt will explode.”
“I’ve seen Fairbolt. I left him in one piece. Mari, too.”
“You can’t tell me he’s happy about this!”
“I don’t. But neither was he stupid.” Another hint of warning, that? Perhaps, for Dar ceased his protests, although with a frustrated gesture. Dag continued, “Omba says Mari spoke to you alone last night, after the others.”
“Oh, and wasn’t that an uproar. Mama always pictures you dead in a ditch, not that she hasn’t been close to right now and then just by chance, but I don’t expect that of Mari.”
“Did she tell you what happened to my sharing knife?”
“Yes. I didn’t believe half of it.”
“Which half?”
“Well, that would be the problem to decide, now, wouldn’t it?” Dar glanced up. “Did you bring it along?”
“That’s why we came here.”
To Dar’s work shack? Or to Hickory Lake Camp generally? The meaning seemed open.
“You seen Mama yet?”
“That will be next.”
“I suppose,” Dar sighed, “I’d best see it here, then. Before the real din starts.”
“That’s what I was thinking, too.”
Dar gestured them toward the cabin steps. Fawn sat beside Dag, scrunching up to him for solace, and Dar took a seat near the steps on a broad stump.
“Give Dar the knife,” said Dag. At her troubled look, he dropped a reassuring kiss atop her head, which made Dar’s face screw up as though he was smelling something rank. Fawn frowned but fished the sheath out of her shirt once more. She would have preferred to give it to Dag to hand to his brother, but that wasn’t possible. Reluctantly, she extended it across to Dar, who almost as reluctantly took it.