“Dag, if you do not burn those abominations and take that girl right back where you found her, you are never entering my tent again.” Had Cumbia been rehearsing too? Coached by excited rumormongers? There seemed something deeply awkward about her, as if her mouth and eyes were trying to say two different things. Dag might know with his groundsense, if he hadn’t obviously closed it down as hard as a hickory shell.
Dag smiled, or at any rate, his mouth curved sunnily, though his eyes stayed tight, making him look, for a moment, oddly like his mother. “Very good, ma’am.” He turned to his stunned listeners. “Omba, Dar, good to see you again. Fawn, get your bags and bedroll. We’ll send someone back for the saddles tomorrow. Omba, if she throws them out in the rain, could you put them under cover for me?”
Omba, staring wide-eyed, nodded.
Wait, what? “But Dag—”
He bent and hooked up Fawn’s saddlebags and handed them to her, then hooked his own over his shoulder. She clutched the heavy load awkwardly to her chest as he put his arm around her back and turned her toward the clearing. The first big raindrops spattered down, batting the hickory leaves and hitting the dirt with audible plops.
“But Dag, no one—she hasn’t—I haven’t—”
Reversing herself abruptly, Cumbia said, “Dag, you can’t go out there now, it’s coming on to storm!”
“Come along, Spark.” He hustled her out.
A few fat drops plunked onto the top of her head like hard finger-taps, soaking cold down to her scalp. “But Dag, she’s not hardly—I didn’t even get a chance to—” Fawn turned back to dip her knees again and call a desperate, “Nice to meet you, ma’am!” over her shoulder.
“Where are you going?” cried Cumbia, echoing Fawn’s thoughts exactly. “Come back out of the rain, you fool!”
“Keep walking,” Dag muttered out of the corner of his mouth. “Don’t look back, or it’ll be all to do over again.” As they passed a big basket leaning against a stump, piled high with dark round shapes, he thunked his hook into one, snatching it up in passing. His stride lengthened. Fawn scurried to keep up.
As they reached the road, Dag hesitated, and Fawn panted, “Where are we going?”
He glanced over his shoulder. Through the trees, the far shore of the lake had disappeared behind a thick gray curtain of rain; Fawn could hear the oncoming hiss of it. “I have some folks who owe me favors, but that’ll best be for tomorrow, I think. Right now we just need shelter. This way.”
To Fawn’s considerable dismay, he turned down the path leading to the bone shack. She grappled her saddlebags around over her shoulder and trotted after. The fat raindrops gave way, in a cold gust, to little hailstones, slicing down through the leaves and bouncing off the path, and, more painfully, off her. The pebble-sized ice triggered a heavier and even more alarming hail of hickory husks as the trees creaked in the wind, and Fawn pictured heavy branches coming down on them like huge hammers. Both she and Dag ducked and ran through the ominous shadows.
She was gasping and even Dag was out of breath when they arrived back at Dar’s work-cabin. Along the eaves, the bones spun and knocked against one another in the gusts like dreadful wind chimes. Hail and hickory husks rattled off the roof shingles, sometimes sailing up again in high arcs before plopping to earth that was rapidly turning to mud. She and Dag thumped up the steps and huddled under the little porch roof.
With his wet hair plastered to his forehead and his jaw set, Dag attempted to free his hook from the plunkin by grasping the round root under his sling-arm, which made his saddlebags in turn slide off his shoulder and land on his feet. He cursed.
“Here,” said Fawn in exasperation. “Let me.”
She dumped her own bags, wriggled the plunkin free of his hook, set it down, then turned to pluck the latchstring out of its slot and pull the door open. The shuttered cabin was dark, and she peered in doubtfully.
Dag bent down to hook futilely at his bootlaces. “Undo these for me, would you, Spark?” he muttered. “Dar doesn’t like his floor dirtied.”
She knocked the hook aside before he could snarl the laces into inextricable wet knots, undid first his, then hers, and set both pairs beside the door. She wiped her hands in aggravation on her riding trousers and followed him inside. He bent over a workbench; a welcome light flared from a good beeswax candle in a clay holder. He lit a second from the first, and with that and the faint gray light leaking through the shutters and from the door, she was finally able to see clearly.
The space was a bare dozen feet long by ten or so wide, lined with shelves and a couple of scarred but cleared-off workbenches. Stools of various heights made from upended logs, cut away beneath for legs and above for short backrests, were thrust under the benches. The space smelled of old wood and fresh wood, herbs and solvents, the honeyed warmth of the candles, oil, leather, and time. And under it all, something undefinable; she tried not to think, death.
Dag dragged their bags just inside the door, rolling the plunkin along after with his foot. He closed the door against the gusts. Minus the rattling of bones and clatter of ice and nuts on the roof, the threatening creak of the trees in the wind, the howling storm, the interminable day, the harrowing scene, or half scene, they’d just been through, and both their moods, it might have been almost cozy. As it was, Fawn would have burst into tears if she hadn’t been so close to just bursting.
“So,” she said tightly, “what happened to all your smooth Lakewalker persuadin’, back there?”
Dag sighed and stretched his back. “There were only two ways it could go, Spark. Slow and excruciating, or fast and excruciating. Like yanking a tooth, I prefer my pain to go fast.”
“You didn’t even give her a chance to say her piece!”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Fewest unforgivable things we had the time to say to each other the better, I’d say.”
“I didn’t get a chance to say my piece! I didn’t even get to try with her! I’m not saying I would have got anywhere either, but at least I’d have known I tried!”
“I know that trying. Spark, it would’ve near broke my heart to watch you turning yourself inside out with it. I couldn’t have stood it.”
He turned to attempt to undo their bedroll strings with his hook; after watching him for a frustrated moment, Fawn reached past and plucked the knots apart, helping him unroll their blankets across the floor. He sat down on his with a weary grunt. She sat down opposite, cross-legged, frowning up at him, and raked her hands through her damp distracted curls.
“Sometimes, once folks have a chance to vent, they’ll calm down and talk more reasonable.” Cumbia had already advanced as far as promoting Fawn from farmer whore to that girl just in the short time she’d been given, scarcely worse than the that fellow that was Dag’s common name in West Blue. Who knew where they might have ended up if they’d just kept at it a bit?
He shrugged. “She won. It’s done.”
“If she won, what was her prize?” Fawn demanded. “I don’t see how anyone won anything much, back there.”
“Look—I didn’t leave, she threw me out. Either she means it, and she’ll never speak to me again, or else it’ll be up to her to apologize.”
“So what you’re actually saying is, you won. Some tactics, Dag!”
He grimaced. “Learned ’em at my mother’s knee.”
“What has got into you? I’ve seen you in some moods, but I never saw you in a mood like this one! Can’t say as I much like it.”
He lay back and stared up at the peeled-log ridgepole. None of the support timbers for the roof were squared off or dressed, being just slim bare trunks of the right length fitted into triangles. “I don’t much like the way I get here, either. It’s like I lose myself when I get mixed up with my closest kin. Dar and Mama mostly—my father when he was alive less so, but some. Mari I can stand. It’s part of why I touch down here lightly, or not at all if I can help it. A mile away, or better yet a hundred, I can go back to being me.”
/> “Huh,” said Fawn, mulling this over. She didn’t find it nearly as inexplicable as she might once have, remembering how vast new possibilities had seemed to open for her in Glassforge, and close down chokingly when she returned to West Blue. It was just that at Dag’s age she figured folks ought to be long over that sort of thing. Or maybe they’d just had more time to work down into a rut. Deep, deep rut. “Funny sort of exile.”
“Indeed it is.” But he wasn’t laughing.
The air was chilling fast as the storm rumbled through. The small stone fireplace was clearly there more for warming pots of work supplies than for heating the far from tight building, presumably not used in winter, but Dag bestirred them to lay a fire. “Have to replace that in the morning,” he muttered at the neat pile of deadfall standing ready on the porch just outside the door. But once the flames caught—Dag did seem to have a peculiar lucky knack for getting fires going—the yellow light, the scent of woodsmoke, and the occasional orange spark popping out onto the slate hearth lent some much-needed cheer to the room. Their hair and clothes began to dry, and Fawn’s skin lost its clamminess.
Fawn set a pot of rain-barrel water on an iron hook to boil for tea, swung it over the fire, and poked at the new coals with a stick, pushing more underneath her pot. “So,” she said, in what she hoped did not sound too desperate a tone, “where do we go tomorrow?”
“I figure to draw our own tent from Stores.”
They owned a tent? “Where will we set it up?”
“I have an idea or two. If they don’t work out, I’ll find a third.”
Which seemed to be all she was going to get right now. Was this clash with his family over, or not? It wasn’t that she thought Dag was lying to her, so much as that she was beginning to suspect his idea of a comfortable outcome did not match hers. If Lakewalkers didn’t marry farmers—or at least, didn’t do so and then take the farmers home—she wouldn’t expect the feeling here against her to be trifling or easily set aside. If this was something no one had successfully done before, her faith that Dag will know what to do was…if not misplaced, more hope than certainty. She wasn’t afraid of hard, but when did hard shade over into insurmountable?
Her stomach growled. If Dag was half as fatigued as she was, it was no wonder nobody seemed able to think straight. Food would help everything. She rolled the mysterious plunkin across in front of the hearth and stared at it. It still looked disconcertingly like a severed head. “What do we do with this?”
Dag sat cross-legged and smiled—not much of a smile, but a start. “Lots of choices. They all come down to plunkin. You can eat it raw in slices, peel it and cut it up and cook it alone or in a stew, boil it whole, wrap it in leaves and cook it in campfire coals, stick a sword through it and turn it on a spit, or, very popular, feed it to the pigs and eat the pigs. It’s very sustaining. Some say you could live forever on plunkin and rainwater. Others say it would just seem like forever.” He gestured to her belt knife, one of his spares that he’d insisted she wear since they’d left West Blue. “Try a slice.”
Dubiously, she captured the rolling globe between her knees and stabbed it. The brown rind was rather hard, but once opened revealed a dense, pale yellow fruit, solid all the way through, without a core or pit or seeds. She nibbled out a bite as if from a melon slice.
It was crunchy, not as sweet as an apple, not as starchy as a raw potato…“A bit parsnippy. Actually, quite a bit nicer than parsnip. Huh.” It seemed the problem was not in the quality, but in the quantity.
For simplicity, and because she really didn’t feel comfortable cooking over Dar’s fireplace, used for who knew what sorcerous processes, they ate it raw in slices. Although Fawn did draw the line at Dag’s attempt simply to stab his portion with his hook and gnaw around the edges; she peeled his piece and made him get out his fork-spoon. The plunkin was surprisingly satisfying. Hungry as they both were, they only disposed of half a head, or root, or whatever it was.
“Why don’t farmers have this?” Fawn wondered. “Food gets around. Flowers, too. Animals, too, really. We could grow it in ponds.”
Dag gestured with his slice, stuck on his fork-spoon. All right, so the official eating tool hadn’t made that much difference; it still made it all seem more like a real meal. “The ears need a little tickle in their grounds to germinate. If farmers planted them, they’d just go down in the mud and rot. It’s a trick most every Lakewalker here learns. I hated raft duty when I was young, thought it was the dullest thing possible. Now I understand why the old patrollers didn’t mind taking their turns, and laughed at me. Soothing, y’know.”
Fawn crunched valiantly and tried to picture a young, impatient Dag sitting out on a raft, mostly undressed, coppery skin gleaming in the sun, grouchily tickling plunkin ears, one after another after another. She had to smile. With two hands, scarless and unmarred. Her smile faded.
“They say the old high lords of the lake league made wonderful magical plants, and animals too,” Dag said thoughtfully. “Not many seemed to have survived the disasters. Plunkins have tricky growing conditions. Not too deep, not too shallow, mud bottoms. They won’t take in those deep, clear, rocky-bottomed lakes east or north. Makes them a regional, er, delicacy. And, of course, they need Lakewalkers, year after year after year. Makes me wonder how far back this camp goes, really.”
Fawn considered the continuity of plunkins. When all their world was falling apart around them, some Lakewalker ancestors must have kept the crop going. For hope? For habit? For sheer stubbornness? Eyeing Dag, she was inclined to bet on stubbornness.
They burned the rinds on the fire, and Fawn set the spare half aside for breakfast. Outside, the green dark of the storm had given way to the blue dark of night, and the rain had slowed to a steady drizzle. Dag hooked their bedrolls closer together.
Fawn felt her knife sheath shift between her breasts as she crawled across to sit again on her blanket, and reached up to touch it. “Do you think Dar was telling the truth about the knife?”
Dag leaned back against his saddlebags, damp bare feet to the fire, and frowned thoughtfully. “I think everything Dar said was truth. As far as it went.”
“So…what does that mean? Do you think he was holding something back?”
“Not sure. It’s not that…I’d say, the knife is a problem he wants to have go away, not explore.”
“If he’s as good a knife maker as you say, I’d think he’d be more curious.”
Dag shrugged. “Folks are at first. Like Saun the Sheep, or me at Saun’s age—it’s all new and exciting. But then it becomes the same task over and over, and the new becomes rare. Whether you then find novelty to be exciting or something to resent…Thing, is, Dar has spent thirty and more years, all day most every day, making weapons for his relatives and best friends to go kill themselves with. Whatever Dar is doing that lets him go on, I’m not inclined to fool with it.”
“Maybe we should ask after a younger knife maker, then.” Fawn shoved her own saddlebags around, trying for a more comfortable prop, and lay down next to Dag. “So…what did he—and you—mean when you said the ground had to have affinity? You used that word two or three times, like it meant something special.”
“Ah. Hm.” Dag rubbed his nose with his hook. His features were outlined in the orange glow from the fire, lapped by the light with the rest of him falling into shadow. The walls of the shack seemed to recede into a fathomless darkness. “Well, simply that malice ground takes up Lakewalker mortality readily, as the ground of bone takes up that of blood.”
Fawn frowned. “You have to figure, bones take up blood because they were once both together.”
“That’s right.”
“So…” She suddenly wasn’t sure she liked where this was going. “So…?”
“Legend would have it—legend is just like they say, only more dried up, you know?”
She nodded cautiously.
“In fact, no one alive now knows for sure. Those who knew died in the knowing, one, tw
o thousand years ago. Chronicles were lost, time was lost—was it two centuries or five or ten that dropped out, how many generations disappeared in the dark?”
“They kept the plunkins going, anyhow.”
His lips curved briefly. “There is that.”
“So what is this thing that’s known or not known?”
“Well, there is more than one version of how malices came into the world. We know they didn’t used to be here.”
“You’ve seen, what, twenty-seven of them? Up close? I don’t want to know what other people say. What do you believe?”
He sighed. “They say is all I have to go on, for most of it. They say the old lords of the lake league worked great magics in great groups. They combined up under the mastery of the high king. One king, the last king, greater and more cunning than any before, at the apex of the greatest array of mages ever assembled, reached beyond the bounds of the world for…something. Some say immortality. Some say power. The king stories mostly assume evil intent because of evil results—if there is punishment, there must have been a crime. They blame pride and selfishness, or whatever vice they’re especially miffed with. I’m not so sure. Maybe he was attempting to capture some imagined good to share, and it all went horribly wrong.
“You know I said the old lords used their magic to alter plants, animals, and themselves. And their children.” He tapped his temple with the backside of his hook, and Fawn realized he thought his eye color was a relic of those efforts. “Extended life, improved groundsense and ability to move the world through its ground.” He glanced, briefly and uneasily, at his left arm held up, and she knew he was thinking about his ghost hand again. He let it drop again to his side. “We Lakewalkers, we think, are the descendants of lesser hinterland lords—what must the great ones have been like?
“Anyway. In their attempt to enhance themselves, the high lords drew in something from outside the world. God, demon, other. If they’d kidnapped a god, it would explain why the gods shun us. And the king combined with it, or it with him. And became something that was neither. Vast, distorted, powerful, insane, and consuming ground instead of…of whatever they’d intended.”