“Muscle-headed turkey-wit,” Berry muttered under her breath. “He never changes.” She raised her voice and shouted after him, “What, are all your fellers too weak and worn out with flipping those dice to pull a bitty flatboat anymore? All little girly-arms on the Turtle, so sad!” She flapped hers limply in mockery.
Wain raised his arm and slapped his massive biceps. “Nice try, Berry!”
Fawn considered volunteering a kiss in Berry’s place, in support of the Fetch, but looking over the rowdy keelboat men decided better of the impulse.
“I’ll play you over the bar!” Berry raised her arms back and mimicked fiddling.
This actually started a hot debate amongst the dozen or so men of the Snapping Turtle’s crew; before it could quite turn to mutiny, Wain shouted, “A concert and a kiss!”
Berry gritted her teeth. “I’ll wait for the rain!”
Moans of disappointment drifted back from the keelboat, but the river bore it inexorably on, and in a few more minutes it had floated out of hearing and then sight. Berry heaved a frustrated sigh. It had all been fairly good-humored, Fawn thought, but—they were still stuck on the sand bar.
Copperhead was turned loose to graze on the island, since, although he had jumped into the water readily enough under Dag’s practiced persuasion, getting him back aboard would be nigh impossible until they could again tie the Fetch to the bank bow-first and run out the gangplank. The men washed in the river and came back aboard, crowding the hearth where Fawn was trying to start an early supper, there seeming to be little else to do for the long evening. They stamped and shivered and rubbed their hands, all but Dag who tucked his under his left arm, but eventually settled down enough out of her way that she could make pies and stew. Dag asked if Fawn wanted him to catch her some fish, but for some reason this amiable suggestion was voted down.
In the night Fawn awoke to find their bedroll empty of Dag. At first she thought he’d gone to piss, but when he didn’t reappear after a reasonable time, she wrapped a blanket around herself and crept out to look for him. A light was seeping in from around the bow hatch, too amber to be the moon. She slipped out the door and closed it behind her. The night air was cold, damp, and smelled of fallen leaves and the river, with a whiff of warm goat and sleepy chicken, but overhead the stars burned bright.
The bench was pulled out from the wall, and Dag was sitting astride it, with a lantern glowing at the other end. He seemed dressed by guess, hair sticking up, and was without his arm harness. He was frowning down at two little piles of mixed oats and corn kernels on the board between his knees, although when she came to his shoulder he looked up and cast her a quick smile.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
He ran his hand through his hair, to no good effect. “I’ve gone back to oats. Figured you’d approve.”
She nodded provisionally. “Are you planning to ground-rip some?” She didn’t see any little piles of gray dust, so perhaps she’d caught him in time. Which begged the question In time for what?—although it was possible her mere presence would inhibit him from dodgier trials.
He made an odd face. “I got to thinking. Even a malice doesn’t normally ground-rip its victims down to deep physical structure—that gray slumping’s more an effect of prolonged draining blight. It only snatches the life-ground. The cream off the top, if you will.”
She frowned in concentration. “I remember when Dar told me about how sharing knives are primed. The knife just draws in a person’s dying ground. The whole person doesn’t dissolve. So it’s not just malices.”
His lips parted, closed. “That’s…a better thought. Though I don’t think of sharing knives as ground-ripping so much as accepting the greatest possible ground-gift. I…hm.” His brows drew in. After a moment he shook off the distracting notion, whatever it was, and went on. “Live ground is more complex than the ground of inert or dead things—lighter, brighter, more fleeting…and it seems”—he reached out with a fingertip beneath his hovering stump and shifted one more oat from the pile on his right to the pile on his left—“more digestible. Speaking of ground-colic.”
She estimated the number of grains in each pile. It was a lot more than ten. “Dag,” she said uneasily, “how many of those are you planning to try?”
He chewed on his lip. “Well, you remember back in Raintree when every patroller in camp who knew how gave me a ground reinforcement, trying to get me better quick so’s we could all ride home?”
“Yes?”
“After a while I started seeing these wavering purple halos around things, and Hoharie made them stop. She said I needed more absorption time.”
“You didn’t tell me about any purple halos!”
He shrugged. “They went away in a day. Anyway, the experience gave me a notion to try. I figure I’ll have hit my daily limit in live-ground theft when things start looking sort of lavender around the edges.”
She pursed her lips in doubt. But how could she demand he not explore his abilities when she was so full of questions herself? There was no expert here for him to beg explanations of. He could only question his own body and ground with these trials, and listen carefully to the answers. Truly, somebody had once had to try everything for the first time, or there would be no experts.
“Are you still thinking that if you could get more ground-food to restore yourself, you could do more healing, faster?”
He nodded. “Maybe. Of Lakewalkers, leastways. But I want to heal farmers, and if I can’t figure out this beguilement problem…” He moved another oat. Then a corn kernel. Then he sat up, blinked, twisted around, and stared at her face.
“Do I have a purple halo now?” she asked a little grimly.
He reached back, moved another oat, and blinked again. “Now you do,” he said in a voice of tentative satisfaction.
“Then stop!”
“Yes,” he sighed. He rubbed his night-stubbled chin and stared down at the two little heaps. “Huh.”
“Hm?”
“This pile”—he pointed to the one on his right—“is live seeds. If you put them in the ground and watered ’em, you’d get new plants.”
“Maybe,” said Fawn, from a lifetime’s experience on a farm. “Anyhow, if you planted enough of them, you’d likely get something. Plus the weeds.”
“This pile,” he said, ignoring the commentary, “is dead seeds. Plant them and they would just sit there and rot. Eventually.”
A bleak look crossed his face, and Fawn wondered if his mind’s eye was seeing a long row of uncorrupted little corpses. Blight it, oats weren’t children. Well, she supposed they were the oat plant’s children, in a way, but down that line of thought lay madness for anyone who meant to go on living in the world. She put in quickly, “Seeds won’t sprout once you cook them, either. How is this different from cooking our food, really?”
His squint, after a moment, grew grateful. “There’s a point, Spark.”
She peered more closely. The heap on the left did seem a bit duller to her eye than the bright yellow grains on the right. She pointed to the dull heap. “Could you still eat those, like cooked food?”
He looked a bit taken aback. “I don’t know. You’d think they’d have lost something.”
“Would they poison you?”
“I have no idea.” He stared down at the little pile for a long time. “I’d try feeding that handful to Copperhead, but he’s over on the island, and, well, a horse. We’ve no dog.” His eye fell speculatively on Daisy-goat.
“We drink milk from that goat,” Fawn said hastily. And, as his face swiveled toward the chicken pen, “And we eat the eggs!”
He frowned, then got a faraway look for a moment. A scratching sound made Fawn glance down to find that Hawthorn’s raccoon kit had appeared at Dag’s ankle and was pawing at his trouser leg. Dag reached down and gathered up the creature, tucking it in the crook of his left arm. Its little leathery paws gripped his sleeve, and its bright black eyes twinkled from its furry mask.
<
br /> “Dag,” Fawn gasped, “you can’t!”
“The horse, goats, chickens, and you are out,” he said patiently. “What’s left on this boat that’ll eat grain? Well, Hod, but no. I don’t think it will poison the little critter, really.”
“It’s just not right. I mean, at the very least you should ask Hawthorn’s permission, and I can’t see you explaining all this to Hawthorn!”
“I can’t even explain it all to myself,” Dag sighed. “Very well.” He scooped up the pile of grain and raised his palm to his own lips.
“No!” Fawn clapped her hand to her mouth to muffle her shriek.
Dag raised his brows at her. “You can’t say I don’t have the right.”
Fawn bounced up and down in dismay, lips pressed tight. And finally blurted, “Try it on the raccoon, then.”
He tilted his head ironically at her and offered the grain to the kit. The kit seemed only mildly interested—spoiled, Fawn thought, by the tastier fodder that everyone aboard slipped to it—but at Dag’s urging and, she suspected, sorcerous persuasion, it did nibble down a spoonful or so of the grains, whiskers twitching. When Dag let it go, it toddled off, apparently unaffected, or at least it didn’t drop over dead on the spot. Dag tossed the remaining handful of dead seeds over the side, wiped his palm on his shirt, and picked off a few raccoon hairs. His eye fell on the chicken coop. “Food, huh,” he said in a distant tone. “I wonder what would happen if I tried to ground-rip a chicken? Next time you mean to serve up a chicken dinner, Spark, let me know.”
Fawn mentally took chicken off her menu plans for the indefinite future. “I don’t know, Dag. The idea of you ripping seed grains doesn’t bother me a bit. But if you could rip a chicken, could you—” she broke off.
He eyed her, not failing to follow. “Ground-rip a person? In full malice mode? I don’t know. A person’s bigger. I begin to suspect I could rip up a person’s ground, at least. And yes, the idea does trouble me, thank you very much.”
Fawn scrubbed her mouth with the back of her hand. “You can rip up a person’s body and ground with your war knife, and you have. Would this truly be different?”
“I don’t know yet,” sighed Dag. “Spark, I really do not know.” He folded her in to him then, leaning his forehead against hers. “I’ve been wondering for some time if I’ve stumbled across some craft secrets of senior medicine makers. Now you have me wondering if it’s secrets of the senior knife makers, instead. They’re even more close-mouthed about their work, and it may be with good reason. Because…”
“Because?” she prompted, when he didn’t go on.
“Because I can’t be the only person with these abilities. Unless I truly have been malice-corrupted, somehow. I wish I had someone to…”
“Someone to ask?” Alas, not Remo; a nice young patroller, but no maker.
Dag shook his head. “Someone safe to ask.”
“Urgh.” She didn’t fail to follow, either.
“Hoharie might be, but she’s back at Hickory Lake. She saw me—I don’t think I told you about this…”
Fawn rolled her eyes. “More purple halos? Yes?”
“Sorry. At the time, I didn’t know what to make of it, so I didn’t talk about it. But when her apprentice Othan was trying to give a ground reinforcement to my broken arm, he couldn’t get in. I ended up sort of…ripping it from him as he was trying to give it. Hoharie was right there, watching.”
“And?”
“And her only reaction was to try to recruit me for a medicine maker. On the spot. Till I pointed out my little problem with fine hand-work.” He waved his stump. “Later, she came up with the idea of partnering me with Othan’s brother, for my spare hands. If she’d offered to partner me with you, I might have taken her up on it, and we’d still be there instead of here. But she shied off from that suggestion.”
Fawn couldn’t decide if that would have been good or not, so only tilted her head, I hear you. But she pounced quickly on the important point. “That was well before you ground-ripped the malice in Raintree, right?”
“Yes…?”
“So these new abilities”—she leaned back and gripped his left arm—“can’t be some sort of malice-contagion you picked up then, because you developed them before. I don’t think you’re turning into a malice.” Or you would be more scary, instead of just more aggravating. “If that’s what’s worrying you.”
From the play of expression on his face—first dismay, then relief—she realized she’d just spoken his most secret fear. And that, once dragged out into open air, it shrank hearteningly. “It…was a passing thought, I admit.” He ducked his head, then smiled crookedly and held her closer. “So if I turned into a malice, would you still love me?”
“If you really turned into a malice, you’d just eat me, and the question wouldn’t arise,” she said a bit tartly.
“That’s how we’d know, I suppose,” he allowed.
“You’d know, anyhow.” She thought about it. “Or maybe you wouldn’t. You’d be too stuck inside your own torment to even see mine.”
“Ah. Yes. You did look one straight in the eye, that time.” His fingers brushed the scars on her neck, not to say I forgot so much as I should have realized. His eyes darkened with his own memories. “From what I’ve seen of the inside of a malice, you’re right. You have an uncomfortably acute way of looking at things sometimes, Spark.”
Fawn just shook her head. This conversation was spiraling into the dark, or at least into the creepy, in a way that suggested it was time for bed, because no further good could come of it tonight. She picked up the lantern and led the way.
15
Dag was reassured early the next morning of the health of the raccoon kit, as it woke him by nosing curiously in his ear. It also conveniently left a scat on the end of their blankets, not for the first time, as the creature seemed to have a partiality for their bed-nook. Dag took the pellet outside to the goat pen in the gray light to squash open with a stick. He would not have been surprised to find that the ripped grains had passed through whole, or even some odder effect, but they appeared to have been digested normally, with no sign of blood or blight to the kit’s gut. So it seemed he could leave a trail of sterile seeds in his wake and do the world no harm. Though he was still deeply suspicious of their reuse as feed; perhaps he would buy his own chicken at the next stop to test them upon in a more methodical way. And put Fawn in charge of it, as he was by no means sure of his ability to keep a chicken alive in the first place, and he wouldn’t want to make a mistake, here.
He leaned on the boat rail and watched the sky lighten from steel to silver to gold in a pure autumn sunrise, color seeping into the low hills lining the mist-shrouded river. It looked to be another brisk blue day like yesterday, which did not bode well for getting the Fetch off the sand bar. But a day of rest would be welcome. Perhaps he and Fawn could take a two-person picnic to the other end of the island. He extended his groundsense to check the chances of privacy, assuming they could successfully lose Whit, Hod, Remo, Hawthorn, and the raccoon. The island was a good two miles long, rich in natural ground, free of blight-sign, and, he found, unpeopled.
His breath drew in sharply, and he tested that range again, turning slowly. To both ends of the island, yes; he could clearly sense the head and tail where the stolidity of land met the melting motion of water. He cast his inner senses up along the farther hills, taking in the trees settling down root-deep for their winter sleep; drying, dying plants with bright seed-sparks armored in burrs; a multitude of small creatures burrowing, nesting, nosing through the brush, flitting from branch to branch; the slower lumbering of a family of black bears in the shadow of a ravine. It’s back. It’s all back, my full range! If only he were still at Hickory Lake, he could go out on patrol again.
He could hear the rattle of Fawn starting breakfast, and her voice scolding the kit out from underfoot and Hawthorn out of his bunk to take charge of it. His mouth quirked in the sure realization that if he were give
n, right this minute, the unfettered choice of whether to go back or go on—he’d go on. Smiling, he ducked inside and made his way to the back deck to wash up.
The morning meal was leisurely, abundant, and prolonged; the sun was high over the hills before Fawn stopped thinking of amusing new treats to try cooking up out of the Fetch’s stores. The younger male eaters, originally ravenous, showed signs of going sessile, losing interest in the idea of hunting on the island in favor of lazing on the boat, at least till Berry starting reeling off a long list of maintenance chores that a fellow with time on his hands could turn to.
On impulse, Dag interrupted this: “Actually, I’d like to borrow Remo and Hod this morning. And Fawn. I want to try some things.”
Berry looked up shrewdly. “Is this about Hod’s beguilement thing?”
“Yep,” said Dag, and marveled at how far they’d come, that he could say such a thing openly—and be understood, at least well enough to go on with.
Boss Berry nodded. “Fine by me.” She added wistfully, “Say, I don’t suppose you two Lakewalkers can magic up some rain for us while you’re at it?”
“I don’t know of any groundwork that manages weather, sorry,” said Dag seriously. “Though who knows what the old lake lords could do, back before the world broke?”
Berry eyed him. “That was a joke, Dag.”
“Oh.”
Fawn patted his hand. “That’s all right. I don’t always get patroller humor, either. Though if something’s appalling, patrollers likely think it’s hilarious.”
Remo looked as though he wanted to object to this, but his mouth was too full.
Dag originally thought to retreat to the boat roof for the trials he had in mind, but then decided it would be best to get more out of groundsense range from the others. They rowed to shore dry-shod in the Fetch’s little skiff, though they might almost have waded, and hiked up the bank, waving good-bye to Berry and Whit, who were setting up a makeshift water-gauge in hopes of spotting some slight rise that might be just enough to lift the flatboat out of its sandy trap. At a high-ish spot near the towhead, with a view up the river valley framed by sand bar willows, Fawn laid out a blanket, and they all settled cross-legged in a circle and looked to Dag. Hod gulped nervously. Remo frowned in misgiving. Fawn just waited, watching him.