“I’ve patrolled down this way a time or two. These southern Lakewalkers haven’t got any more use for farmers than the ones back in Oleana do—and more land jealousy, what with the camps being squeezed up between farmer areas. And with malices so seldom found in these parts, the farmers don’t even give their patrollers that thin gratitude we get in the north. Though when a southern patrol does find a little sessile, ’bout once in a lifetime, you’d think it was the Wolf War breaking out again, the way they carry on . . . anyway. I doubt the pair of us would be any more welcome at New Moon Cutoff than we were at Hickory Lake.”
“Maybe, maybe not, if we made it plain we were just visiting. Seems to me it was mainly your tent-kin who thought I was a problem they had to fix.”
“Mm,” said Dag.
Fawn swallowed. “Or you could go without me. At least to see the man, and ask. I’d be all right staying with Berry and Whit.”
“You’re the light that I see by, Spark. I’m not letting go of you again.”
The flash in his eyes reminded her of the lantern reflection off Crane’s knife blade, held tight to her throat, that had shimmered across Dag’s face just before . . . just before.
“Then we’ll both go, and I’ll deal with whatever I’m dished out. If it’s no better than Hickory Lake, it’ll be no worse, either, and I survived that.” She pulled the unbreakable walnut from her pocket and rolled it curiously in her hand. “What you’re doing now all by yourself isn’t working, you say. If any of the rest of us could help you, we would have by now. Time to try something else. Stands to reason Dag! And if this Arkady fellow doesn’t work out, either, well, at least you can scratch him off your list, and be that much farther along.”
She watched his face scrunch up in doubt so intense it looked like pain, and added, “I can’t be happy while you’re hurtin’. We have some time to pass anyhow, waiting down here at the edge of the world for the cold to end before we travel. You’ve kept all your promises to show me the river, and Graymouth, and the sea. Now you can just show me New Moon Cutoff for dessert. And if it’s not as fine as the sea, at least it’ll be new to me, and that’ll be good enough.” She gave a determined nod, which made him smile, if a bit bleakly.
“If that’s what you really think, Spark,” he said, “then I’ll give the fellow a try.”
3
Two days of cold rain masked Dag’s disinclination to travel to New Moon Cutoff, so Fawn did not badger, but she did draw Barr and Remo into the project. When the next day dawned clear, the three of them had Dag on the road north, if not early, at least before noon. Barr and Remo claimed to be interested in buying horses for a better price than found in the Drowntown market, where the flatboat men not wishful to join keeler crews bid for mounts to carry them back home on the Tripoint Trace. Fawn wasn’t sure Dag was fooled, because he looked pretty ironic about it all, but he didn’t say anything cutting. Fawn rode rather guiltily on her new mare, now named Magpie; three sets of saddlebags were piled onto Copperhead, led by his master; the patroller men strode.
Or tried to. Outside of Graymouth, the road became a quagmire.
It was nearly impassable to wagons—they paused several times to offer help to farmers with wheels stuck up to the hubs; and once, the man was so desperate that he even accepted the offer, despite the three tall strangers being Lakewalkers. Though his thanks, afterward, were brief and worried, cast over his shoulder as he urged his team into motion once more. Pack trains of horses or mules made fairly good time on the hoof-pocked verge—a couple of them passed by southbound, bringing in loads of cotton, tea, and other mysterious local goods to the river port. Barr, however, complained bitterly about slogging in his farmermade boots, new bought in Graymouth.
“Don’t they fit right?” Fawn asked. “I thought you said you’d broken them in. Do they leak?”
“No more than you’d expect,” said Barr. “But look!” He raised one knee to display a boot.
From her saddle, Fawn looked blankly down at it.
“There must be ten pounds of mud stuck to each foot!” fumed Barr.
Fawn glanced at Remo, standing with his hands on his hips and grinning at his partner, and realized that his boots, though damp and stained, were largely clump-free. “Hey, Remo, how come your boots aren’t like that?”
Remo held out a leg and smugly rotated his ankle. “My cousin made these for me. They’re groundworked to shed the mud.”
“Cheer up, Barr,” Dag advised, smiling faintly. “I’ll help you fix them when we make camp tonight. Didn’t you learn how to renew leatherwork when you were on patrol back in Oleana?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“He usually sweet-talked one of the girls into doing it for him,” remarked Remo, staring off artlessly over sodden fields.
“I was going to say, renew, yes, but these boots have never been worked at all! I thought that needed to happen while they’re first made.”
“Usually, but I’ll see what I can lay in,” said Dag. “It’s not like I haven’t done trail fix-ups on leather gear ’bout ten thousand times.”
They trudged onward past a hamlet boasting an inn of sorts, but they still had two hours of daylight left for walking; only Fawn looked back in regret. When dusk descended, they found a high spot off the road to make a camp. Fawn was not impressed with its comforts, although the boys did get a fire going despite the damp. She unpacked their food and shared it around.
Dag and Barr were soon heads down over the offending boots. Dag, quite adeptly it seemed to Fawn, instructed Barr in how to persuade them to be more waterproof. Muddy boots. Soon to be un-muddy boots, but which would not then walk on their own, nor force their owner to dance through the night, nor stride leagues at a step. So much for glamorous Lakewalker magic, wicked necromancy, rumors of cannibalistic rites. If only other folks could see these fellows as I do . . .
“Hey, Fawn!” Remo called from beyond the firelight, where he’d been rustling around along a weed-choked drainage ditch. “Want an alligator?”
“No!” she cried back in alarm. “I don’t want one!” Had he found one? How big? Could it smell her new shoes from there? If so, would it be angry? And if Remo caught it, instead of being promptly bitten in traplike jaws as his carefree enthusiasm deserved, would he make her try to cook it . . . ?
Remo came tromping back out of the darkness with a wriggling form stretched between his two hands. Boot magic was temporarily abandoned as Barr jumped up to look, too. Dag, unhelpfully, sat on his log and grinned at Fawn’s expression. Which would have annoyed her more except his grins had grown too rare, lately.
“It’s . . . small,” said Fawn as the beast was eagerly presented to her gaze. A foot and a half of struggling lizard; Remo had one hand firmly clamped around its long snout and the other stretching its lashing tail. It hissed protest and churned its short legs, trying to claw its captor.
“Just a baby,” agreed Remo. “They hatch from eggs, they say. Like chickens.”
The bulging yellow eyes, with vertically slit pupils, looked even less friendly than a chicken’s. Baby or no, this was not, Fawn sensed, an animal that would welcome cuddling. Bo’s tale of the boy, the bear cub, and the thorn would have come out very differently in the end, if the boy had drawn the barb from the paw of a creature like this.
When the Oleana boys had finished exclaiming over the catch, they then squabbled over whether to let it go again. Fawn gave this plan no encouragement.
Even barring what horrors a malice might make of such a creature, those things grew, presumably, into what had mauled that boy at the Lakewalker camp. And if she volunteered to cook it, it couldn’t end up introduced alive into her bedroll later, although she supposed the boys would be more likely to try that game on each other than on Dag. They weren’t her own brothers. Their ruckus would still disrupt her sleep.
They toasted the meager fragments over the coals. Fawn found that alligator meat tasted like some off cross between pork and the boiled crab claw she ha
d tried in the Drowntown market—and like campfire smoke, of course, but everything tasted of that. It would beat starving, but Fawn did not foresee a future in alligator farming. Treating the skin did keep the patroller boys occupied for the rest of the evening, leaving Fawn to cuddle with Dag in their reptile-free bedroll in a vain attempt to get warm.
When the camp finally settled for the night, she murmured into his collarbone, “Dag . . . ?”
“Mm?”
“I thought what you and Remo discovered about unbeguiling, back up on the Grace, was pretty exciting. I figured you’d be talking about it to every new Lakewalker we met. Instead, I don’t recall as you’ve even spoken to any Lakewalker we’ve passed.”
He gave an unrevealing grunt. The verbal equivalent to that thing he did with his eyelids, she decided.
“I been wondering why not,” Fawn finished, refusing to be daunted.
He sighed. “It wasn’t quite that simple. Yes, my trick works to unbeguile farmers, I’m sure of that part, but I still don’t know what the effects are on the Lakewalker, to be taking in all that strange ground. I’m willing to experiment on myself. I’m less willing to put others at risk, till I know—” He broke off.
“What?”
“What I don’t know yet.”
She wanted to reassure him, to say, Well, at least we’re heading in the right direction to find out, but for all she knew she’d dragged them out on a fool’s errand. Tomorrow would—might—tell. “You will let this Arkady fellow know all about it, though, won’t you? Promise?”
“Oh, yes,” he breathed, stirring her curls. “Sleep, Spark.”
———
Midday, on a side road striking west from the Trace, they passed from fallow fields into woods; Dag guessed they were crossing out of farmerowned land onto that of the Lakewalker camp. The camp itself came up sooner than he’d expected, only a few miles farther on. Magpie, recognizing her former home, tried to pull ahead, and for the first time Fawn had to rein back to her companions’ walking pace. The road climbed a low rise that proved to be a former river bluff, and Dag’s heart gave an odd lurch when he glimpsed the familiar glint of lake water through the leafless trees. I’ve been long away from home, this patrol. This cutoff was an old watercourse of the Gray River, which had ages ago looped thirty miles west instead, leaving this crescent-shaped lake and the groove of land in which it lay.
A quarter mile along the crest, the road dodged left again, descending to the shallow lake valley. A spur curved back down the slope into the woods. Just past where the tracks met, two flanking tree stumps cradled a peeled pole across the road at knee height; not so much a gate as the idea of a gate. Less cursory were two armed patrollers, taking their turn at this light camp duty between patrols. They watched Dag’s little party approach with alert curiosity. Dag presumed their open groundsenses—his was nearly closed just now—assured them that their visitors bore no ill will.
“Oh, hey!” said Remo, his spine straightening. “It’s those two girls who were selling horses at the Drowntown market last week!”
“Oh?” Barr followed his gaze, brows climbing. “Aha! So, partner, why didn’t you take me along to help buy that birthday horse, huh?”
“Didn’t think you were interested in horses,” said Remo blandly.
They all paused before the level pole.
“Well, if it isn’t the quiet fellow from Oleana!” said one of the patrollers, who had red-brown braids wreathing her head. “How de’, Remo. What brings you here?” Her taller blond companion looked approvingly at the boys, curiously at Dag, and doubtfully at Fawn. The redhead added more anxiously, “That piebald mare is working out all right, isn’t she?”
Remo ducked his head and smiled. “Hi again! Yes, the mare’s fine.”
Fawn nodded friendly confirmation from atop Magpie, who stretched out her nose and snuffled at her former handlers. “We’ve just brought our, uh, friend Dag here along to see that Arkady Waterbirch fellow you two told us about.”
Remo having apparently become spokesman, Dag was inclined to let him continue; he merely added a nod and touched his forehead in polite greeting. Then he wondered exactly what Fawn and Remo had said about him, because the two women stared at him in some surprise. He rehitched Copperhead’s reins around his hook and waited.
Barr chipped in, with a fine white grin, “Hi, my name’s Barr. I’d be Remo’s partner who he forgot to mention. I’m from Oleana, too—Pearl Riffle Camp, way on up the Grace. Real malice country up north there, y’know. Seems he also forgot to tell me your names . . .” He trailed off invitingly.
There followed an exchange of pleasantries in which Barr smoothly managed to extract the patroller girls’ names, tent-names, projected patrol schedules, family situations, the fact that the tall blonde had just returned from exchange patrol but the shorter redhead had never been beyond the territory of her home camp, and whether either had any pretty sisters—or ugly brothers. Dag would have been tolerably amused, if he hadn’t been so tired and strained.
Remo listened with growing impatience. Giving up on waiting for a natural break in the flow, he gripped Barr’s arm and overrode him: “And where would we find Maker Waterbirch?”
“Oh,” said the redhead, Tavia. She swung around and waved her arm toward the lake. “If you follow this road down and take the right-hand fork along the shoreline, you’ll pass the medicine tent about half a mile in. Old Arkady’s is the third tent after that, set apart. There’s these two big magnolia trees flanking his front path, you can’t miss them.” She glanced up at the listening Fawn, collected a nudge from her blond partner Neeta, and added, “If you follow this side road off east here, back down the slope, there’s a shelter and camp for farmers who come here to trade. Has its own well and all. Your farmer friend can wait there.”
“She’s with me,” said Dag.
Tavia gave him a politely embarrassed smile; her blond partner frowned.
“Farmers aren’t allowed in camp,” said Neeta. “The shelter’s not bad, and there should be a stack of firewood for the hearth. Nobody else is there just now.”
Dag’s jaw set. “We go in together or not at all.”
Remo and Barr exchanged alarmed looks. “Dag,” said Remo uneasily, “we just walked two days to get here.”
“If Fawn isn’t allowed in, neither this place nor its people are any use to me. If we start now, we can be halfway home to the Fetch by nightfall.”
“Wait, wait!” said Barr as Dag made to turn away. But when Dag paused and raised his eyebrows, he could not immediately come up with a counter.
Fawn, who’d listened to this exchange with her fist stuffed in her mouth, took it away to say placatingly, “It’s all right, Dag. Doesn’t sound like anybody would bother me at that shelter, and I could build a fire. I could wait out there for a while, anyhow, while you go in and talk to the man. And then we’d see.”
“No,” said Dag.
“Um . . . who is she, to you?” asked Tavia.
“My wife,” said Dag.
The two patroller women looked at each other; the blonde rolled her eyes. The alarm in Barr’s eyes was shading over into panic. Blight it, boy, I don’t know what bur is getting under your saddle. I’m closed down as tight as that walnut. I can’t possibly be leaking any mood. Vile as that mood was growing . . .
Tavia glanced at Dag and addressed herself prudently to Remo.
“What did he want to see Arkady for, anyway?”
“It’s . . . complicated,” said Remo helplessly.
“A complicated problem with groundwork,” Fawn put in. “And medicine making. Likely not something to discuss in the middle of the road. You two aren’t either of you makers, are you?”
The blonde looked offended, but Barr added hastily, “Yes, probably this Arkady fellow should be the one to decide. A couple of patrollers really aren’t fit to guess what a maker would want. I know I’m not! That’s why we’re here!” He blinked and smiled winningly at the women. “I thoug
ht it was important enough to walk two days for, and in bad boots at that. It seems crazy to stop just half a mile short. If you can’t let Fawn in, and believe me I know how stuffy patrol leaders can be about camp rules, couldn’t one of you go in and ask him to come out here and talk? And then whatever got decided would be off you and on him, where it belongs.” Barr blinked eyes gone liquid as a soulful puppy’s; Dag could have sworn his blond queue grew fluffier even as his smile brightened to near blinding. Remo pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed.
Tavia’s brow wrinkled, but a crooked smile was drawn unwillingly from her in response. “Well . . .” she said weakly.
“All,” growled Dag, “or none.”
Barr made pleading hand gestures and kept smiling in a way that reminded Dag of Bo’s story about the fellow who grinned a bear out of a tree. Some forms of persuasion, it seemed, had nothing to do with illicit groundwork, because Tavia rubbed her neck and repeated, “Well . . . I suppose I could walk down quick and ask him, sure. Mind, after that it’ll be up to him.”
“Tavia, you are a jewel among gate guards!” cried Barr.
“Barr, it’s just the sensible thing to do,” said Remo quellingly. He gave Tavia a respectful salute of thanks. She strode off with a saucy glance over her shoulder that seemed equally divided between the two patroller boys. Neeta shook her head.
Silence fell for a time as Neeta retreated to a more firm-chinned patrol stance, and Remo rubbed his chapped hands and stole glances at her. At length Fawn said, “I suppose we could go water the horses at that well while we wait. Take a look around.”
Dag grunted, but didn’t balk when she reined her mare around and led off. Barr followed, grabbing Remo and bringing him along. The farmer trade camp proved to be a large clearing, the shelter three log walls with a fieldstone hearth, snugly roofed, all tidy and in reasonable repair. Remo and Barr drew up several buckets of water and emptied them into a trough, where Copperhead and Magpie gulped enough to make it seem worthwhile.