When they returned to the gate, Tavia was just turning onto the bottom of the road, a tall man striding at her shoulder.
“Blight, Barr,” muttered Remo. “This is the first time I’ve seen your talents have a use.”
“Yeah?” Barr muttered back. “I find them useful. This is just the first time you’ve ever appreciated them.”
As the pair climbed nearer, Dag studied the groundsetter warily.
Arkady Waterbirch wore clean trousers, shirt, and an undyed wool coat to the knees, open in this moderate chill. His hair was blond streaked with gray, pulled back in a neat mourning knot at his nape; in the pale light of this winter noon, it shone silver gilt. His hairline was not thinning yet, but seemed to be thinking about it. As he drew nearer still, Dag eyed his tawny skin, with fine lines at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth, and found himself unable to guess the man’s age; his silvering hair said older, his unweathered skin suggested younger; in any case, he was likely not far off from Dag’s own generation. His hands, too, were smooth, with the cleanest fingernails Dag had ever seen even on a medicine maker. His eyes were bright copper shot with gold. The general effect was a trifle blinding.
What the man’s ground was like Dag could not tell until he opened his own, shuttered most of the time since . . . since Crane, really. As the maker’s gaze swept him in turn, Dag grew conscious of his own travel-worn appearance. Two days of trudging through the mire and sleeping rough last night had returned him to his patrol look: clothing shabby and sweat-stained—although, thanks to Fawn, neatly mended; cropped hair uncombed; jaw unshaved, because they’d all been eager to leave last night’s damp camp and move along. Most of his old scars were covered by his clothing, but for the first time in a while Dag felt an impulse to hold his maimed left arm behind his back.
The boys were tidy enough, for patrollers; their youth, Dag thought with an inward sigh, could have made rags look good on them, though they did not know it. Fawn, still atop Magpie, was her own fair, small, strong self, brown eyes bright with hope and worry, every scant inch a farmer girl. He was reminded of the day she’d told the formidable Captain Fairbolt Crow to go take a jump in Hickory Lake, during another not-altogether-easy introduction, and almost smiled.
As the maker came to a halt and took in the folks awaiting him, he seemed more and more nonplussed. After a second sweeping look over the party, pausing on Remo, he addressed himself to Dag: “Tavia’s tale seems a trifle confused. But if that’s your boy, there, I can tell you right now he hasn’t the ground to apprentice for a medicine maker. He’s a patroller born. If you’ve come all this way for a different answer than you had at home, I’m sorry for it, because I can’t give it to you.”
Remo looked taken aback. “No, sir,” he said hastily, “that’s not what we’re here for. And Dag’s not my father, he’s my . . . um. Captain, I guess.”
Captain No-Camp, the ill-fated Crane had dubbed Dag; the name seemed to be sticking, along with a few more unwanted gifts.
The copper-gilt eyes narrowed on Dag’s hook. Arkady said more gently, “Ah. You may have been misled by rumor. On a day with the right wind at my back, I can do some useful things, but I don’t make miracles. I’m afraid there’s not much I can do for your arm. That injury’s far too old.”
Dag unlocked his voice. “I’m not here about my missing hand, sir.”
I’m here about the hand that came back. So bluntly confronted, Dag found it hard to explain his needs. “It’s not Remo who’s interested in training for medicine maker. It’s me.”
Arkady’s eyes flew wide. “Surely not. Maker’s talents, if you have them, should have shown by age twenty. Even a groundsetter’s potential should be starting to show by age forty.”
“I was long gone for patroller by then, and no one much could have stopped me. My maker’s calling was . . . delayed. But everything changed for me this year, from my name to my ground.” Dag swallowed.
“Anyhow,” Fawn put in, “Dag doesn’t just think he can be a medicine maker, he’s been healing folks, all down the Grace and Gray valleys. He fixed Hod’s busted kneecap where the horse kicked him, and Cress’s infected gut, and Chicory’s busted skull and that other fellow’s cut throat after the fight at the bandit cave, and who knows what all else there, and he healed Bo’s stab to his stomach that we all thought sure was going to kill him. And he made a sharing knife. Before that, he did patrol healing on the trail I guess, but since last summer all this other has come roaring out. I don’t know why now, but talent he has. He needs instruction.
So as not to make bad mistakes from not knowing things, which is a regret I could tell you all about.”
Arkady’s head rocked back. His eyes narrowed at Dag, then fixed on Remo. “Have you seen this?” he demanded.
“Yes, sir,” said Remo. “Well, the kneecap I saw later, after it was part healed, and I wasn’t there for the woman at Pearl Riffle, but all the rest, yes.”
“And more,” said Barr, his lips twisting.
“If so, why wasn’t he invited—snatched up!—by the makers at one of those camps along the river?”
“All the folks he healed were farmers,” said Fawn.
Arkady recoiled; he wheeled on Dag. In a voice of suppressed fury, he said, “You unspeakable fool! You went and left all those poor people mad with beguilement?”
Dag’s lips curled up. “No, sir. Because between Fawn, Remo, Hod, and me, we cracked unbeguilement as well. I could see it was the first thing had to be done, if I meant to be a medicine maker to farmers. Which I did and do.”
All three New Moon folks were staring at Dag openmouthed. And seeing . . . not much; he still held his ground veiling tight-furled. None could tell if he was concealing lies or truth, only that he was concealing himself.
“You’re raving,” said Arkady abruptly. “And I can’t be dealing with a renegade.”
“I’m no renegade!” said Dag, stung on the raw. Are you so sure, old patroller? He was going to have to unveil, open himself to those coppergold eyes and whatever lay behind them, which he hadn’t wanted to do at this gate. Or at all, he admitted to himself.
“Deserter?” said Neeta suspiciously. She glanced at Fawn, and her voice grew edged with scorn. “Oh, of course. It’s obvious. Banished for farmer loving, back in Oleana.”
“No!” Although the latter had come too close to being true. “I resigned from the patrol in good order. My old camp captain knows where I went and why.” The problem was huge, complex, with snarled strings running down into the most intimate aspects of his ground and up and out into the whole wide green world. Blight, it’s impossible to speak this tangle plain. But Fawn’s eyes were urgent on him. He must not disappoint her appalling trust.
“Renegade, deserter, banished, or just plain mad, it’s clear you’re unfit to be a medicine maker,” said Arkady coldly. “Off with you. Get out of this camp.” He began to veer away. Fawn’s hand went out in pleading; he did not glance at her.
We pretend to save farmers, thought Dag, but in truth we turn our backs . . .
Opening his ground here, now, felt like tearing off a bandage stuck to a half-healed wound. Dag nearly expected to see blood and pus flying.
For the first time in weeks, he extended his ghost hand in its full power.
And ground-ripped a strip from the back of the maker’s left hand, right down to the matter. Blood burst from it like a cat scratch. Arkady hissed and wheeled back.
Open at last to the man, Dag bent before the density of his ground, a subdued brilliance like the sun behind a cloud. What Arkady would make of the dark mess that was presently Dag, there was no guessing.
The maker’s face worked with ripples of emotion: shock, outrage, chilling anger.
Arkady touched the bleeding scratch with the finger of his other hand; the blood stopped flowing. Some floating part of Dag’s mind marveled: Ah! He can do groundwork on himself!
Dag said, in a dead-level voice, “Open as you were, I could have reached in an
d done that to the artery from your heart just as easily. At your first heartbeat, it would have burst, and you’d have been dead in the next. And I’m walkin’ around loose out here. If I’m not to turn into a real renegade, a man who just needs killin’, I need some kind of a pathfinder. Because right now I’m almost as lost as I’ve ever been.” Save for after Wolf Ridge, and the death of Kauneo. Nothing would ever be as dark as that again; the realization was oddly consoling.
The two gate guards both had their knives out, tense with alarm, but Arkady waved them back. He was plainly shaken; his lips moved on a—name?—Sutaw. He straightened himself, fastidiously flicked the trailing red drops from his fingers, inhaled, and said coldly, “That was an inexcusably clumsy piece of groundsetting. If you were an apprentice of mine, I’d have your hide for groundwork that ripped into a patient like that.”
All the blood seemed to drain from Dag’s head, so deep was his relief. He’s seen this. He knows what it is. It looks normal to him. It’s a known groundsetting technique. Not malice magic. I’m not turning into a malice . . .
Dag only realized he’d fallen to his knees when Fawn appeared at his side, her voice anxious. “Dag? Are you all right? Are you laughing, or crying? ” She pulled his hand away from his face. His shoulders shook.
“I’m not sure, Spark,” he groaned. “Both, I think.” Only now, when it was so abruptly removed, did he realize just how much that secret terror had been riding him, sapping his strength. Had he been a fool?
Maybe not.
Arkady rubbed his chiseled chin. And, at length, sighed. “You all had better come down to my place. I don’t think I can deal with this in the middle of the road.”
“All of them, sir? ” said Neeta, with a dubious look at Fawn.
“They seem to come as a set. Yes, all. Tavia, tell the women I’ll be having four guests for lunch today.” He walked over and extended his right hand to Dag.
Indeed, I need a hand.
Dag took it, hauling himself upright again.
4
A half-mile walk, leading the horses, brought them all to Arkady’s place, and Fawn stared in astonishment. After her experience at Hickory Lake Camp she’d thought she knew what Lakewalker tents were like: crude, deliberately temporary log cabins, usually with an open side protected by hide awnings, clustered in kin groups around a dock space or central fire pit. The dwellings she’d glimpsed at Pearl Riffle had been similar. This . . . this was a house.
Two huge trees laden with dark green leaves like drooping tongues— but not a blossom in sight at this season—bracketed a stone-paved walk.
Atop a foundation cut into the slope and lined with fitted stones, several rooms rambled, built of silvery-gray weathered cedar planks, roofed with split-wood shingles, and connected by a long porch. The windows gleamed with real glass. Barr and Remo, Fawn was consoled to note, also stared openmouthed; by camp standards, it was practically a palace.
Dag seemed less surprised, but then, Fawn wasn’t exactly sure if he was paying attention. After his brief, scary breakdown at the gate, he’d recovered himself and was looking awfully closed. Again.
They tied the horses to the porch rail and followed Arkady into what appeared to be a main room, pausing to wipe their feet after him twice, once on a mat outside and again on a rag rug just inside the door. The far wall had a whole row of glass windows and a door onto an unroofed porch overlooking the lake. A large hearth to the right was fitted up for cooking, which Fawn suspected might include cooking up medicines. By the hearth stood a sturdy table, waist height for working, but near the windows was a lower, round one that seemed just for eating. It boasted real lathe-made chairs, with stuffed cloth cushions tied on. At Hickory Lake, folks had mostly made do with trestle tables and upended logs.
“You can wash your hands at the sink,” Arkady directed, and busied himself with his water kettle and a teapot, of all things. Fawn guessed that he was buying time to think about what to do next; he’d said almost nothing on the walk from the gate, beyond laconically pointing out patrol headquarters and the medicine tent, bracketing the entry road.
Those, too, had been plank-built and houselike.
Beneath a lakeside window, the tin-lined sink had a water barrel with a wooden tap to its right, a drain board to the left. Fawn filled the washbasin and took her turn with a cake of fine white soap, watching while Dag did his one-handed trick with the soap and water after her. Arkady, she noticed, paused to covertly watch that, too. The patroller boys followed suit; the very dirty water was dumped down a drain, where it gurgled through a wooden pipe leading outside. It was all as handy as a well-furbished farm kitchen, and as hard to shift. Fawn fancied she could almost hear Dag thinking, Sessile! and not in a tone of approval.
They sat five around the table and watched while Arkady poured out tea into fired clay mugs, and offered a pitcher of honey. Fawn sipped the sweet brew gratefully, wondering who was supposed to start, and if it would be up to her. To her relief, Arkady began.
“So—ex-patroller—how have you come to me? New Moon Cutoff seems a long way from Oleana.” He took a swallow and settled back, watching Dag narrowly.
It was a—deliberately?—broadly worded question. Dag looked somewhat desperately at Fawn. “Where to begin, Spark? ” he asked.
She bit her lip. “The beginning? Which would be Glassforge, I guess.”
“That far back? All of it? You sure? ”
“If we don’t explain how your knife got primed at Glassforge, you won’t be able to explain what you did with it at Bonemarsh, and Hoharie herself said she thought that was magery.”
Arkady’s eyes widened slightly at the word. “Who is Hoharie? ”
“Hickory Lake’s chief medicine maker,” Dag explained.
“Ah.” Arkady went still, taking this in. “Do go on.”
“How about if I start? ” said Fawn. Their tale had to convince the groundsetter to take Dag seriously, despite Dag’s running off to mix with farmers. Because if they could be let into the camp on this man’s bare word, they could surely be thrown out the same way. Plain and true.
Nothing else would do. Just as well; Fawn didn’t think she could tell fancy lies to that penetrating coppery stare.
“It was coming on strawberry season last summer in Oleana, and I was going to Glassforge to look for work on account of—” She took a breath for courage. The intimate parts of this tale would be new to Barr and Remo, too; it was almost harder to speak it in front of them than this shiny stranger. “On account of as I’d got pregnant with a farm boy who didn’t care to marry me, and I didn’t care to stay around and deal with what my life would be at home once it came out. So, the road. Dag’s patrol was called down there to help search for a malice that was running a bandit gang in the hills. A couple of the bandits—a mud-man and a beguiled fellow—snatched me off the road because I was pregnant, it seems.”
Remo’s eyes widened, and Barr blinked, but both kept their mouths shut tight. Arkady’s hand touched his lips. “So it’s true that malices need pregnant women for their molts? ”
“Yes,” said Dag. “Though they’ll also use pregnant animals if they can’t get humans. It’s not actually the women they crave, it’s the fastgrowing ground of the youngsters they bear, and the, the template of bearing. To teach them how, see. I arrived . . . almost in time. There was this cave. The malice ripped the ground from Fawn’s child about the time I hit its mud-man guards. I was carrying a pouch with two sharing knives in it, one primed and one bonded to me. I tossed the pouch to Fawn, who was closer, and she put both knives in the malice, one after the other.”
“Wrong one first,” confessed Fawn. “The unprimed one. I didn’t know.”
“You couldn’t have,” Dag assured her. He stared rather fiercely at Arkady, who in fact showed no signs of wanting to criticize this.
“It had me by the neck at the time, which is where these came from,” Fawn went on, touching the deep red dents marring the sides of her throat, four on
one side and one on the other.
“So that’s what those are!” said Arkady, startled into leaning forward and peering. He drew his hand back before actually touching her. “I didn’t think to find blight scars on a farmer. Those are the freshest I’ve ever seen. That sort of ground injury doesn’t often come our way down here.”
Barr leaned back, his brow wrinkling; belatedly figuring out just how close to a malice Fawn had come, she thought. If I have malice fingerprints on me, the malice couldn’t have been more than an arm’s length off, you know.
“Count yourselves lucky,” said Dag dryly. With this start, he seemed willing to take up the tale. “In any case, my bonded knife ended up primed with the ground of Fawn’s child. Hickory Lake’s chief knife maker and I each have different ideas as to why, but they don’t matter now. Anyway, on the way to take the knife to my camp and see about the puzzle, we stopped at West Blue—Fawn’s kinfolk have a farm just up that river valley—I thought they’d want to know she was still alive. We were married there. Twice over, once by farmer customs and once by ours. Here. Roll up your sleeve, Spark.”
He shrugged awkwardly out of his jacket and rolled up his own left sleeve, revealing the arm harness that held his wrist cap in place, and above it, his wedding cord that Fawn had braided. He normally kept his sleeve rolled down in front of strangers, but Fawn supposed this maker, like a farmer midwife, had to see what was going on in order to do his work, so you just had to get past the shyness. Almost as reluctantly, Fawn pushed up her left cuff to reveal her cord that Dag had braided.
Dag hitched his shoulder forward. “Does your groundsense say these are valid cords? ” he asked. Growled, more like.
“Yes,” said Arkady cautiously. Fawn sighed with relief.
“Thank you for your honesty, sir.” Dag sat back with a satisfied nod.
“We had some blighted stupid argumentation about that at Hickory Lake, later.”
Arkady cleared his throat. “Your tent-kin did not welcome your new bride, I take it? ” Your very young bride, Fawn fancied his glance at her added, but he had the prudence not to say it aloud.