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 given, 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.
Dag cleared his throat, wishing he were more sure of, well, anything. “Fawn said the answer to this puzzle ought to lie between us all, if only we could see it. I mean to try harder to see it. Why is Hod beguiled, but Fawn not? Why don’t Lakewalkers beguile each other? What are our grounds really doing, when we feel what we feel? My notion is that Remo and I will each open our grounds as wide as we can, try trading little ground reinforcements all around, and watch each other.”
“What would we be looking for?” asked Remo, a trifle plaintively. “I mean—it’s not like we haven’t done this before.”
Dag shook his head. “Watch for the things we don’t usually notice. Especially watch for the things we think we know that might not really be so. Watch for the differences between Hod and Fawn. Is it the receiver that makes the difference, or is it the way the ground is gifted? I hope it’s not all in the receiver, because that would mean I couldn’t fix it—I could only heal some sick or hurt farmers but not others, and how would I tell which was which, in advance? How could I say to someone in mortal trouble, no, you go away, I can’t—” Dag broke off. Swallowed. Said, “You start, Remo. Give a small reinforcement to Hod.”
Remo’s lips twisted in doubt. “In his knee again?”
“How about his nose?” Fawn suggested. “I think he’s getting the sniffles from being in that cold water yesterday. And it wouldn’t be mixed up with the old groundwork there.”
Hod, who had in fact been making some ominously juicy snorting noises all morning, turned red, but nodded. Acutely aware that he would be laying himself entirely open to Remo’s perceptions, Dag dropped his every guard and closed his eyes. He felt the whorl of ground coming away from Remo’s face and floating between the two, the quick blink like water droplets joining as it settled into Hod’s ground in turn, a palpable touch of warmth. Remo sneezed, and Dag’s eyes shot open again.
Hod rubbed his nose and looked bewildered. “Feels nice,” he offered.
Dag squinted, but no, with neither sight nor groundsense could he detect anything out of the ordinary. He ran his hand through his hair. “Well, all right. Do the same for Fawn, then.”
“Are you sure, Dag?” asked Remo. “I mean—I wouldn’t want to risk accidentally beguiling your wife.” His glance at Dag was sidelong and wary.
“Fawn’s already received some pretty complex ground reinforcements from me, and minor ones from Mari and Cattagus—is that all, Fawn?”
She nodded. “Old Cattagus fixed that little burn on my hand that time, and Mari—you were there when she helped me out.” She made a vague gesture to her belly and the slowly healing malice scars hidden there that still rendered her monthlies so painful.
“She’s not been beguiled yet, and this is lighter than even a minor healing reinforcement,” said Dag. “Go ahead.”
“Where?” said Remo. “I mean, Barr claims if you put a ground reinforcement in a farmer girl’s—” He broke off abruptly, his face flushing. His ground shuttered.
“Out with it,” said Dag patiently. “Who knows what overlooked thing could be important?”
Remo’s ground only eased back by half. He looked up the river valley, meeting no one’s eye. He said distantly, “Barr says if you put a ground reinforcement in a farmer girl’s t…c…p…private parts”—this last choice barely got past his teeth—“it makes her eager to, um, be with you.”
“Huh?” said Hod.
“Go out to the woodpile with him,” Dag translated into Hoddish.
“Oh.” Hod nodded wisely. “Sure.”
From the look on Fawn’s face, she did not require a translation. But she sat up straighter, her brow wrinkling. “Dag…is that why, when we first met, you said you couldn’t heal my womb after the malice ripped me there?”
Remo’s head swiveled at this, and his inspection of her malice scars dropped below her neck for the first time. His eyes widened.
Dag answered, “No! It was what I was always taught about field healings. For folks who aren’t trained up as medicine makers, ground reinforcements flow best from body part to the same body part—the way Remo did Hod’s nose, just now. Without a womb to pull ground from, I’d no such ground to give you.” He hesitated. The healings he was trying nowadays through his ghost hand—his ground projection—certainly didn’t work that way. “I wouldn’t put much faith in Barr’s hearsay.”
“But it wasn’t hearsay,” Remo blurted. “He said he did it.”
Dag, after an unmoving moment, pursed his lips. “You know this for sure?”
Remo nodded in discomfiture. “We’d put up out on patrol in this farmer’s barn. He went after one of the sisters. The prettiest, naturally. He dared me to try with another one, but I said I’d tell our patrol leader if he ever pulled a stunt like that again, and he shut up about it.” After a moment, he added, “I’m pretty sure he’s done it more than once, though.”
“He could hardly have pulled ground from his womb,” said Dag slowly, still not convinced he believed Barr’s brag.
“No, he said it was from his”—Remo gestured crotch-ward—“parallel parts. Because he had plenty to spare. He claimed.”
Fawn said, in a coolly thoughtful tone, “That wouldn’t have been a healing reinforcement then, exactly. Maybe it was just…stimulatin’. You know, Dag, what you were taught may just be what they tell the young patroller boys—and girls—so as to save trouble. And in the next generation, if no one tested it, they’d pass it along for fact. So you could both be right, in a way.”
Dag rubbed the back of his neck as he considered this proposition. Maybe there ought to be another experiment, later, in private…he wrenched his mind back to the present trial. “Elbow. Try a tiny reinforcement in her elbow.”
“Yes, sir,” said Remo, in a tone that added, And if anything goes wrong later, sir, remember you told me to do this. He leaned forward again.
This ground reinforcement, as nearly as Dag could tell, worked identically to Hod’s. Fawn rubbed her elbow and squinted at Remo, then sat back with an unperturbed smile.
Well, that had gone nowhere in particular. “All right,” Dag sighed. “Now me, I guess. If you’re up to it. Or do you need a rest?”
Remo shook his head. “Not for those little bits.”
Dag sat up and opened his ground as wide as he ever had, trying for a listening quietude. “Elbow’s fine for me, too. Better stay away from my left side, it’s still pretty roiled over there.”
Remo’s head tilted, and his lips parted. He said uneasily, “Dag, yours is the strangest ground I’ve ever seen. Scarred up one side and knotted down the other, but dense…you’re as dense as any medicine maker I’ve met. It’s hard to know where to put a reinforcement!”
Dag nodded. “That calling has been growing in me for some time, I suspect. Longer than I’ve known. Try a foot. They’re always happy for some help.” He cast a glint at Fawn, recalling her very alluring foot rubs; she glinted back.
Remo gathered himself, touched his own right foot, then Dag’s. Dag felt the whorl of ground flow past. There! An echo of ground—like the fainter second rainbow that sometimes mirrored a first—passed back between them even as the bit of Remo’s ground joined to Dag’s. The ground in Remo’s foot closed again like some thick liquid settling around the warm return gift.
“Did you see that?” Dag said in excitement.
“What?” said Remo cautiously. “It seemed like a usual reinforcement to me.”
“That little backsplash from me to you, like an undertow of ground.”
“Can’t say as I noticed.”
Dag’s teeth gritted in frustration. He bit back a sharp rejoinder of Then open wider, blight you! Remo was only a young patroller. It was more than probable that an improved sensitivity to ground was growing in Dag along with his other maker’s talents. Had his younger self ever experienced such simple field reinforcements as anything other than diffuse blobs? Although if Remo truly couldn’t sense this, he wasn’t going to be much help as a check on Dag’s perceptions.
Dag sighed and straightened. “All right. My turn. I need you to watch really closely, Remo. I’ll start with Hod’s right elbow, as there’s no other groundwork there.” That had been a good notion of Fawn’s, to keep the trials separated for clearer comparisons.
He unfurled his ghost hand, reached out, and spun off a tiny reinforcement into the target. No ground-echo returned, hah! The reinforcement was swallowed up greedily as though gulped. Hod sighed contentedly.
But Remo almost fell over in his scramble backward. Up on one knee and looking ready to bolt, he pointed toward Dag’s hook and cried, “Blight! What was that?”
Dag had forgotten he’d not introduced Remo to his new talent. “Settle down. It’s just my gh—ground projection. Instead of mirroring body parts, it pulls ground generally from all through me. Hoharie—she’s Hickory Lake Camp’s senior medicine maker—says it’s a maker’s skill. It doesn’t usually take quite this form in other makers, but you can kind of see why it would for me.”
“Uh,” said Remo. “Yeah.” Dag wished he wouldn’t look quite so bug-eyed, but he did settle back cross-legged and tried to be attentive.
“I will wait,” said Dag patiently, “till you can get your ground open again.”
Remo swallowed. It took him a few minutes, but he eventually achieved the relaxed openness Dag needed.
Dag rubbed his jaw, and said, “Think I’ll try you next. I need you to watch not my reinforcement, but for a little echo of it coming back from you to me. I’d say underneath, but it’s more like the return ground passes right through the other, lagging a bit. Ready?”
Remo nodded. Dag leaned forward and extended his ghost hand again. He paused while Remo’s ground flickered in alarm, then steadied. He nodded and spun off the reinforcement toward Remo’s right forearm. This time, watching for it, the ground return was distinctly discernible. The faint Remo-ground-echo was converted so rapidly it seemed to disperse through Dag’s arm like a blown dandelion puff. Dag’s brows rose.
“I saw…” Remo began excitedly, then slowed. “I’m not just sure what I saw.”
“You saw your ground-echo. I felt it slide into me. It converted a lot faster than…um…a primary ground reinforcement.” The one Remo had placed in Dag’s foot was still there, comfortable but distinct. Dag’s return echo in Remo’s foot was almost fully absorbed already. Dag blew out his breath and turned to Fawn. She was watching him closely, clearly struggling to follow all this. He gave her a reassuring nod, but it only made her lift her brows wryly.
Dag centered himself, opened all his heart to her, reached out, and spun a reinforcement into her opposite elbow. The return echo came back to him like a kiss, and his lips softened in a smile.
“I saw that thing again!” said Remo. “I think…”
Dag sat back and rubbed his forehead. “I saw. Felt. Yes. The reason Fawn is not beguiled is that her ground is acting like a Lakewalker’s—at least—it did when I gave her the reinforcement. But it didn’t when you did. That’s…odd.”
“Is it because you’re married?” said Remo.
“I’m not sure.” Marriage—Lakewalker marriage—was certainly a ground-transforming act, as their binding strings testified. But Dag could hardly marry all his potential patients. A stumper, this.
They’d gone all the way around with each of them. The answer had to be here, hidden in the crisscross of ground flow—or its absence. Dag fell onto his back and glowered up at the nearly leafless willow branches, at the cool, blue sky brightening toward noon. Dag and Remo had exchanged ground with each other; Dag only had exchanged with Fawn. Neither had exchanged with poor Hod.
Or was that, neither had accepted an exchange with poor Hod…?
Oh ye gods. Can I do this? I don’t want bits of Hod in me!
So do you really want to be the farmers’ own medicine maker—old patroller? Because a real maker can’t pick and choose his patients. He has to take whoever and whatever comes, equally.
“It’s not true,” he said to the sky in sudden wonder. “It was never true.”
“What’s not true, Dag?” Fawn asked in that long-suffering voice that suggested she was about to snap. His lips curled up, which made her growl, which made them curl up more.
“It’s not true,” he said, “that Lakewalkers don’t beguile each other. We beguile each other all the time.”
“What?” said Remo, sounding startled.
Dag sat up, his smile twisting. He raised his left arm toward Hod. Spun off a neat reinforcement into the nearly healed knee. And held himself open: not sternly, not rigidly, but warmly and without reservation.
The backsplash this time was so blatant that Remo cried Whoa! There was, after all, a deal of accumulated ground-load for Hod to dump so suddenly.
Hod bent, blinked, and touched his forehead, then gripped his leg. His smile flickered very uncertainly. “Uh,” he said. “I felt…it went away…” And added piteously after a moment, “But…can I still be your friend?”
“Yes, Hod, you surely can,” said Dag. “You surely can.”
“Dag,” said Fawn dangerously, “do you want to explain that for the rest of us? Because if you haven’t just done something worse ’n that catfish, I’ll eat my hat.”
“I just un-beguiled Hod!” Dag exulted, choking back a thoroughly undignified chortle. “In a sense.”
“The first half of that sounds good,” allowed Fawn, and waited with understandable suspicion for him to explain the second.
“I think—I’m guessing—that the hunger a beguiled person has for repeated ground reinforcements isn’t only because they feel real good. It’s really an urgent attempt by their ground to rebalance itself. To complete the thwarted exchange. Except that it just gets worse with each addition if the Lakewalker doing the reinforcements still blocks—rejects—the return ground-gift.”
Dag went on in growing elation, “That also explains why beguilement’s so blighted erratic. It depends on how open—or not—the Lakewalker feels about farmers—or about that particular farmer, leastways. I’ve been open to Fawn since almost the beginning, so no imbalance has ever built up in her. Hod…not. Till just now. Ha!” He supposed he’d only frighten Hod and Remo if he jumped up and danced around them all whooping like a madman, but he really wanted to.
Remo looked less enthusiastic. “What do you mean, we beguile each other all the time? We don’t!”
“Beguile and un-beguile both. Ground exchange, in balance, not thwarted. I swear it starts with our mother’s milk, and goes on—not a Lakewalker child comes of age without having received dozens of little reinforcements from dozens of kinfolk or friends for this or that ailment or injury. Grown up and out on patrol, or in camp with our tent-kin, we’re always swapping around. We float in a lake of shared ground. I’d not be surprised to find it’s part of why, when a Lakewalker is cut off from others, we feel so odd and unhappy.”
Remo looked wholly interested but only half-convinced. “Dag, are you sure of this?”
“Nearly. You’d best believe I’ll be watching out for it from now on.”
Fawn asked, “Does this mean you really could teach other makers to heal farmers?”
“Spark, if I’m right, any medicine maker who knew this could treat a farmer without beguiling—if only the maker was willing to take in farmer ground.” He hesitated. That might be a bigger if only than it looked at first. Still, medicine making had never been for the squeamish.
Remo said slowly, “But what would happen to that lake of shared ground if a lot of Lakewalkers started taking in farmer ground? What would happen to the maker?”
Dag fell silent. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I came out here this morning determined to wring some answers to my questions—and we did! — but it seems I’ve just stirred up a pack of bigger questions. I’m not getting ahead, here.”
After a longer pause, Fawn clambered to her feet and motioned them all off the blanket so she could roll it up. The walk back to the Fetch was very subdued. Although at least Hod had stopped sniffling.
In the warmest part of the afternoon, Dag took Fawn down the island to, as they explained to Hawthorn, scout for squirrels. Hawthorn promptly begged to go along, brandishing a slingshot. Remo, bless him, understood the patrol code, and diverted the boy long enough for them to escape.
Finding a warm nook took a little searching, as the wind was freshening and showing signs of veering northwest, with horse-tail clouds spread in gauzy lines turning the light paler. But a low spot in some deadfall, once it was lined with the good supply of blankets they’d packed along, lent both privacy and comfort.
Over the next few delicious hours, Dag discovered that with his growing control of ground projection he could indeed lay reinforcements in select body parts that did not match his own, but, Fawn reported, it did nothing that his ghost hand didn’t already do better. They compared the techniques a couple of times, to be certain, during which Fawn’s solemnly helpful expression kept dissolving into giggles. Dag chortled in, he trusted, a more dignified fashion. Well, maybe not so dignified in that position…He was unable to test Barr’s assertion about making farmer girls suffer desire because he couldn’t force himself to stay closed to Fawn, and anyway, it would have been like pouring milk into milk and looking for a color change. But he hoped this new support around her hidden malice scars would help with the pain of her next monthly, coming up soon.
“A ground reinforcement doesn’t actually heal a person,” he explained as they lay drowsily intertwined, bodies and investigations temporarily exhausted. “It just strengthens a body to heal itself quicker, or to fight infection better. If the damage is too great or the sickness spreads too fast, the maker’s work gets overwhelmed, too.”
Fawn’s lips pursed. She turned her head in the crook of his arm to dot kisses across his skin. “Can the maker get overwhelmed? Give away too much ground to live?”
Dag shook his head. “You’d pass out, first. It’s not like bleeding, that can go on without your will or awareness. Although the exhaustion can lay the maker open to sickness, too, same as anyone else.” He hesitated. “A reinforcement’s not to be confused with a medicine maker’s groundlock, mind you. If a maker’s gone down and in too deep, till matching grounds turns into mixing them, and his patient dies on him, the maker can die, too. The dying ground disrupting the other, see.”
She blinked. “Huh. I wonder if that’s how your ancestors first got the idea for sharing knives?”
Dag rocked back. “Huh! Could be, Spark! Could well be.” Bright farmer girl!
She nodded, brows drawing down. “One way or another, seems like it would be a good idea to keep your strength up.”
“Same as a patrol leader keeping his patrol in good shape, I reckon,” he allowed thoughtfully.
“And the other way around.”
He bent his head and nuzzled her hair. “That, too, Spark.”
The next morning Dag woke to gray skies and extra kisses. Fawn sat up on one elbow, and asked, “Do you know what day this is?”
“I’ve lost track,” he admitted. “Better ask Berry.”
“Guess I’d better.” She grinned and went off to start breakfast.
The clouds thickened but did not deliver rain; the Fetch stayed stuck. After lunch, Whit insisted on dragging Dag off to explore the back side of the island. A wedge of fallen trees and thatch across the channel made a temporary bridge to the mainland, and they picked their way precariously across despite Dag’s assurances that there was nothing over there of note for at least a mile in any direction. When they at last returned to the Fetch, Remo met them on shore with strict instructions from the cook to go catch some fish for dinner, specifically not catfish. This entailed another trip across to the back channel, from which they returned with heavy strings of walleye and three kinds of bass. Bo and Hod took the catch in charge to clean and gut. Then Whit suggested an archery lesson. Remo and Dag set up a target while Whit took the skiff out to the boat for their bows and arrows. In a while Hod and Hawthorn rowed to shore for a turn as well, and by the time they’d worn out everyone, especially the chief instructor, the leaden skies were darkening with early nightfall.
The air of the Fetch’s cabin, when Dag stepped inside, was warm and moist and smelled amazing. He walked into the kitchen area to find it crammed with busy people and festooned with bunches of autumn wildflowers and dried milkweed pods tied with colored yarn. Berry and Fawn were frying up a mountain of fish and potatoes and onions, and Whit and Bo were tapping a new keg of beer set up on a trestle, and where had that come from?
“What are we celebrating?” Dag inquired amiably.
Fawn set aside her pan, walked over, stood on tiptoe, snaked an arm around his neck to pull his face down to her level, and said, “You. Happy birthday, Dag!” And kissed him soundly, to the hoots and clapping of the whole crew congregated. He pulled back, once she released him, with his mouth gaping in astonishment.
“Yes!” Whit whooped. “We got him! We got him good!”
“How did you know this was my birthday?” Dag asked Fawn. It had been upwards of twenty years since he’d paid the least attention to it himself, and he certainly hadn’t mentioned it recently.
“Dag!” said Fawn in fond exasperation. “You gave it to the town clerk when we were married in West Blue! Of course I remembered!”
And Fawn’s was in about six more weeks, as he had learned at the same time and not forgotten—he’d thought they might be in Graymouth by then, and wondered what farmer birthday customs might please her, and been glad that Whit would be there to ask and maybe help keep her from feeling too alone in a strange place. She’ll be nineteen, gods. Dag wasn’t sure whether to feel old, or good, but as Remo pressed him into his seat and Bo thrust a tankard of beer into his hand, he decided on good.
Then came tender fish and melting potatoes and a tide of beer, and jokes and tales and laughter, and yes, friends, and his own real tent-kin. He was glad, too, for Remo at the table—whatever the exact interplay of ground and body, mind and heart, it seemed a wider world to have both farmers and Lakewalkers in it. Celebrating each other.
The beer, Dag learned, had been secretly laid in by Whit for precisely this purpose at that last stop where he’d sold his window glass. Its status as a present had apparently kept it from any premature depredations by Bo, a fact Bo himself pointed out with a certain pride. The Bluefield conspiracy had been going on for some days, it seemed, for when no one was able to force down another bite, Fawn brought out a package wrapped in cloth and tied with another jaunty yarn bow. Dag opened it to discover a new-sewn oiled cloth cape and hood, such as boatmen wore.
“Bo let me use his old one for a pattern,” Fawn explained in satisfaction. “I traded making new ones for him and Berry for the cloth to make some for you and Whit, but I haven’t got to the others yet.” Her second packet was a sweater sleeve, incomplete but promissory. “I expect to make some real good progress on it next week. Remo said Lakewalkers give new clothes and weapons on birthdays, and maybe when you start patrolling, a horse. You have a horse and a whole arsenal already, but at least I made you a few more arrows. Berry gave me the Tripoint steel heads, and Hawthorn had the eagle feathers.” She added a bundle of half a dozen new shafts to the stack, and Dag decided he would let his tongue be cut out before explaining that such gifting customs were mainly meant for youngsters.
Outside in the dark, the wind blew a spatter of rain against the walls and windows, and Berry looked up intently. But as the wind and water didn’t yet shift the boat, she settled back and sipped at her tankard. Dag would have been quite content to just take a seat near the fire with a warm wife in his lap for the rest of the night, but Fawn extracted herself from his embrace and flitted off again.
“More?” said Dag.
“Remo said Lakewalkers don’t make birthday cakes, exactly, but if you’re going to be a real Bluefield, you need to have one,” Whit explained as Fawn came tottering back with a huge cake on a platter. “With candles. It’s the farmer thing to do, or at least it always was at our house.”
“I love the candles best. One for every year,” Fawn expanded upon this, thumping the platter down in front of Dag. Which explained the size of the cake, bristling with a small forest of thin beeswax sticks. “I made this cake with ginger and pear, and honey-butter frosting. Because I was getting right tired of everything apple, even if we still have barrels of them.”
“Where did you find all the candles?” Dag asked, fascinated and a bit taken aback. “Same goods-shed where Whit got the beer?”
Fawn shook her head, dark eyes and curls all sprightly. “Nope, the ones they had were all too big. I made these myself, this afternoon, with some wax Berry gave me from her stores and some string I plaited a while back.”
Dag plucked one up and rolled it between his fingers, smelling the faint honey scent. “They’re a good making, Spark.”
She smiled in pleasure at his praise.
“The deal is,” Whit advised, “you’re supposed to light them, then make a wish. If you blow them all out in one breath, you get your wish.”
Dag could not picture the groundwork that would effect such a thing, so decided it must be a farmer superstition, if a pleasant one. “It sounds right difficult.”
“It’s easier when you’re six than when you’re fifty-six,” Whit conceded.
“Indeed. Well, all right. I’ll try.” Certain Lakewalker makers produced groundworked candles that made the task a snap; this would call for a greater effort on his part, Dag suspected. But these wax lights were sound work, and of Fawn’s own hands. Just like their marriage cords. He set the candle back in its hole in the frosting, centered himself, aligned his ground, called up his hottest persuasion, and swept his ghost hand back and forth across the bristling top of the cake. To his pure delight, all fifty-six little golden flames sprang up in its wake with a faint foomp! foomp! sound.
He looked up in satisfaction to find Fawn and Berry both standing at his sides with lit spills in their hands and their mouths open. A silence stretched around the crowded table. Hod was blinking. Hawthorn’s eyes were wide. Bo seemed to have bitten his tongue. “Was that…not right?” Dag asked hesitantly.
Whit said, in a rather hollow voice, “And I’d have been impressed if he’d blown them out all at once!”
Remo laughed out loud. Actually, Remo cackled, Dag decided. Dag might have been more annoyed, particularly as Remo didn’t stop for quite a while—choking himself off, eventually, into his sleeve—except that it was the first time ever he’d heard the boy laugh.
“That was just fine, Dag,” Fawn assured him valiantly. “You can light all our birthday cakes from now on.” She blew out her spill and handed him a knife.
Dag waited a while for Fawn to enjoy the glow—or conflagration—while he enjoyed the play of the warm light on her face, like a summer sunset here on the edge of winter. He didn’t cheat much, blowing out the candles again. Fawn extracted the wax stumps for reuse, sharing the task of licking off the frosting with Hawthorn, an eager volunteer. The pocked cake was divided into generous slabs, with half still left for breakfast. After, Dag was made to sit by the fire with Fawn just as he’d pictured, while Whit and the crew took charge of the cleanup. The rain drummed on the roof as Hod and Hawthorn pestered Remo to show them how Lakewalkers cheated in games of chance, Remo protesting that he didn’t know how to either play or cheat.
And then, with a faint groan and a definite jerk, the Fetch lifted from the sand bar. Berry whooped, and everyone dropped all other tasks to turn out and get the boat away from the bar and down the island to a safe landing, to be tied properly for the night. Both of the Lakewalkers, with their ability to move surely in the dark, were pressed into this task, but when they all came trooping wetly back inside Fawn had hot tea waiting and prewarmed towels stacked by the hearth. Sodden clothes were stripped off and hung up—except for Dag’s, adequately protected by his new boatman’s rain gear—dry clothes were donned, and those with room snagged more cake and beer. The patter of rain gusted into a rattle of hail, but the guide ropes held the boat in its new mooring as they all settled around the hearth once more.
Then Berry pulled out her fiddle and gave them three tunes, two lively, one slow and plaintive. There wasn’t enough room to dance, but while Berry shook out her fingers and rested up the Clearcreeks debated teaching boatmen’s songs to the Bluefields. Hawthorn claimed he knew all the rude words.
“Yeah, but you don’t understand ’em,” drawled Bo.
“I do too!”
“Maybe it’s time for a lullaby,” Berry suggested.
“No, not yet!” Hawthorn protested. Hod looked torn. Whit looked wistful.
Remo was sitting on the floor near the fire, the overfed raccoon kit asleep in his lap; his head came up, turning.
“What?” Dag said quietly.
“There’s a Lakewalker out on the river in a narrow boat.”
“In this weather?” Bo snorted. “Fool should be on shore with the boat turned upside down and him under it. Tied down at both ends, too, if he’d a lick of sense.”
Dag silently agreed, but stretched his groundsense outward. A Lakewalker indeed, and just as miserable as you’d expect. Their grounds bumped, and the narrow boat changed course, fighting through the wind waves.
Remo’s eyes widened. He set down the kit and scrambled to his feet. “It’s Barr!”
A clunk and a thump were followed by the muffled pounding of a fist on the side of the hull.
“Remo, you fool!” Barr’s voice called hoarsely. “Blight you! I know you’re in there! Come give me a hand before I freeze in this blighted rain!”