Fawn returned late one evening from the medicine tent along with Dag and Arkady-there had been another child with an intractable fever-to find the dinner basket left by their door with a letter propped up on it.
Arkady read the inscription and raised his brows. “For you,” he said, handing it to Fawn. “Courier must have brought it by.”
Surprised, she made out her name and Dag’s, and Arkady’s Place, New Moon Cutoff Camp, in Whit’s crabbed handwriting. Whit was a reluctant correspondent; any letter from him had to be important. She took it to the round table while Arkady stoked the fire for his endless tea. Dag set down the basket, lit the brace of table candles, then came to her shoulder, looking concerned. “Anything wrong? ”
“No, not really,” she reported, tilting the paper to catch the flickering light. Whit’s scrawl was actually legible, in a painful sort of way.
“Whit says Berry found a buyer for the Fetch who wants it for a houseboat.”
The Fetch had been much better built than most makeshift crafts launched from the upper Grace feeder creeks by venturesome Oleana hill boys. Berry would be happy that her papa’s last boat wouldn’t be broken up for timber, or worse, firewood. Daisy-goat was slated to be sold with her floating home, alas. “He also says Berry’s found them all work with a keeler boss she trusts, heading upriver soon to catch the last of the winter fall. All on the same boat-Whit and Bo and Hod for hands, Hawthorn for boat boy, and her for the fiddler.” Berry had been holding out for just such a collection of berths, though exactly when she would find it had still been up in the air when Dag and Fawn had left Graymouth. Whit had talked idly about the whole crew joining the long-planned overland ride up the Trace, but the money would be much better this way. “Whit says if we want to change our minds, we should meet them in Graymouth before the end of the week, and if not, to write and let him know when to look for us back at Clearcreek.”
“Ah,” said Dag.
She glanced up at him. “I better write back soon, or the letter might not reach him before they shove off. So… what are we doing, Dag? When we started out for New Moon, I thought we might be here a few days, but it’s already been more ’n a month.”
Dag delayed answer by going to the sink to wash his hand before dinner, a ritual Arkady insisted upon with more than maternal firmness.
Fawn followed suit. They laid out the contents of the basket, and Arkady brought over the tea, before Dag spoke. “I’ve hardly finished training up for medicine maker.”
Arkady, pouring, snorted. “You’ve hardly started. I’d give you two years. Most apprentices take three or four.”
“Two years!” said Fawn.
Dag merely nodded. “I begin to see why.”
“Really,” said Arkady, “medicine makers don’t ever stop learning from each other, and from their patients. The common ailments become routine very quickly-and I will say, you’re the most relentless student I’ve ever had-but some experiences can’t be sped up. You just have to wait for them to occur.”
Dag bit into his bread and butter, chewed, swallowed. “When would you guess I’d be fit to start actual groundwork? ”
Arkady didn’t answer right off. Instead he went to his shelf, took down a familiar little book, and paged through it. He eyed Dag steadily for an unnerving minute, then, with some danger of mixing ink and crumbs, jotted a few notes and blew on the page to dry them. “Tomorrow,” he said.
Dag looked startled but pleased. “What about all my so-called dirty ground you were so worried about? ”
“As I hoped, the best remedy was time. Your ground is cleaning itself out quite nicely, and will continue to do so as long as you don’t contaminate yourself again. The permanent cure, of course, is to stop doing that.”
Dag took a slow sip of tea. “That’s… not enough, Arkady. If I’m ever to treat farmers and not leave them crazy with beguilement, I’m going to have to go on absorbing all sorts of strange ground.”
Arkady glowered at him.
“It was all mixed together in my head for a while,” Dag went on, “but looking back, I’m less and less sure how much of my upset was from taking in strange ground, and how much was just from dealing with Crane and his bandits, which was plenty to give any thinking man nightmares.”
“Mind and ground-and emotion-do intersect on the deepest levels,” Arkady conceded. He glanced, oddly, at Fawn.
Dag nodded. “Because for all the things I took in-barring Crane- it seems to me I just kept getting stronger and better at groundwork all the way downriver. ’Cept for the part about being untidy, just what about having dirty ground unfits me for medicine making? ”
“Every bit of strange ground you take in changes your own ground, and so how it works. The results risk being uncontrolled.”
Dag frowned. “Everything I do and learn-blight, every breath I take-changes my ground. My ground can’t not change, not while I’m alive. Could be dirty ground is just something to live with, like the bugs and blisters and weather and weariness on patrol.”
“Rough-and-ready may do for patrolling. Not for the delicate control needed for groundsetting.”
“Groundsetting isn’t so sweet and delicate as all that, that I’ve seen.”
“Your projection changes everything you touch with it.”
“My hand changes everything I touch with it. Always has. Anyway, I want to change folks.”
“Dag, you can’t treat farmers. Not at New Moon Cutoff.”
“What if Fawn falls ill? I will sure enough treat her!”
Arkady waved this away. “That’s different.”
“Oh? How? Groundwise.”
Arkady sighed and rubbed his brow. “I can see I’m going to have to give you the set speech. For my usual apprentices it starts out, When I was your age… but I suppose that won’t do for you.”
“When you were my age? ” Fawn suggested helpfully.
Arkady eyed her. “A little older than that. Not much, I grant.”
Dag eased back and occupied his protesting mouth with another bite of bread. He nodded to signal that Arkady had his full attention.
Arkady drew a long breath. “When I was much younger, and stupider, and vastly more energetic, my wife and I were training up together as medicine makers at a camp called Hatchet Slough, which is about a hundred and fifty miles northeast of here.”
What wife? Fawn hadn’t seen hide nor hair of a Missus Arkady since she’d arrived, nor, more tellingly, heard any word. Dag nodded understanding- of the geography? Or of something else? She wasn’t sure if Arkady saw the little flinch that went-with. Tales of the ill fates of first wives would likely do that to Dag. Fawn gulped and shut up hard.
“We were both newly come into our full maker’s powers. Bryna had a special talent for women’s ailments. There were already hints that I’d be a groundsetter when I grew into myself. It seemed we had more enthusiasm than sick or injured to treat at Hatchet Slough. An excess of energy that’s hard to imagine, now…
“Being young, we talked about the problems of our neighboring farmers. She thought it a grand idea to offer treatments to them- perhaps set up a little medicine tent at the camp farmer’s market, next to the table for herbs and preparations. Our mentors put their feet down hard on that before it became more than talk, of course, but you can see how far our thinking had gone. Your notions aren’t new, Dag.”
Dag’s eyes lit. “But with unbeguilement, you could really do that!”
Arkady made a little wait-for-the-rest gesture. “A desperate farmer woman with a dying husband who’d heard our loose talk came to Bryna for help. She went.”
“Is this one of those failed-and-blamed tales?” Dag said uneasily.
Fawn shivered. Accusations of black sorcery could get a lone Lakewalker beaten up-or burned alive, if the mob was vicious enough. Lakewalkers in pairs or groups were much harder to tackle.
“No. She succeeded. The man wasn’t even beguiled.” Arkady drew another fortifying breath. “Word got out. Another frantic farmer came, and another. I started going out with her. One sick woman became deeply beguiled, and began haunting the camp. Her husband decided she’d been seduced, and tried to waylay and kill me. Fortunately, there were some patrollers nearby who rescued me and drove him off.
“It all came to a head when there was a riot at the camp gates by the kin of some desperately ill folks, trying to break in and carry us away by force. It was repulsed with a lot of bloodied heads on both sides-one patroller was killed, and two farmers. The camp council decided to break the impasse by smuggling us out in the night. We were taken in secret to Moss River Camp to continue our training. The Hatchet Slough Lakewalkers misdirected anyone inclined to search for us. And that was the end of our experiments with farmers.” Arkady sat up straight and fixed Dag with a glare. “As I don’t care to relive that nightmare, you will stay away from farmers as long as you reside at New Moon Cutoff. Is that very clear? ”
Dag returned a short nod like some unhappily disciplined patroller.
“Yes, sir.”
Arkady said in a more conciliating tone, “Of course that does not apply to Fawn. She doesn’t trail a jealous farmer spouse, nor does she have kin here to foment a riot. She’s not likely to create a camp problem.”
He added after a moment, “At least, not in that sense.”
Fawn’s brows drew down in puzzlement. “But what happened to your wife, sir? ”
Dag gave her an urgent head shake, but whether it meant No, don’t ask! or I’ll explain later, she wasn’t sure.
But Arkady replied merely, “She works at Moss River Camp these days.” Voice and expression both flat and uninviting, so Fawn swallowed the dozen questions that begged.
“As guests here,” Dag said, “Fawn and I are of course obliged to abide by your camp rules. I won’t give you trouble, sir.”
Fawn wasn’t at all sure how to take the skeptical lift of Arkady’s brows, but his tension eased; he accepted Dag’s assurance with a nod.
The maker opened his mouth as if to add something, but then apparently thought better of it, taking a belated bite of his dinner instead.
–-
It wasn’t till they were settling down in their bedroll, laid out in the spare room at the house’s farthest end, that Fawn found the chance to ask more.
“So what was all that about Missus Arkady? Missus Maker Arkady, I guess. For a horrible minute I thought Arkady was going to tell us she’d been murdered by farmers, but seemingly not.”
Dag sighed and folded her in close to him. “I had the tale from Challa a few days back. Seems Arkady and his wife worked together happily in the medicine tent here for years and years. They were partners, as well as spouses, close as close. But they had some of the same problems that Utau and Sarri had.”
“No children?” A sorrow that the Hickory Lake couple had solved radically by taking another member into their marriage, Utau’s cousin Razi; not the usual course, Fawn had gathered. But their toddlers were darling, however many parents they possessed.
Dag nodded. “Not just no conceptions. Miscarriage after miscarriage, getting worse as she grew older. Arkady was especially frustrated, Challa says, because as a senior medicine maker he thought he ought to be able to fix it somehow. Seems that’s why the miscarriages got more dangerous, actually. When the troubles weren’t let go early, they were worse when they did break. It’s not an uncommon problem-I’ve seen it in camps all over the north. Two exceptional people get string-bound, and their tent-kin settle back happily to wait for the exceptional children to start popping out, and nothing happens. Kauneo and I…” He bit his lip.
She stroked his brow. “You don’t have to say.”
He nodded gratefully, but went on anyhow. “We didn’t have long enough together to find out if we’d be more of that. There was one month we had hopes… anyway, Arkady’s wife Bryna. She was getting older, time was running out, then suddenly she asked him to cut strings with her.”
Lakewalker divorce. Fawn nodded.
“Arkady wasn’t too happy, I reckon, but he didn’t fight it. They divided up New Moon and Moss River medicine tents between them, more or less, and very soon after, she got string-bound with a widowed patroller from over there. They had two children before she had her change of life. I guess they’re nearly grown by now.”
Fawn tried to decide if this was a happy ending or not. Half a one, maybe. “You wonder why Arkady didn’t remarry.”
“Even my groundsense doesn’t help me figure what goes on in his head. I do see he’s a right sensitive man, and maybe only partly from training his groundsense to a pitch like I’ve never seen.”
“Do you think that’s why he’s so… I don’t know how to say it- tidy? Maybe turmoil hurts him in his ground.”
He raised his brows at her. “Could be, Spark.”
She cuddled in closer, planting a kiss on his collarbone. His hand tightened on her hip. Before they gave over talking in favor of other sorts of exchange, she said, “So, what should I write to Whit and Berry? ”
He sighed uncertainly. “What do you want to do, Spark? ”
She went still beneath his warm grip, stemming her first thought before it could leap off her tongue. I want to go home made no sense. The West Blue farmhouse would belong to her eldest brother’s wife, in due course. Dag had been all but banished from Hickory Lake. All the home she had was right here beneath her, a square of blanket on somebody else’s floor. And Dag. It was enough for two.
But not for three.
Or maybe even more; twins ran in Fawn’s family. Two years in this place? It seemed a huge stretch of time to her, though Dag no doubt saw it as a hiccup in his much longer existence. A lot could happen in two years. Births. Deaths. Both.
Her thoughts were spinning too wide and loose to snag sense. She coiled them in. A day, a week, a month, that was all she could plan right now. “I’ve seen the rivers, and it was all good except for that one mile. And I’ve seen the sea. I’d still like to see the Trace in that lingerin’ spring you…”-she caught the word promised before it could escape to wound him-“told me about. Whichever spring that turns out to be.”
He ducked his head, but didn’t speak.
Arkady had said how much time it would take to turn Dag into a real medicine maker. He hadn’t exactly said outright that Dag and his farmer bride were invited to stay here that long. Was that I’d give you two years an observation or an offer?
She drew breath. “I’ll write Whit and Berry that we’re not coming back to the Fetch, anyhow.” That floating home might already be passed to its new owner, their things transferred to the keelboat. “Is it possible to send a letter from here all the way up to Clearcreek? ”
Dag pursed his lips, seeming to check his mental map-courier routes and camp locations, likely. “Yes. No guarantee of how quick it’d get there, though.”
Fawn nodded understanding. It was a slow, hard slog to wrestle a keelboat upriver: four months or more from Graymouth to Tripoint, compared to the six or so weeks it took to float down. The overland route on the Tripoint Trace cut off the corner of the river route, many miles shorter, quicker for the horsed or the lightly burdened, but unfriendly to heavy cargo. They could leave New Moon weeks or even months from now and still beat Whit and Berry… home, her thought faltered. Or to Clearcreek, anyhow. Where Whit at least had achieved a real home now, with Berry and Hawthorn. She and Dag would be welcome guests there, Fawn had no doubt. She swallowed. “I’ll tell him if we don’t all meet up back at Clearcreek by strawberry season, to look for another letter.”
Dag nodded again.
It was plain that tonight even he couldn’t answer the question Dag, what will happen to us? She didn’t ask it. She tilted back her head instead, finding his lips for a wordless kiss.
–-
Dag took Fawn along with him to Vayve’s place to work on his new sharing knife, feigning to need her clever fingers even more than he actually did. By the time Vayve had watched Fawn help carve and polish the cured femur, wait in apprehensive but attentive silence while Dag anchored the involution into the bone, and slice his skin with a hot knife to let his blood trickle onto the blade for bonding, the maker had lost her rigidity at having a farmer in her work shack. Another little victory for Fawn’s good nature and bright ground; or, considering how far into the core of Lakewalker secrets this making was, maybe not so little.
It didn’t take Dag as long to recover from the shuddering pain of setting this involution as it had when he’d done Crane’s knife-if not elegant, at least this one was not so anxiously overbuilt. He set Fawn to burning his name and the donor’s into the sides of the bone with an awl heated in a candle flame, then borrowed her birthday walnut back from her skirt pocket to place before Vayve.
Vayve’s lips pursed as she took it up and examined it. “What was this? Practice in setting involutions? It’s far too dense, if so.”
Dag shook his head. “I’d another notion altogether. Hoped you might have some ideas. It’s been in my mind for a while that I’d like to make something for Faw-farmers that would work to protect them from malices like ground veiling does a patroller. Not the same way, mind; I don’t see how farmers could twist their grounds sideways to the world the way we do. It would have to be something else. Something any good maker could produce.”
Vayve looked startled. “You would have Lakewalker makers expend themselves creating these shields for farmers? How could we afford the time? ”
“Make and sell them, like other groundworked objects.”
“You know we only sell trivial things. These shields of yours-if they could be made at all-would not be trivial work.”
“So, don’t sell them for a trivial price.” Dag glanced at his knife on the workbench, its plain lines echoing the bone from which it had just emerged, then over at another blank Vayve had in progress, hung on the wall. The carving on that blade was elaborate. Later, it might be decorated with shell inlay or colored stones, the hilt wrapped with patterned leather. Some designs were exclusive to certain tents or camps, proclaiming the knife’s origin to the educated eye; you could always tell southern work at a glance, that way. Great pains and pride went into the makings. In the north, Dag thought, it was mostly just pain. There’s your spare time, Vayve. Don’t you see it?
Fawn put in, “Dag started off with the notion of shielding just me, and only then thought of farmers generally. But I reckon such shields might work to protect Lakewalker youngsters, too. Like the nineteen lost at Bonemarsh. Because it wasn’t only Greenspring hit with that sorrow. Stands to reason.”
Vayve fell suddenly silent.
So did Dag, blinking. Of course. Of course…! The intractable problem of how to persuade Lakewalker makers to be interested in this wild notion of his evaporated with startling suddenness, right before Dag’s eyes. Vayve’s ground roiled with new thought.
Why hadn’t he taken his idea that one step further? Aside from the fact that his head had been stuffed so full of new things these past months it felt like bursting, and he was so dizzy with it all he didn’t know if he was coming or going. Maybe it was for the same reason no Lakewalkers had taken any step-they already had a solution to the problem, or thought they did. A young Lakewalker’s tent-kin or patrol mentors were all intent on teaching ground veiling. Why tackle a problem sideways in chancy experiments that could cost lives when you already had a time-proven system?
Dag took an unsteady breath and went on: “I was thinking that an involution might either be expanded into, or anchor, some sort of slippery shield that a malice couldn’t get a grip on. At least for long enough for the farmer-or youngster-to run away. If an involution can hold a dying ground, why not a living one? ”
Vayve’s brows climbed. “But a knife’s involution breaks when it’s brought in contact with a malice.”
Dag ducked his head. “But it doesn’t break from the outside. It breaks from the inside, from the affinity of the dying ground with the malice nearby. It’s a sort of a vibration. I didn’t realize that, for all the twenty-six knives that had passed through my hand to their ends, till I held one that had no affinity with a malice.”
Dag took a long breath, and began the explanation, again, of how his former bonded knife had become charged with the death of Fawn’s unborn child at Glassforge, and the tale of its final fate in Raintree. Vayve asked far more, and more detailed, questions about the events than Arkady had. She proved especially fascinated with his account of the malice’s mud-man magery as seen from the inside.
Dag explained, “I recognized it as an involution of a sort, too, but huge, and so complex-anchored in the array of groundlocked makers the malice had slaved together. It didn’t just sit there passive like a knife’s involution. It was living off the makers, in a sense. It was the first I realized that magery is an alive thing.
“I’m not sure just where a ground shield would get such aliveness, though. And it couldn’t be working all the time, or it would wear out too quick. I’m thinking it would need to come awake only when challenged, the way a knife only breaks when it actually enters a malice.”
“Well,” said Vayve slowly, “there would be four possible sources of ground in that moment. The involution itself, the person being shielded, the immediate surroundings, or the malice itself.”
Dag frowned. “I don’t see how you could put enough strength into an involution to last more ’n a moment, if it came alive like the magery I saw in Raintree.”
“It would be clever if you could pull it from the malice itself,” mused Vayve. “Like grabbing an attacker’s arm and pulling him off balance.”
“More like grabbing an attacker’s arm and pulling it off,” said Dag, “but no. You don’t want malice ground getting in you or on you. It’s a deadly poison. Blight itself.”
“The surroundings could be anything. No way to anticipate them,” said Vayve. “That leaves the person being shielded.”
“That seems… circular,” said Dag, trying to picture this.
“If the malice’s touch spurred your shield to going,” said Fawn, “how would you rein it in? ”
Dag frowned. “I expect it would run down on its own pretty quick.”
“If it was using up a person’s ground to live, wouldn’t that be sort of fatal? ”
“Um…” said Dag, scratching the back of his head.
They debated involutions and groundwork for upwards of an hour, till the light falling through the open door of the work shack and Dag’s grumbling stomach reminded him that their dinner basket had likely arrived at Arkady’s place. They had not solved any of the problems, but Dag’s unsettlement felt curiously heartening. Maybe he’d only stepped back or sideways, and not ahead, but at least he hadn’t been dancing alone. Fawn was right. Makers need other makers. Like Dag’s knife-maker brother Dar, Vayve had plainly been doing the same task over and over in the same way for a long time; unlike Dar, her mind hadn’t set solid.
“Come around again if you think of anything else,” she told Dag with a friendly smile as he and Fawn made their way down her porch steps.
He smiled back. “You too.”
–-
The breeze whispered from the south. The slanting sun burned through the damp air with surprising strength. Fawn could just picture the full spring that would come on in not many weeks more, when the fat buds and shy shoots all unfurled. In any case, it was warm enough this afternoon to sit outside on Arkady’s roofless porch overlooking the lake.
Seated on the bench pushed up to the plank table, she crouched over her task, her tongue caught between her teeth, tracing with her curved steel cutter around Dag’s new bonded knife laid upon a leather scrap.
The southern Lakewalkers made their knife sheaths of elaborate tooled leather, inlaid sometimes with silver or even gold, but this one would be plain, in the northern style. Simple and fierce, like her thoughts. She tried to make it her best work, like holding yourself up stiff and straight in pride before the eyes of an enemy.
Arkady wandered out of the house with a mug of tea in his hand, peered for a moment over her shoulder, then drifted to the porch rail, leaning on it to gaze down over the slope. Thirty paces below, Dag sat cross-legged on the stubby dock, his back to the house, bent over his own task.
“What is he doing down there?” Arkady muttered querulously.
“What does he have in those sacks? ”
“A bag of nuts,” replied Fawn, not looking up from the cut she was finishing, “and a box of mice. And a glass jar.”
“Mice!”
“He’s not ground-ripping them!” she added hastily as Arkady straightened up. “He promised me he’d be careful about that.” She’d walked down to observe Dag’s progress a short while ago. She’d brought him the nuts and the jar, but made him catch his own mice. There were limits to wifely support. Although the sight of several mice marching out of the nearby woods in a ragged line and jumping into the box under Dag’s direction had been a memory to treasure. “He says he’s about to give up trying to make a shield for the whole body, like that groundworked leather coat he once had that he claimed would turn arrows. The idea sort of worked, but then the mice couldn’t run or breathe.”
Forcing a second trip to the woods for more mice, earlier, and silencing Fawn’s doubts about the enterprise. Dag could make lots of little trials quickly this way, work through the mistakes and dead ends. And scale up to, say, her later on. Much later on. “He’s gone back to just trying for ground shielding.”
“Madness,” Arkady muttered.
“If he can make it work,” Fawn pointed out loyally, “it could save thousands of lives.”
“Thousands,” Arkady breathed. “Gods.” He leaned and sipped his tea again, staring down the slope with an unreadable expression.
“When your husband first turned up at my gates,” Arkady continued after a long pause, “I took him for a simple man, if not a simpleton outright. Shabby, grubby, with that northern mumble that sounds like he has a mouth full of pebbles…”
“He’s only so word-stiff when he’s feeling shy and uncertain,” Fawn defended. “He can talk like a stump speaker when the mood gets on him. And he likes being clean as much as the next man”-well, unless the next man was Arkady-“he just doesn’t waste time pining for things he can’t get right then. He’s good at enduring.”
“Indeed,” murmured Arkady. He swallowed more tea. “I’ve spent my whole life in three camps, you know. I’ve traveled between them, but never beyond them.”
Fawn’s brows flew up in surprise. “What, you never rode down to look at the sea? Or Graymouth? And them so close!”
Arkady tilted his free hand back and forth. “My chosen realm runs beneath the skin. It seemed a vast enough hinterland for me.” He stared again down the slope. “Dag, though… walks with a foot in each world. He straddles things. Outside and inside. Patroller and maker. North and south.” He glanced at her. “Lakewalker and farmer. Knife maker and medicine maker, gods. He may be the least simple man I’ve ever met.”
Fawn had no argument with that. She bent her head for another cut, finished it, and said, “It goes with his knack for mending things that are broken, I guess. Bowls. Bones. Hearts. Worlds, maybe. To fix things you first have to walk all around them, see them whole.”
“And this all somehow comes down to sitting on my dock tormenting mice?” Arkady almost ran his hand through his hair. He did clench his nape knot. “What is he doing? ” he repeated. Abandoning his mug on the railing, he thumped down the porch steps and strode down the slope. Fawn watched him stand by Dag, speak, wave his arms. Dag’s hand returned a level gesture. When she looked up from her next cut, Arkady was sitting cross-legged too, glowering at the jar into which Dag was lowering a wriggling mouse by its tail. They seemed to be still talking. Debating. But when Dag bent over again in concentration, Arkady did too.
Fawn lined up her pieces and picked up her square-nosed awl to make holes for the stitching to come. She would stain the leather black with walnut juice, she decided, and bleach the binding threads pale in contrast. She glanced at the bone knife she’d helped fashion with her own hands, gods spare her heart. Her mortal foe would go most elegantly garbed in mourning colors, soft as whispers against Dag’s breastbone when he suspended the sheath from the cord around his neck. Her rival’s dark dress would be sewn well, to last for years. Decades. Longer, if Fawn had her wish.
If wishes were horses, we all would ride.
She leaned forward and pressed the first pair of holes through the leather.