Fawn didn’t think Dag’s company would be dawdling on their road tomorrow.
There seemed so little she could do for him. Socks. Arrows. Packing. It all felt so trivial. All things he had accomplished perfectly well for himself for years before she’d come along to so disrupt his life. She might help by putting him to bed and sitting on him, maybe; it was clear his body needed its rest, and equally clear his mind would scarcely allow it. She raised her hands and began tenderly unbuttoning his shirt. As her wrist moved, her eye was caught by the gold beads of her marriage cord. He needs to be thinking about his task, not about me. But time was growing desperately short.
“Dag…”
“Mm, Spark?” His fingers in turn gently twisted themselves in the curls of her hair, letting the locks flow over and between them.
“You can feel me through your wedding cord, right? And all the other married Lakewalkers, Mari and Cattagus and all, they can do the same for each other?”
He nodded. She drew his shirt off that long, strappy-muscled torso, folding it up atop his clean and mended riding trousers for morning. Later in the night. Whatever that grim predawn hour was.
She went on, “Well, I can’t. I’ve taken your word that our cords work the same as everyone else’s, but I can’t feel it for myself.”
“Others can tell. And tell you.”
“Yeah, well, except I can’t be all the time asking, twenty times a day. Cattagus for one doesn’t take to being pestered. And besides, he’ll have his own worries about Mari.”
“True,” he conceded, eyeing her.
She slipped out of her own shirt, his hand helping not so much for need, as to trail over her skin in passing. The light touch made her shiver. “I want to know in my own heart. Isn’t there anything at all you can do to, to make me feel you? The way all the others can?”
He said after a moment, “Not the way the others can, no. You’re no Lakewalker.”
Nor ever would be, but his wording caught her attention. “Some other way?”
“Let me…think about that for a little, Spark. It would take some unusual groundwork.”
Stripped for sleep, he was altogether unaroused. If he felt half as distracted as she did right now, that was no surprise. She felt obscurely that she ought to send him off having been thoroughly made love to, but for the first time ever, such intimacy felt forced and unhappy. That was no good either.
“You’re all tense. How if you lie down and I give you a back rub? Might help you sleep.”
“Spark, you don’t have to—”
“And a real good foot rub,” she added prudently.
He rolled over into their bedroll with a muffled noise indicating abject surrender, and she smiled a little. She started at his neck. His muscles there were plenty hard and tense, though this seemed poor compensation for the limpness elsewhere. The corded unease gave itself up but slowly as her hands pressed, slid, caressed. Unhurriedly, she worked her way from tousled top to gnarly toe, not making love, just loving.
Perhaps the lack of expectation paid off; in any case, when he at length rolled over again a more alert interest had clearly returned to him. There might yet be sleep for him tonight, if the long way around. She slid down against him to capture his mouth in a deep kiss; his own hand snaked around her shoulder and began tracing lazily over her. She tried to soak up every sensation, hold them like painted patterns on her skin, but racing time washed them constantly beyond her reach.
He arched above her like a clouded night sky, lowering, entering her; if not easily, far more easily than their first urgent fumbles on their wedding night. Exercise, indeed she thought, and smiled in memory. She felt a pang of regret that tonight was bound to be futile for trying to catch a child, both too late for this month and too soon for her healing. In these hurried, frightening circumstances, she might have been tempted to take a chance on the healing. Still…surely it would be ill omened to conceive their first child out of fear and despair. Dag’ll come back. He must come back.
He slipped his left arm behind her back, clutched her, and heaved them both over. She adjusted herself with a wriggle and sat up, looking down at him curiously. His face held a different abstraction, and she feared for a moment that they would again lose their intimate impetus to the creeping chill of tomorrow’s worries.
No, evidently not. But he watched her though half-lidded eyes as his left arm began a peculiar circuit, briefly touching the cord bound on her left wrist, then her forehead, heart, belly, groin, and wrist again.
“What are you doing?”
“Not sure. Something by feel. A little left-handed groundwork, maybe.”
What he’d called his left-handed groundwork hadn’t appeared in their lovemaking since he’d recovered the use of his right hand. She had missed his eerie caresses, though she supposed it wasn’t to her credit that they’d made her feel so downright smug for marrying a black sorcerer instead of a mere farmer. But that seemed not to be what he was about, this time.
“I’m trying to patch a bit of ground reinforcement into you that will dance with my ground in your cord. Shaped inside your own ground—pretty ground! If you—as you—grow open to me, I think I can coax it in through natural channels. Not sure exactly what the effect will be. Just…”
She opened eyes, heart, and body to him, wide and vulnerable. “Need blood?” she asked breathlessly.
She wasn’t sure if his huff was a laugh or a sob. “Don’t think so. Just…just love me…”
She found their rhythm again, taking over the lovemaking, abandoning the magic-making to him. His eyes were as wide and black as she’d ever seen them, pools of night with liquid stars in their depths. His left arm continued its rounds, more slowly but somehow more intensely. It ended laid diagonally across his belly just as his back began to arch. Her eyes squeezed shut as the wonderful, increasingly familiar wave of sensation coursed up from her heated loins, stopping her breath. A stranger, sharper wave of sweet warmth wound with it, rising up through her heart and down her arm in time with the pulse of her blood.
Oh. Oh!
Then, as he sank beneath her, the ecstatic shudders in his own body damping out, she said “Oh!” in quite another voice of surprise. She clapped her right hand to the cord encircling her left wrist. “It—it tingles. It feels like winter sparks.”
“Too much? Does it hurt?” he wheezed anxiously, opening his eyes again.
“No, not at all. Strange…oh! It’s fading a bit. Am I losing…?”
“You should be able to call it up to you when you wish. Try.”
She bit her lip and concentrated. The warm sensation faded. “No…no, oh dear. Am I not doing it right?”
“Instead of concentrating, try relaxing. Make yourself open.”
“That,” she said after a minute, “is a lot harder than concentrating.”
“Yes. Not force, but persuasion. Enticement.”
She sat astride him with her eyes closed, right hand wrapping her wrist, and tried again. She imagined herself smiling wordlessly, trying to attract Dag over to her for a kiss and a cuddle. I love you so much…
A prickling heat around, no, inside her wrist seemed like an answering whisper, Yes, I’m here. “That’s you? In the cord?”
“That’s a bit of me that’s been in the cord since that night in your aunt Nattie’s weaving room,” said Dag, smiling up at her.
“And you can feel a bit of me in your cord like this, too?”
“Yep.” He added in caution, “It may not last more than a few weeks, as you absorb the ground reinforcement.”
“It’ll do fine.” She vented a long, elated sigh, and slumped down across his chest. But since he couldn’t kiss any more of her than the top of her head in this position, she roused herself and reluctantly parted from him. They cleaned up briefly and lay back down just as the candle guttered out. Dag was asleep before she was.
She woke in the dark and rolled over to clutch an empty bedroll. Her heart lurched in panic. Feeling aroun
d frantically, she found Dag’s dented pillow still warm. She gripped her cord, calmed her breathing, and tried to sense him. Alive, of course, the reassuring prickle told her; just over…thataway.
He’s just gone out to the slit trench, you fool girl, she scolded herself in relief. She rolled on her side, bringing her hands up to her breasts, and bent her head to kiss the heavy, twice-blessed braid.
The tent flap lifted in a few minutes. The shadows outside were nearly as inky as in here. Dag slipped his bare, chilled body into their bedroll again; they wound their arms around each other, and Fawn did her best to share heat through her skin so that he might ease swiftly into whatever space of sleep was left to him this night. But before his breathing slowed, a slap sounded on the leather of their tent flap, and a low voice called, “Dag?” Utau, Fawn thought.
“I’m awake,” Dag groaned.
“Omba’s girls just brought our horses around.”
“Right. Be right with you.”
From the middle distance sounded a muffled equine snort, and Copperhead’s familiar, irritable squeal. Fawn slipped her shift on in the dark and went out to coax a bit of flame from the gray ashes of their fire, trying to get a last few minutes of light from the melted candle stub in the bottom of its clay cup. Back inside, she found Dag dressed already, running his hand over his gear as if in final inventory. There would be no turning back for forgotten items this trip. His face looked tired and strained, but not, she thought, from fear. At least…not physical fear. They shared slices of plunkin, gnawed down quickly and without ceremony. Or, in Fawn’s case, appetite.
“Now what?” said Fawn.
“The company will assemble at the headquarters tent. Most folks say good-bye at home.”
“Right, then.”
He hooked up his saddle, Fawn tottered after with the saddlebags, and they went out to where the horses were tied. Razi, Utau, and Mari were saddling theirs, in the light of a torch held aloft by Cattagus. Sarri stood ready to hand things up. In the east, across this arm of the lake, the black shapes of the trees were just growing distinguishable from the graying sky. Mist shrouded the water, and the grass and weeds underfoot were damp with dew.
Cattagus handed the torch to Sarri long enough to hug Mari, muttering into her knotted gray hair, “Mind your steps, you fool old woman.” To which she returned, “You just mind yourself, you fool old man.” Despite his wheezing, he gave her a leg up, his hand lingering a moment on her thigh as she settled into her saddle.
Dag gave Copperhead a knee to the belly, ducked the return snap of yellow teeth, and tightened his girth for a second time. He turned to grip Fawn’s hands, then embraced her as she flung her arms around him and held hard. He put her from him with a kiss, not on her lips, but on her forehead: not farewell, but blessing. The tenderness and terror of it wrenched her heart as nothing else had this anxious morning.
And then he was heaving himself up on Copperhead. The gelding, clearly refreshed by his holiday in pasture, signified his displeasure at being put back to work so early in the morning by sidling and some halfhearted bucking, firmly checked by his rider. The four patrollers angled onto the road and vanished in the shadows; Fawn saw a few more mounted shapes trotting to catch up. Those left behind turned back silently to their tents, though Cattagus gave his niece Sarri a hug around the shoulders before he went in.
Fawn was entirely unable to contemplate falling back to sleep. She went into her tent and straightened her few belongings—housekeeping was a short task with so little house to keep—and tried to set her mind to the work of the day. Spinning was endless, of course. She was helping Sarri with her weaving in return for share of the tough cloth she was presently making and for teaching Fawn how to sew a pair of Lakewalker riding trousers, but it was too early to go over there. She wasn’t hungry enough yet to eat more plunkin.
Instead, she traded her shift for a shirt and skirt, put on her shoes, and walked down the shore road toward the split to the bridge. The gray light was growing, with the faintest tinge of blue; only a few pricking stars still shone down through the leaves. She was not, she discovered, the only person with this notion. A dozen or more Lakewalkers, men and women, old and young, had collected along the main road in small groups, scarcely talking. She tried nodding to some neighbors she recognized from the plunkin delivery chore; at least some nodded back, though none smiled. But nobody was smiling much.
Patience was rewarded in a few minutes by the sound of hoofbeats coming from the woodland road. The cavalcade had already broken into the ground-eating trot of the long-legged patrol horses. Dag was in the lead, riding alongside Saun, listening with a thoughtful frown as the young man spoke; but he swiveled his head and flashed a smile at Fawn in passing, and Saun looked back and managed a surprised salute. Others along the road craned their necks for a glimpse of their own, exchanging a few last waves. One woman ran alongside a young patroller and handed up something folded in a cloth that Fawn thought might be a forgotten medicine kit; in any case, the girl grinned gratefully and twisted in her saddle to thrust it away in her bags.
Fawn wasn’t sure how seventy patrollers could seem at once so many and so few. But every one had been well kitted-up: good sturdy gear, fine weapons, good horses. Good wishes. And what she’d just seen was only a tenth of Fairbolt’s patrollers. It wasn’t hard to see where the wealth of this straitened island community was being spent.
As the tail of the company vanished around the bend, the onlookers broke up and began walking back to their tents. Almost at the last, an angular figure emerged from the cover of some straggling, sun-starved honeysuckle bushes across the road. Fawn, startled, recognized Cumbia at the same moment the Lakewalker woman saw her. She gave a nod and a polite knee-dip to her mother-in-law, wondering for a moment if this was a good chance to begin speaking with her again. It occurred to Fawn that this task might actually be easier without Dag and his nervy…well, prickliness seemed an inadequate word for it. Pigheadedness came closer. She mustered up a smile to follow, but Cumbia abruptly turned her head and began walking rapidly down the woodland road, back stiff.
It dawned on Fawn that the preparations for such dark morning departures had for long been Cumbia’s task. And Cumbia had once had a husband who hadn’t returned from patrol, or only in the form of a deathly bone blade. Was this the first time her son had ridden out without bidding her farewell? Fawn wasn’t sure if Cumbia had tried to show herself or hide herself, over there on the other side of the road, but she knew Dag hadn’t glanced that way. Dar, Fawn noted, had not come with his mother, and she wondered what it meant.
Face pinched, Fawn turned back onto the shore road. She held her hand over her marriage cord, trying for that reassuring tingle. Come on, girl, he’s not even over the bridge yet. But there, the little prickling answered her silent query nonetheless. Thataway. She took a deep breath and walked on.
In the inadequate light of their half dozen campfires flickering across this roadside clearing, Dag walked down the horse lines inspecting, but not with his eyes alone. Three horses lame. Not bad for three days of hard pushing. The company had traveled with several packhorses carrying food and precious grain. Patrol horses were normally grassfed, except now and then in farmer country where grain was easier to come by, but grazing took time and grain gave better strength. The loads of provender were rapidly dwindling; tomorrow morning, they could cache three emptied packsaddles and trade out animals, and leave no one slowing the rest by going double-mounted. Yet.
Dag had led his company miles north from Hickory Lake to pick up the straight road west, despite Saun’s pleas that he could guide them, once they’d passed the borders of Oleana into Raintree, on a shorter, swifter route. They were now, by Dag’s reckoning, a half day’s ride due north of Bonemarsh Camp. Not a direction from which relief—or, from the malice’s point of view, attack—might be expected. According to the shaken party of Lakewalker refugees, mostly women with children, that they had encountered and questioned late this af
ternoon, the malice had holed up at Bonemarsh. Temporarily. Dag had been waiting for such intelligence. Now he had it, it was time to commit his company to his plan. No excuses, no delays.
He sighed and began a roundabout stroll through the settling camp, touching this patroller or that on the shoulder. “Meet by my campfire in a few minutes.” Razi and Utau were both among them, and to Dag’s deeper regret, Mari and Dirla. Others from other patrols, all with skills known to him; not of bow or sword or spear, though all were proficient enough, but of groundsense control. A few were partnered, but most would be leaving their usual partners behind. They won’t like that. He wished that might prove the worst of their worries.
The night sky was misty, only a few stars showing through, and the ground was sodden. The company had ridden through miserable rain all day yesterday, blowing east into their faces as they pressed west. The next few days should prove fair, though Dag wondered if that would be more to their advantage or to their quarry’s. Hauling logs to keep their haunches out of the damp, the patrollers he’d tapped collected quietly around the dwindling fire, watching attentively as Dag came up. In all, sixteen: his twelve chosen, the other two patrol leaders, Saun, and himself.
“All right”—he drew breath—“this is what we’re going to do tomorrow. We’re facing a malice not only at its full strength, and mobile, but who now certainly knows what sharing knives are. Getting close enough to kill it will be a lot trickier.”
Saun stirred and subsided on his log, and Dag gave him an acknowledging nod. “I know you weren’t too happy about not sending word ahead, Saun, but a courier could barely have outpaced us, and I wasn’t keen to send a rider alone into woods maybe full of mud-men. We are several days ahead of any other possible reinforcements from the east, and also well ahead of any return messengers. No one knows we’re coming, no one knows we’re here—including the malice.”
Dag controlled an urge to pace, grasping his hook behind his back and rocking slightly instead. “I have—one time—seen a malice this advanced taken down, at Wolf Ridge in Luthlia.” The younger patrollers around the fire blinked and sat up; a few older ones nodded knowingly, gazes growing more intent. “The strategy had two pieces, though the way it played out was partly accidental. While the most of us held the malice’s mud-men and slaves—and attention—in open battle up on the ridge, by way of diversion, a small group of patrollers good at veiling their grounds slipped up on the lair. There were eight pairs in that group, and each pair carried a sharing knife. Orders were, if anyone went down, their partner didn’t stay by them, but was to take the knife and go on. If any pairs went down, the same with their linking pairs.” The reverse, Dag and everyone listening to him was aware, of the usual patrol procedure to leave no one behind. “When enough patrollers got close enough to the malice to risk a rush, they did.” It had been down to four survivors by then, Dag had been told later. “And that was the end of that malice.” But not of the cleanup, which had gone on for months thereafter.
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