And then it was time to saddle up and ride again, which seemed pretty much the story of his life.
* * *
Barr called a halt at a meadow in a narrow creek valley when it was only late afternoon. There was no reason now to press their horses, after all. The next valley over, a few miles on, was flatter and farmed, and a family lived there that routinely let out their barn to passing patrols to camp in, but he wasn’t just sure how comfortable Lily would be in it, what with that memory still fierce in her mind of the Mason barn burning down. Also, they’d be more likely to cross tracks with other patrollers, doubtless from Pearl Riffle and thus knowing Barr, and gabby, and he wasn’t… wasn’t quite ready to expose Lily to them. Explain Lily to them. Whichever. If it rained tonight, he might be sorry, but for now he wasn’t.
Horse care, as always, came first, then turning their mounts loose to feed in the little meadow. Then setting up camp, as routine as breathing to Barr. Helplessly as a leaky bucket, he found himself passing on tricks and tips for efficiency in this task, just as older patrollers had taught him, and he’d taught younger patrollers in turn. Lily didn’t say much—she never seemed to say much, maddeningly, weren’t girls supposed to be chatterers?—but she followed all his directions without protest. If he kept pouring information in, speaking of buckets, surely she had to fill up and spill out something in return eventually?
In any case, he was able to use the daylight he’d saved for a beginning lesson on knife work, directed at much less cooperative partners than a patroller seeking to share. How to stand and strike without just waving your knife out for your opponent to grab off you and thus arm himself at your expense. Then, how to move and hit someone—or something—in motion, by far the more likely condition, and how to see the commonest counter-blows coming and block them. They used safety sticks again, and Barr didn’t hesitate to tap her hard to keep her awake and encourage her to strike with some strength in return.
“I wish I had a patroller girl for you to spar against,” he told her, when they stopped to catch breath. Barr was not much above middle height as Lakewalkers went, though he preferred to think of himself as nearly tall, but he was built solid, so they were hardly evenly matched. “Still, if you practice on taking out someone bigger than you are, you should be all right for anything smaller.” Which she wasn’t too likely to encounter at her current slim size, true, though some mud-men were sawed-off little basta—buggers.
She wiped her wrist against her flushed forehead. “Is this how you put one of those bone knives in a malice?”
“Depends. If you can find one new-hatched, still in its larval stage, you can just about walk up to it and stick your primed knife right in. Which is why we search hard to find them early. If it’s molted a few times and taken on form from what it’s been ground-ripping—eating—it can grow a lot bigger and nastier than even its mud-men. In which case you also have to get past the mud-men to get to their maker, which can get complicated, and is why a standard patrol is a five-by-five search array, twenty-five folks. And why we train to combine patrols into a bigger company, at need.”
“Have you killed a lot of those mud-men?”
“Absent gods, yes. See, every malice builds them different, plus starting out of different animals, so they come in every shape and size.” He wondered if it would give her nightmares like his to tell her about the mud-bats, and decided to set that tale aside for later. It wasn’t like he didn’t have plenty of others. “The more advanced a malice grows, the more human-like it can make its mud-slaves. If you ever run across a mud-man that has speech, you know its malice has consumed at least one person, and we’re in real trouble then.”
“Huh…”
“Still, I’d twenty times rather face a mud-man, as ugly as they come, than a human bandit. Or, a hundred times worse, a person who’s been mind-slaved to the malice. Because you know such folks are not, not guilty of anything more’n bad luck to be caught, and if only you could take down their controlling malice, they’d come back to their right minds. Every patroller hates that like poison. But sometimes it’s you or them, and it had better not be you.”
Her lips parted; she stared at him for a long moment. “…Patrollers really do kill people?” Have you? hung unvoiced but plain.
“Bandits,” he corrected, a little nettled by her tone. “River pirates, one time. Who are not nice folks, trust me. Though we prefer to haul them alive to the nearest farmer town and dump them off. When we can. The local folks are usually glad for the gift, because they’re usually who the robbers have been preying on.”
It was time, he thought, to break for supper. If he filled his mouth with food instead of words for awhile, maybe he could stop stirring up that dark disturbance in her ground. Fear was a plenty useful emotion, but it needed to be directed at the right targets.
Over the campfire, once her ground had settled down a bit, he tried his best to draw her out in turn. This was mostly another failure, though he was able to lead her on to talk about all the Mason horses and ponies past, and a little about her friendship with Meggie Smith. Lily seemed to admire her. Leading questions about her family made her clam up tight.
Eventually he gave up and started filling in the silent gaps with some of his more benign patrol anecdotes. Descriptions of the appalling Luthlian winters were fun for impressing an audience, he was already finding. Though he wasn’t sure she believed him about the giant southern swamp lizards to be found toward the delta of the great Gray River. He had visited the Western Levels during one of his outermost Luthlian patrols, finding them every bit as devastated and devastating as once described to him during an evening gabfest much like this.
“What’s beyond the Western Levels?” Lily asked. “How far do they go?”
“No one knows. So far, no one’s been able to cross the blight without getting so drained they’re either forced to turn around and go back, or they misjudge their timing and die out there in the graylands. So exploration isn’t exactly encouraged.”
Her silences had grown thoughtful again, not fearful, so Barr left this one undisturbed till she came out with, “Just how many patrols have you been on, anyways?”
It was Barr’s turn to blink. “Lost count years ago. I started when I was sixteen, though that first year was mostly local training patrols.”
“That’s… only two years older’n me.”
“Uh. Yeah.” Uh. “A busy camp can field you on a patrol as often as once a month, though some sweeps in the outlying areas take longer for the getting-there. Ten a year, maybe? Let me see if I can estimate…” Arithmetic was not his strongest skill, and there had been time out for this and that, and how the blight was he to count that trip to the southern sea? It had ended up a lot more like a half-year-long patrol than a break. “More than a hundred and fifty, probably. Less’n two hundred, though.”
He looked up to find her face had twisted into an expression of dismay much as when he’d first tried to explain sharing. “How old are you?”
“Uh… how old do I look to you?” A Lakewalker could estimate near-exactly, but then, his people judged grounds, not faces.
“Twenty… three? Maybe?”
He chuckled. “You’re off by a decade. Try”—yes, a birthday had passed unnoticed during his long ride back from Luthlia—“thirty-three.”
Dismay was abruptly replaced by horror. “That’s nearly as old as my papa!”
Yeah, there’s a reason for that, he did not force his lips to say. It was a perfect opening for a talk he did not want to have. Because if he brought her back to her farm, as he was pledged to do, he had no right to mess up her life there, now did he? Not that the Masons, among them and including Lily, hadn’t managed to mess it up pretty good without his help.
He wasn’t sure what his face, or his ground, looked like to her right now, but she hastily put in, “Oh! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. I wasn’t trying to say you were old old, or anything.”
“You read that reaction ou
t of my ground, didn’t you?” And never had he been more thankful that a person only sensed feelings, not thoughts.
She rocked back as if from an accusation. “Sorry!”
“No, no”—he tried to wave off her alarm gently, like a stick insect he didn’t seek to damage—“I was just surprised, is all. That’s a first for me. I was the youngest at home, and a youngster on patrol for so long, I’m more used to being treated like the fool than like the…” Patrol leader? “It was new,” he finished. Lamely, he feared.
“Sorry,” she repeated.
“Don’t be! That was good. Shows you are starting to connect up what you feel with the meaning of it. We should practice a bit of basic ground control, while you’re sensitive right now.”
He then proceeded to try to show her what could hardly be told in words, opening and closing himself repeatedly. He induced some echoing twinges in her, which he made sure to praise. She seemed almost as startled by this as by her clumsy, but discernible, ground response.
A notion then crossed Barr’s mind. “How do you like my mare Briar?” he asked. Briar was desultorily nibbling weeds nearby, the campfire light making her dark bay coat, now freed of its winter shagginess by Barr’s labors, gleam with shifting orange highlights.
Lily followed his gaze. “She’s a pretty one. She seems really fit.”
“What else can you tell about her? Not with your eyes, but with your groundsense.”
Lily stared for a long moment. Then offered hesitantly, “Is she… in foal?”
“Exactly right!” He made sure only satisfaction sounded in his voice, not his less comfortable emotions. “She was bred right before we left Luthlia. Should get a real fine colt out of her early next spring.”
“You can tell if it’s a colt or a filly?”
“Yes. Can you?”
“No…”
“Not yet, I reckon you should say,” he corrected her, which induced a tremulous almost-smile.
He had possibly done something right, because when they settled into their bedrolls soon after, in the humid darkness noisy with insect and frog songs, neither of them were as strained as they’d been the night before.
* * *
Packing up their gear the next morning, Barr made the discovery that Lily had never touched a bow in her life.
“Huh!” he said. “Mine’s built short to fit on my saddle and has a vicious draw, but I could still give you a beginning session or two on it. Maybe tonight.” Though they’d have to ride slower than snails to fit in every lesson he kept thinking of. Knife work, bow work, ground work, how had he ever come to lodge all that in his own head? Not in three days, for starters. “When we get to Clearcreek, we might find something more suited to your size.” Or he could get one made custom for her by some local farmer bowyer.
A bow would be a great weapon for her, he thought. It would keep her at a distance from mud-men. And with that innovation that Dag and Arkady were working on, making crossbow-bolt sharing knives, why, a well-shielded girl would be able to take down a malice at a nice long range. A much better picture than her closing with one of the grotesque things at armlength…
Lily didn’t make any objecting noises, anyway, eying the weapon with curiosity as they mounted up. She fell in behind him on the narrow trail like a baby duckling, and conversation was curtailed again. It was a bit frightening how easy she followed him. As disturbing as how easy he took the lead?
Barr wondered when it had become such an unthinking reflex for him, when confronted with a younger Lakewalker, to start teaching his trade. Well, first there’d had to be younger Lakewalkers, he supposed. Was he, in his new anxiety, getting too much ahead of himself with Lily? Or was it just that he didn’t know any way to say I care about you except in patroller, and when had he grown so narrow?
Or maybe the question ought to be, When had he grown enough to recognize it as narrow?
And then there were maker powers, which, he had to admit, didn’t much run in Tent Foxbrush. Patrollers to the bone, his kin. Maker powers could be slower to grow than basic groundsense—Dag had been a patroller for years before he came into his own formidable crafting. Maybe Arkady could tell if Lily had any potential in that direction?
Really, he needed to stop picturing Lily as a young patroller born. She couldn’t patrol anywhere unless she was fully accepted into a camp somewhere, and there were problems with it being his own. Although… really, if they were putting shielded farmers on patrols, just hitch one of those walnuts on Lily and she should be a shoo-in. Which Dag, or Arkady, or Verel, or any potent knife- or medicine-maker who’d been trained to it could fix her up with.
If she wanted. And what the blight did she want? It’s not like he’d asked, in his pelter to make her safe, now had he? For all his groundsense, the girl felt as opaque to Barr as a Glassforge brick wall, even without a shield. Maybe she really wanted a farm life, if not the one she’d fled from. …Maybe Fawn, adept farmwife that she was, could be a bridge to that part of Lily?
Absent gods, Barr hoped he’d find clear heads in Clearcreek, because for sure he wasn’t bringing his own.
He’d been riding with his ground closed, concealing his churning mind from his attendant duckling, but a movement at the corner of his eye caught his attention. He brought Briar to a halt, turned in his saddle, and pointed, whispering, “Look!”
Lily stood in her stirrups and peered into the sun-dappled woodland. He could sense the thrill, and thrill of fear, in her when she’d seen what he had. “Bears!”
Down in the hollow they were skirting, a black bear and two cubs rooted among the fallen logs. Moon snorted uneasily as he caught the scent of them, though Briar, attuned to her rider, stayed calm. One cub reared up and tried to tackle its sibling, resulting in two furry black bodies rolling over each other and crashing into their parent, who huffed and cuffed them in a tired maternal fashion.
“Oh, they’re so cute!” whispered Lily back. All right, so there was a thing she liked, bear cubs, although who didn’t? “Can we get closer?”
“Best not try. Black bears won’t usually charge a person, but Mama is going to be extra protective right now.”
They stayed in their saddles for a few minutes anyway, watching the show. Or rather, Lily watched the bears, Barr watched Lily. It was fascinating how her ground lightened as she was drawn out of her sorrows for a spell, which did give Barr a clue how darkly they were weighing on her the rest of the time. Yeah, if only Edjer hadn’t died, Barr thought he’d be glad to whale the tar out of the little rat for the harm his lies had done Lily. Too late to go back.
But not too late to go on. He smiled over his shoulder at Lily, who actually for the first time ever smiled back, huh! If briefly. Looked good on her for that moment, though. He chirped Briar into motion and led down the trail once more.
* * *
An hour farther on, Barr had his groundsense spread to its widest, looking for an open spot for their noon halt that would have grazing, good grass being sparse in the middle of miles of woods. The familiar, deathly bleakness just brushed the edge of the edge of his senses. He stopped Briar with a jerk, swearing aloud. The source had to be at least half a mile up the shallow creek they were fording, maybe around a bend and over a bump or two.
“What is it?” asked Lily, pulling up Moon and sounding startled at his rough words.
“There’s something I need to check up this crick.” Barr swung down from his saddle and dropped his reins to the path. “You stay here with the horses and do not move, you hear?” He thought this through. “Unless I don’t come back, and then…” Yes, what? Lily could have no idea which direction to ride. He should have taught her map-reading, too, except the only one he had for this sector was in his head. “I’ll be back.”
He started picking his way up along the creek bed, moving as fast as he could without stumbling over the mossy rocks and breaking his leg, again. The old injury, quiet when he rode, twinged at the force he put through it hopping and striding. He b
reathed deep, to thwart gasping fast-and-panicked. It was fifteen endless minutes, tracking the sick sensation and steadily closing his ground as he closed the distance, before he came upon the first blight-sign, just beyond the rise out of the shallowing ravine.
He curled up tight as a walnut shell himself, dropped to the earth, and crept up over the hump to take in with his eyes what he could no longer sense with his ground. And thank the absent gods for that, or he’d be vomiting up breakfast and last night’s dinner as well.
The sessile, oh, luck be praised, still sessile malice lay up under a bank formed by roots from a huge fallen cottonwood tree and the layered black slate of this country. This one was a pale, man-sized, vaguely man-shaped form that looked like a cross between a wet wasp nest and a grub, moist and glistening. If a grub weighed a couple of hundred pounds. If it wasn’t the ugliest malice Barr had ever seen, or the most terrifying, that maybe said more about Barr than about the gestating monster. But it couldn’t move on its own, yet.
Its next molt, changing out like a caterpillar splitting its carapace for the new form now growing inside it, would fix that, though, Barr judged. The bloated skin rippled as the new one turned and jerked inside its parent.
If only he’d possessed a primed knife, he could walk up and finish it right now. Yeah. Crap.
The woods for a hundred paces around were dead and gray, weeds dried brittle, trees leafless, worse than a patch of winter dropped down into spring’s lap. A couple of desiccated rabbit and squirrel corpses lay around the margins; farther in, any little critter that had mischanced to cross the blight was already rendered down to a pile of formless ash.
Barr dared to rise and creep closer, peering hard for the pots, the holes in the soil where the new malice, immobile as it still was, might already be brewing up its first batch of mud-men slaves. Who would not be immobile at all, and whose first task would be to range out and collect more living creatures to feed their master. If his luck held, it was still too soon…
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