She nodded. The water was flat and tepid but seemed clean.
“Eat.” He held out a piece of bread fished from the one cloth.
“I couldn’t.”
“No, really. It’ll give your body something to do besides shake. Very distractible that way, bodies. Try it.”
Doubtfully, she took it and nibbled. It was very good bread, if a little dry by now, and she thought she recognized its source. She had to take another sip of water to force it down, but her uncontrolled trembling grew less. She peeked at his stiff left hand as he opened the second cloth, and decided it must be carved of wood, for show.
He wetted a bit of cloth with something from a small bottle—Lakewalker medicine?—and raised his right hand to her aching left cheek. She flinched, although the cool liquid did not sting.
“Sorry. Don’t want to leave those dirty.”
“No. Yes. I mean, right. It’s all right. I think the simpleton clawed me when he hit me.” Claws. Those had been claws, not nails. What kind of monstrous birth…
?
His lips thinned, but his touch remained firm.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come up on you sooner, miss. I could see something had happened back on the road, there. I’d been trailing those two all night. My patrol seized their gang’s camp a couple of hours after midnight, up in the hills on the other side of Glassforge. I’m afraid I flushed them right into you.”
She shook her head, not in denial. “I was walking down the road. They just picked me up like you’d pick up a lost… thing, and claim it was yours.” Her frown deepened. “No… not just. They argued first. Strange. The one who was…
um…
the one you shot, he didn’t want to take me along, at first. It was the other one who insisted. But he wasn’t interested in me at all, later. When—just before you came.” And added under her breath, not expecting an answer, “What was he?”
“Raccoon, is my best guess,” said the patroller. He turned the cloth, hiding browning blood, and wet it again, moving down her cheek to the next gash.
This bizarre answer seemed so entirely unrelated to her question that she decided he must not have heard her aright. “No, I mean the big fellow who hit me. The one who ran away from you. He didn’t seem right in the head.”
“Truer than you guess, miss. I’ve been hunting those creatures all my life.
You get so you can tell. He was a made thing. Confirms that a malice—your folk would call it a blight bogle—has emerged near here. The malice makes slaves of human shape for itself, to fight, or do its dirty work. Other shapes too, sometimes.
Mud-men, we call them. But the malice can’t make them up out of nothing. So it catches animals, and reshapes them. Crudely at first, till it grows stronger and smarter. Can’t make life at all, really. Only death. Its slaves don’t last too long, but it hardly cares.” Was he gulling her, like her brothers? Seeing how much a silly little farm girl could be made to swallow down whole? He seemed perfectly serious, but maybe he was just especially good at tall tales. “Are you saying that blight bogles are real?”
It was his turn to look surprised. “Where are you from, miss?” he asked in renewed caution.
She started to name the village nearest her family’s farm, but changed it to
“Lumpton Market.” It was a bigger town, more anonymous. She straightened, trying to marshal the casual phrase I’m a widow and push it past her bruised lips.
“What’s your name?”
“Fawn. Saw… field,” she added, and flinched. She’d wanted neither Sunny’s name nor her own family’s, and now she’d stuck herself with some of both.
“Fawn. Apt,” said the patroller, with a sideways tilt of his head. “You must have had those eyes from birth.”
It was that uncomfortable weighty attention again. She tried shoving back:
“What’s yours?” though she thought she already knew.
“I answer to Dag.”
She waited a moment. “Isn’t there any more?”
He shrugged. “I have a tent name, a camp name, and a hinterland name, but Dag is easier to shout.” The smile glimmered by again. “Short is better, in the field.
Dag, duck! See? If it were any longer, it might be too late. Ah, that’s better.”
She realized she’d smiled back. She didn’t know if it was his talk or his bread or just the sitting down quietly, but her stomach had finally stopped shuddering. She was left hot and tired and drained.
He restoppered his bottle.
“Shouldn’t you use that too?” she asked.
“Oh. Yeah.” Cursorily, he turned the cloth again and swiped it over his face.
He missed about half the marks.
“Why did you call me Little Spark?”
“When you were hiding above me in that apple tree yesterday, that’s how I thought of you.”
“I didn’t think you could see me. You never looked up!”
“You didn’t act as though to wanted to be seen. It only seemed polite.” He added, “I thought that pretty farm was your home.”
“It was pretty, wasn’t it? But I only stopped there for water. I was walking to Glassforge.”
“From Lumpton?”
And points north. “Yes.”
He, at least, did not say anything about, It’s a long way for such short legs.
He did say, inevitably, “Family there?”
She almost said yes, then realized he might possibly intend to take her there, which could prove awkward. “No. I was going there to look for work.” She straightened her spine. “I’m a grass widow.”
A slow blink; his face went blank for a rather long moment. He finally said, in an oddly cautious tone, “Pardon, missus… but do you know what grass widow means?”
“A new widow,” she replied promptly, then hesitated. “There was a woman came up from Glassforge to our village, once. She took in sewing and made cord and netting. She had the most beautiful little boy. My uncles called her a grass widow.” Another too-quiet pause. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
He scratched his rat’s nest of dark hair. “Well… yes and no. It’s a farmer term for a woman pregnant or with a child in tow with no husband in sight anywhere.
It’s more polite than, um, less polite terms. But it’s not altogether kind.”
Fawn flushed.
He said even more apologetically, “I didn’t mean to embarrass you. It just seemed I ought to check.”
She swallowed. “Thank you.” It seems I told the truth despite myself, then.
“And your little girl?” he said.
“What?” said Fawn sharply.
He motioned at her. “The one you bear now.”
Flat panic stopped her breath. I don’t show! How can he know? And how could he know, in any case, if the fruit of that really, really ill-considered and now deeply regretted frantic fumble with Sunny Sawman at his sister’s spring wedding party was going to be a boy or a girl, anyhow?
He seemed to realize he’d made some mistake, but to be uncertain what it was.
His gesture wavered, turning to open-handed earnestness. “It was what attracted the mud-man. Your present state. It was almost certainly why they grabbed you.
If the other assault seemed an afterthought, it likely was.”
“How can you—what—why?”
His lips parted for a moment, then, visibly, he changed whatever he’d been about to say to: “Nothing’s going to happen to you now.” He packed up his cloths.
Anyone else might have tied the corners together, but he whipped a bit of cord around them that he somehow managed to wind into a pull-knot one-handed.
He put his right hand on the log and shoved himself to his feet. “I either need to put that body up a tree or pile some rocks on it, so the scavengers don’t get to it before someone can pick it up. He might have people.” He looked around vaguely. “Then decide what to do with you.”
“Put me back on the road. Or just point me to it. I can find it.”
He shook his head. “Those might not be the only fugitives. Not all the bandits might have been in the camp we took, or they might have had more than one hideout. And the malice is still out there, unless my patrol has got ahead of me, which I don’t think is possible. My people were combing the hills to the south of Glassforge, and now I think the lair’s northeast. This is no good time or place for you, especially, to be wandering about on your own.” He bit his lip and went on almost as if talking to himself, “Body can wait. Got to put you somewhere safe. Pick up the track again, find the lair, get back to my patrol quick as I can. Absent gods, I’m tired. Mistake to sit down. Can you ride behind me, do you think?”