She almost missed the question in his mumble. I’m tired too. “On your horse?
Yes, but—”
“Good.” He went to his mount and caught up the reins, but instead of coming back to her, led it to the creek. She trailed along again, partly curious, partly not wanting to let him out of her sight.
He evidently decided a tree would be faster for stowing his prey. He tossed a rope up over the crotch of a big sycamore that overhung the creek, using his horse to haul the body up it. He climbed up to be sure the corpse was securely wedged and to retrieve his rope. He moved so efficiently, Fawn could scarcely spot the extra motions and accommodations he made for his one-handed state. Dag pressed his tired horse over the last ridge and was rewarded on the other side by finding a double-rutted track bumping along the creek bottom. “Ah, good,” he said aloud. “It’s been a while since I patrolled down this way, but I recall a good-sized farm tucked up at the head of this valley.”
The girl clinging behind his cantle remained too quiet, the same wary silence she’d maintained since he’d discussed her pregnant state. His groundsense, extended to utmost sensitivity in search for hidden threats, was battered by her nearby churning emotions; but the thoughts that drove them remained, as ever, opaque. He had maybe been too indiscreet. Farmers who found out much about Lakewalker groundsense tended to call it the evil eye, or black magic, and accuse patrollers of mind reading, cheating in trade, or worse. It was always trouble.
If he found enough people at this farm, he would leave her in their care, with strong warnings about the half-hunt-half-war presently going on in their hills.
If there weren’t enough, he must try to persuade them to light out for Glassforge or some other spot where they might find safety in numbers till this malice was taught mortality. If he knew farmers, they wouldn’t want to go, and he sighed in anticipation of a dreary and thankless argument.
But the mere thought of a pregnant woman of any height or age wandering about in blithe ignorance anywhere near a malice’s lair gave him gruesome horrors. No wonder she’d shone so brightly in his groundsense, with so much life happening in her. Although he suspected Fawn would have been scarcely less vivid even before this conception. But she would attract a malice’s attention the way a fire drew moths.
By the time they’d straightened out the definition of grass widow, he had been fairly sure he had no need to offer her condolences. Farmer bed customs made very little sense, sometimes, unless one believed Mari’s theories about their childbearing being all mixed up with. their pretense of owning land. She had some very tart remarks on farmer women’s lack of control of their own fertility, as well. Generally in conjunction with lectures to young patrollers of both sexes about the need to keep their trousers buttoned while in farmer territory.
Old patrollers, too.
Details of a dead husband had been conspicuously absent in Fawn’s speech. Dag could understand grief robbing someone of words, but grief, too, seemed missing in her. Anger, fear, tense determination, yes. Shock from the recent terrifying attack upon her. Loneliness and homesickness. But not the anguish of a soul ripped in half. Strangely lacking, too, was the profound satisfaction such life-giving usually engendered among Lakewalker women he’d known. Farmers, feh.
Dag knew why his own people were all a little crazed, but what excuse did farmers have?
He was roused from his weary brooding as they passed out of the woods and the valley farm came into sight. He was instantly ill at ease. The lack of cows and horses and goats and sheep struck him first, then the broken-down places in the split-rail fence lining the pasture. Then the absence of farm dogs, who should have been barking annoyingly around his horse by now. He stood in his stirrups as they plodded up the lane. House and barn, both built of weathered gray planks, were standing—and standing open—but smoke rose in a thin trickle from the char and ashes of an outbuilding.
“What is it?” asked Fawn, the first words she’d spoken for an hour.
“Trouble, I think.” He added after a moment, “Trouble past.” Nothing human flared in the range of Dag’s perceptions—nor anything non-human either. “The place is completely deserted.”
He pulled up his horse in front of the house, swung his leg over its neck, and jumped down. “Move up. Take the reins,” he told Fawn. “Don’t get down yet.”
She scrambled forward from her perch on his saddlebags, staring around wide-eyed. “What about you?”
“Going to scout around.”
He made a quick pass through the house, a rambling two-story structure with additions built on to additions. The place seemed stripped of small objects of any value. Items too big to carry—beds, clothes chests—were frequently knocked over or split. Every glass window was broken out, senselessly. Dag had an idea how hard those improvements had been to come by, carefully saved for by some hopeful farmwife, packed in straw up from Glassforge over the rutted lanes.
The kitchen pantry was stripped of food.
The barn was empty of animals; hay was left, some grain might be gone. Behind the barn on the manure pile, he at last found the bodies of three farm dogs, slashed and hacked about. He eyed the smoldering outbuilding in passing, charred timbers sticking out of the ash like black bones. Someone would need to look through it for other bones, later. He returned to his horse.
Fawn was gazing around warily as she took in the disturbing details. Dag leaned against Copperhead’s warm shoulder and swiped his hand through his hair.
“The place was raided by the bandits—or someone—about three days ago, I judge,”
he told her. “No bodies.”
“That’s good—yes?” she said, dark eyes growing unsure at whatever expression was leaking onto his features. He couldn’t think that it was anything but exhaustion.
“Maybe. But if the people had run away, or been run off, news of this should have reached Glassforge by now. My patrol had no such word as of yesterday evening.”
“Where did they all go, then?” she asked.
“Taken, I’m afraid. If this malice is trying to take farmer slaves already, it’s growing fast.”
“What—slaves for what?”
“Not sure the malice even knows, yet. It’s a sort of instinct with malices.
It’ll figure it out fast enough, though. I’m running out of time.” He was growing dizzy with fatigue. Was he also growing stupid with fatigue?
He continued, “I’d give almost anything for two hours of sleep right now, except two hours of light. I need to get back to the trail while I still have daylight to see it. I think…” His voice slowed. “I think this place is as safe as any and safer than most. They’ve hit it once, it’s already stripped of everything valuable—they won’t be back too soon. I’m thinking maybe I could leave you here anyway. If anyone comes, you can tell them—no. First, if anyone comes, hide, till you are sure they’re all-right folks. Then come out and tell them Dag has a message for his patrol, he thinks the malice is holed up northeast of town, not south. If patrollers come, do you think you could show them to where the tracks led off? And that boy’s—bandit’s—body,” he added in afterthought.
She squinted at the wooded hills. “I’m not sure I could find my way back to it, the route you took.”
“There’s an easier way. This lane”—he waved at the track they’d ridden up—“goes back to the straight road in about four miles. Turn left, and I think the path your mud-man took east from it is about three miles on.”
“Oh,” she said more eagerly, “I could find that, sure.”
“Good, then.”