“I think she had the training, way back when. All the youngsters at least get taken out on short trips around the camps. Patrollers are chosen for two things, mainly. General health and strength, and groundsense range. Not everyone can project their groundsense out far enough to be useful on patrol. The lack’s not considered a defect, necessarily; many’s the quite competent maker who can’t reach out much beyond his arm’s length.”
“Is Dar like that?”
“No, his range is almost as long as mine. He’s just even better at what he does with bones. What my mother always wanted, now…” He trailed off.
Volunteering useful information at last? No, evidently not. Fawn sighed and prompted, “Was what?”
“More children. Just didn’t work out that way for her, whether because Father was out on patrol too much, or they were just unlucky, or what, I don’t know. I should have been a girl. That was my immediate next lapse after arriving late. Or been eight other children. Or had eight other children, in a pinch, and not off in Luthlia or someplace, but here at Hickory Camp. My mother had a second chance with Dar and Omba’s children. She kind of commandeered them from Omba to raise; which I gather caused some friction at first, till Omba gave up and went to concentrate on her horses. They’d worked it all out by the time I got back from Luthlia minus the hand, anyway. There’s still just a little…I won’t call it bad feeling, but feeling, there over that.”
Mother-in-law versus daughter-in-law friction was common coin in Fawn’s world; she had no trouble following this. She wondered if Cumbia’s thwarted thirst for daughters would extend itself to a little farmer girl, dragged in off patrol like some awkward souvenir. She had taken in one daughter-in-law, quite against custom, after all. Some hope there?
“Dag,” she said suddenly, “where am I going to live?”
He looked over and raised his eyebrows at her. “With me.”
“Yes, but when you’re gone on patrol?”
Silence. It stretched rather too long.
“Dag?”
He sighed. “We’ll just have to see, Spark.”
They were nearly back to his family tent-cabins when Dag paused at a path leading into the woods. If he was checking anything with his groundsense, Fawn could not tell, but he jerked his chin in a come-along gesture and led right. The high straight boles, mostly hickory, gave a pale green shade in the shadowless light, as though they were walking into some underwater domain. The scrub was scant and low on the flat terrain. Fawn eyed the poison ivy and stuck to the center of the well-trodden path, lined here and there with whitewashed rocks.
About a hundred paces in, they came to a clearing. In the center was a small cabin, a real one with four sides, and, to Fawn’s surprise, glass windows. Even the patrol headquarters had only had parchment stretched on window frames. More disturbingly, human thighbones hung from the eaves, singly or in pairs, swaying gently in the air that soughed in the papery hickory leaves overhead. She tried not to imagine ghostly whispering voices in the branches.
Dag followed her wide gaze. “Those are curing.”
“Those folks look well beyond cure to me,” she muttered, which at least made his lips twitch.
“If Dar’s busy with something, don’t speak till he speaks to us,” Dag warned in a quiet voice. “Actually, the same applies even if it looks like he’s doing nothing.”
Fawn nodded vigorously. Putting the picture together from Dag’s oblique descriptions, she figured Dar was the closest thing to a real Lakewalker necromancer that existed. She could not picture being foolish enough to interrupt him in the midst of some sorcery.
A hickory husk, falling from above, made a clack and a clatter as it hit the shingle roof and rolled off, and Fawn jumped and grabbed Dag’s left arm tightly. He smiled reassuringly and led her around the building. On the narrower south side was a porch shading a wedged-open door. But the man they sought was outside, at the edge of the clearing. Working a simple sapling lathe, so ordinary and unsorcerous-looking as to make Fawn blink.
Dar was shorter and stockier than Dag, a solid middle-aged build, with a more rectangular face and broader jaw. He had his shirt off as he labored; his skin was coppery like Dag’s but not so varied in its sun-burnishing. His dark hair was drawn back in a Lakewalker-style mourning knot, which made Fawn wonder who for, since his wife Omba’s hadn’t been. If there was gray in it, she wasn’t close enough to see. One leg worked the lathe; the rope to the sapling turned a clamp holding a green-wood blank. Both hands held a curved knife and bore it inward, and pale yellow shavings peeled away to join a kicked-about pile below. Two finished bowls sat on a nearby stump. In the shavings pile lay discarded a partially carved, cracked blank, and another finished bowl that looked to Fawn perfectly fine.
His hands most drew her eye: strong and long-fingered like Dag’s, quick and careful. And what a very odd thing it was that it should feel so odd to see them in a pair, working together that way.
He glanced up from his carving. His eyes were a clear bronze-brown. He looked back down, evidently trying to keep working, but after another spin muttered something short under his breath and straightened up with a scowl, allowing the blank to wind down, then unclamped it and dropped it into the shavings pile. He tossed the knife in the general direction of the stump and turned to Dag.
“Sorry to interrupt,” said Dag, nodding to the half bowl. “I was told you wanted to see me immediately.”
“Yes! Dag, where have you been?”
“Been getting here. I had a few delays.” He made the sling-gesture.
For once, it did not divert his interrogator’s eye. Dar’s voice sharpened as his gaze locked on his brother’s left arm. “What fool thing have you gone and done? Or have you finally done something right?” He let his breath out in a hiss as his eyes raked over Fawn. “No. Too much to hope for.” His brow wrinkled as he frowned at her left wrist. “How did you do that?”
“Very well,” said Dag, earning an exasperated look.
Dar walked closer, staring down at Fawn in consternation. “So there really was a farmer-piglet.”
“Actually”—Dag’s voice suddenly went bone dry—“that would be my wife. Missus Fawn Bluefield. Fawn, meet Dar Redwing.”
Fawn attempted a tremulous smile. Her knees felt too weak to dip.
Dar stepped half a pace back. “Ye gods, you’re serious about this!”
Dag’s voice dropped still further. “Deadly.”
They locked eyes for a moment, and Fawn had the maddening sense that some exchange had passed or was passing that, once again, she hadn’t caught, although it had seemed to spin off the rather insulting term piglet. Or, from the heated look in Dag’s eye, very insulting term, although she couldn’t see exactly why; chickie and filly and piglet and all such baby-animal terms being used interchangeably for little endearments, in Fawn’s experience. Perhaps it was the tone of voice that made the difference. Whatever it was, it was Dar who backed down, not apologizing but changing tack: “Fairbolt will explode.”
“I’ve seen Fairbolt. I left him in one piece. Mari, too.”
“You can’t tell me he’s happy about this!”
“I don’t. But neither was he stupid.” Another hint of warning, that? Perhaps, for Dar ceased his protests, although with a frustrated gesture. Dag continued, “Omba says Mari spoke to you alone last night, after the others.”
“Oh, and wasn’t that an uproar. Mama always pictures you dead in a ditch, not that she hasn’t been close to right now and then just by chance, but I don’t expect that of Mari.”
“Did she tell you what happened to my sharing knife?”
“Yes. I didn’t believe half of it.”
“Which half?”
“Well, that would be the problem to decide, now, wouldn’t it?” Dar glanced up. “Did you bring it along?”
“That’s why we came here.”
To Dar’s work shack? Or to Hickory Lake Camp generally? The meaning seemed open.
“You seen Mama yet?”
“That will be next.”