Dag drew breath and repeated his blunt introduction: “Fairbolt, meet Missus Fawn Bluefield. My wife.”
Fairbolt squinted and rubbed the back of his neck, his face screwed up. The silence stretched as he and Mari looked over the wedding cords with, Fawn felt, more than just their eyes. Both officers had their sleeves rolled up in the heat of the day, and both had similar cords winding around their left wrists, worn thin and frayed and faded. Her own cord and Dag’s looked bright and bold and thick by comparison, the gold beads anchoring the ends seeming very solid.
Fairbolt glanced aside at Mari, his eyes narrowing still further. “Did you suspect this?”
“This? No! This isn’t—how could—but I told you he’d likely done some fool thing no one could anticipate.”
“You did,” Fairbolt conceded. “And I didn’t. I thought he was just…” He focused his gaze on Dag, and Fawn shrank even though she was not at its center. “I won’t say that’s impossible because it’s plain you found a way. I will ask, what Lakewalker maker helped you to this?”
“None, sir,” said Dag steadily. “None but me, Fawn’s aunt Nattie, who is a spinner and natural maker, and Fawn. Together.”
Though not so tall as Dag, Fairbolt was still a formidably big man. He frowned down at Fawn; she had to force her spine straight. “Lakewalkers do not recognize marriages to farmers. Did Dag tell you that?”
She held out her wrist. “That’s why this, I understood.” She gripped the cord tight, for courage. If they couldn’t be bothered to be polite to her, she needn’t return any better. “Now, I guess you could look at this with your fancy groundsense and say we weren’t married if you wanted. But you’d be lying. Wouldn’t you.”
Fairbolt rocked back. Dag didn’t flinch. If anything, he looked satisfied, if a bit fey. Mari rubbed her forehead.
Dag said quietly, “Did Mari tell you about my other knife?”
Fairbolt turned to him, not quite in relief, but tacitly accepting the shift of subject. Backing off for the moment; Fawn was not sure why. Fairbolt said, “As much as you told her, I suppose. Congratulations on your malice kill, by the way. What number was that? And don’t tell me you don’t keep count.”
Dag gave a little conceding nod. “It would have been twenty-seven, if it had been my kill. It was Fawn’s.”
“It was both ours,” Fawn put in. “Dag had the knife, I had the chance to use it. Either of us would have been lost without the other.”
“Huh.” Fairbolt walked slowly around Fawn, as if looking, really looking, at her for the first time. “Excuse me,” he said, and reached out to tilt her head and study the deep red scars on her neck. He stepped back and sighed. “Let’s see this other knife, then.”
Fawn fished in her shirt. After the scare at Lumpton Market she had fashioned a new sheath for the blade, single and of softer leather, with a cord for her neck to carry it the way Lakewalkers did. It was undecorated, but she’d sewn it with care. Hesitantly, she pulled the cord over her curls, glanced at Dag, who gave her a nod of reassurance, and handed it over to the camp captain.
Fairbolt took it and sat down in one of the chairs near a window, drawing the bone blade out. He examined it much the way Dag and Mari had, even to touching it to his lips. He sat frowning a moment, cradling it in his thick hands. “Who made this for you, Dag? Not Dar?”
“No. A maker up in Luthlia, a few months after Wolf Ridge.”
“Kauneo’s bone, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever have reason before to think the making might be defective?”
“No. I don’t think it was.”
“But if the making was sound, no one but you should have been able to prime it.”
“I am very aware of that. And if the making was unsound, no one should have been able to prime it at all. But there it sits.”
“That it does. So tell me exactly what happened in that cave, again…?”
First Dag, and then Fawn, had to repeat the tale for Fairbolt, each in their own words. They touched but lightly on how Dag had come upon Fawn, kidnapped off the road by bandits in the thrall of the malice. How he’d tracked her to the malice’s cave. And come—Dag bit his lip—just too late to stop the monster from ripping the ground of her two-months-child from her womb. Fawn did not volunteer, nor did Fairbolt ask, how she came to be alone, pregnant—and unwed—on the road in the first place; perhaps Mari, who’d had the tale from Fawn back in Glassforge, had given him the gist.
Fairbolt’s attention and questions grew keener when they described the mix-up with Dag’s malice-killing sharing knives. How Dag, going down under the malice’s guard of mud-men, had tossed the knife pouch to Fawn, how she’d stuck the monster first with the wrong, unprimed knife, then with the right one, shattering it in its use. How the terrifying creature had dissolved, leaving the first knife so strangely charged with the mortality of Fawn’s unborn daughter.
By the time they were half-through, Mari had pulled up a chair, and Dag leaned against the table. Fawn found she preferred to stand, though she had to lock her knees against an unwelcome trembling. Fairbolt did not, to Fawn’s relief, inquire into the messy aftermath of that fight; his interest seemed to end with the mortal knives.
“You are planning to show this to Dar,” Fairbolt said when they’d finished, nodding to the knife still in his lap; from his tone Fawn wasn’t sure if this was query or command.
“Yes.”
“Let me know what he says.” He hesitated. “Assuming the other matter doesn’t affect his judgment?” He jerked his head toward Dag’s left arm.
“I have no idea what Dar will think of my marriage”—Dag’s tone seemed to add, nor do I care, but he didn’t say it aloud—“but I would expect him to speak straight on his craft, regardless. If I have doubts after, I can always seek another opinion. There are half a dozen knife makers around this lake.”
“Of lesser skill,” said Fairbolt, watching him closely.
“That’s why I’m going to Dar first. Or at all.”
Fairbolt started to hand the knife back to Dag but, at Dag’s gesture, returned it to Fawn. She put the cord back over her head and hid the sheath away again between her breasts.
Fairbolt, almost eye to eye with her, watched this coolly. “That knife doesn’t make you some sort of honorary Lakewalker, you know, girl.”
Dag frowned. But before he could say anything, Fawn, despite the heat flushing through her, replied calmly, “I know that, sir.” She leaned in toward him, and deepened her voice. “I’m a farmer girl and proud of it, and if that’s good enough for Dag, the rest of you can go jump in your lake. Just so you know this thing I have slung around my neck wasn’t an honorary death.” She nodded curtly and stood straight.
A little to her surprise, he did not grow offended, merely thoughtful, if that was what rubbing his lips that way signified. He stood up with a grunt that reminded her of a tired Dag, and strode across the room to the far side of the fireplace.
Covering the whole surface between the chimney stone and the outer wall and nearly floor to ceiling was a panel made of some very soft wood. It was painted with a large grid pattern, each marked with a place name. Fawn realized, looking at the names she recognized, that it was a sort of map, if lines on a map could be pulled about and squared off, of parts of the hinterland—all the parts, she suspected. To the left-hand side was a separate column of squares, labeled Two Bridge Island, Heron Island, Beaver Sigh, Bearsford, and Sick List. And, above them all, a smaller circle in red paint labeled Missing.
About a third of the squares had hard wooden pegs stuck in them. Most of them were in groups of sixteen to twenty-five, and Fawn realized she was looking at patrols—some squares were full of little holes as though they might have been lately emptied. Each peg had a name inked onto the side in tiny, meticulous writing, and a number on its end. Some of the pegs had wooden buttons, like coins with holes bored in the middle, hung on them by twisted wires, one or two or sometimes more threaded in a stack. The buttons, too, were numbered.