They burned the rinds and sat together by the crackling flames, watching through the trees as the sunset light faded on the farther shore. For all his weary unease, Dag still found it a pleasure just to look at the play of light and shadow across Fawn’s features, the shine and spring of her hair, the gleam of her dark eyes. He wondered if gazing upon her face through time would be like watching sunsets, never quite the same twice yet unfailing in joy.
As the shadows deepened, the tree frogs in the woods piped a raucous descant to the deep croaking of bullfrogs hidden in the rushes. At last it was time to wave good night across the campsite at the others turning in, and drop the tent flap. By the light of a good beeswax candle, a gift from Sarri, they undressed and lay down in their bedroll. A few hours in Fawn’s company had soothed Dag’s strained nerves, but he must still have looked tense and absent, for she ran her hand along his face, and said, “You look tired. Do you…want to…?”
“I could grow less tired.” He kissed her curls away from her face and let his ground ease open a trifle. “Hm.”
“Hm?”
“Your ground is very pretty tonight. Glittery. I think your days of fertility are starting up.”
“Oh!” She sat up on one elbow. “Am I getting better, then?”
“Yes, but…” He sat half-up as well. “From what Mari said, you should be healing up inside at about the same rate as outside. Ground and flesh are still deep-damaged, and will recover slowly. From these”—he touched his lips to the carmine dimples in her neck—“my guess is your womb’s not ready to risk a child yet, nor will be for some months.”
“No. Nor is the rest of me, really.” She rolled back and stared up at their hide roof. “I never thought to have a baby in a tent, though I suppose Lakewalker ladies do. We’re not prepared for winter or anything, really. Not enough”—her hands waved uncertainly—“things.”
“We travel lighter than farmers.”
“I saw the inside of Sarri’s cabin. Tent. She doesn’t travel all that light. Not with children.”
“Well, that’s so. When all of Dar and Omba’s children were home, shifting camp in season was a major undertaking. I usually tried to be out on patrol,” he admitted ruefully.
Fawn sighed in uncertainty, and continued, “It’s past midsummer. Time to be making and saving. Getting ready for the cold and the dark.”
“Believe me, there is a steady stream of plunkins on their way to winter stores in Bearsford even as we speak. I used to ride that route as a horse boy in the summers, before I was old enough to go for patroller. Though in this season, it’s easier to move the folks to the food than the food to the folks.”
“Only plunkin?”
“The fruit and nuts will be coming on soon. A lot of the pigs we eat here. One per tent per season, so with four tents on this site, that makes four pig-roasts. Fish. Turkey, of course, and the hunters bring in venison from the woods on the mainland. I used to do that as a boy, too, and sometimes I go out with them between patrols. I’ll show you how Stores works tomorrow.”
She glanced up at him, catching her lower lip with her white teeth. “Dag—what’s our plan, here?” One small hand reached out to trace over his splinted arm. “What happens to me when you go back out on patrol? Because Mari and Razi and Utau—everyone I know—will all be gone then, too.”
He hardly needed groundsense to feel the apprehension in her. “By then, I figure, you’ll be better acquainted with Sarri and Cattagus and Mari’s daughter and her family. Cattagus is Sarri’s uncle, by the way—he’s an Otter by birth, as if you couldn’t tell. My plan is to lie up quiet, get folks used to the idea of you. They will in time, I figure, like they grew used to Sarri’s having two husbands.”
And yet…normally, when patrollers went out, they could be sure their spouses would be looked after in their absences, first by their families, then by their patrol comrades, then by the whole community. It was a trust Dag had always taken for granted, as solid as rock under his feet. It was deeply disturbing to imagine that trust instead cracking like misjudged ice.
He went on in a casual voice, “I think I might skip the next patrol going out and take some of my unused camp time. Plenty to do here. Sometimes, between patrols, I help Omba train her young horses, get them used to a big man up. She mostly has a flock of girls for apprentices, see.”
Fawn looked unconvinced. “Do you suppose Dar and your mama will be speaking to you again by then?”
Dag shrugged. “The next move is up to them. It’s plain Dar doesn’t like this marriage, but he detests rows. He’ll let it pass unless he’s pressed to act. Mama…had her warning. She has ways of making me crazy, and I suppose the reverse is true, but she’s not stupid. And she’d be the last person on the lake to invite the camp council to tell her what to do. She’ll keep it in the family. All we need do is let time go by and not borrow trouble.”
She eased back in reassurance, but there remained a dark streak in her spirit, interlaced with the fresh brightness from her recovering body. Dag suspected the strangeness of it all was beginning to accumulate. He’d seen homesickness devastate young patrollers far less dislocated than Fawn, and he resolved to find familiar tasks for her hands tomorrow. Yes, let her be as busy as she was used to being, till her balance grew steadier.
Meanwhile—here inside Tent Bluefield—the task to hand was surely growing less frantic and more familiar, but no less enchanting for all of that. Back to taking turns. He sought her tender lips in a kiss, opening his heart to all the intricacy of her ground, dark and light together.
Dag vanished for a couple of hours the next morning, but returned for lunch—plunkin again, but he didn’t seem to mind. Then, as promised, he took Fawn to the mysterious Stores. This proved to be a set of long sheds tucked into the woods, down the road past the patroller headquarters. Inside one, they found what appeared to be a woman clerk; at any rate, she sat at a table scratching in a ledger with a quill, surrounded by shelves crammed with more ledgers. A toddler lay asleep in a sort of wooden pen next to her. More sets of shelves, ceiling-high, marched back in rows the length of the building. The dim air smelled of leather and herbs and less-identifiable things.
While Fawn walked up and down the rows of shelves, staring at the goods with which they were crammed, Dag engaged the woman in a low-voiced consultation, which involved dragging out several more ledgers and marking off and initialing lists therein. At one point Dag said, “You still have those?” in a voice of surprise, laughed, and dipped the quill to mark some more. His splints, Fawn noticed, hardly seemed to slow him down today, and he was constantly taking his arm out of the sling.
Dag then led Fawn up and down the rows and had her help him collect furs and other leather goods according to some scheme of his own. A half dozen beautiful dark brown pelts looking like the coats of some extraordinary ferret-shaped creature he explained as coming from mink, small woodland predators from north of the Dead Lake; an exquisite white pelt, soft as whipped cream, was from a winter fox, but it was like no fox fur Fawn had ever seen or touched. These, he said, could be bride-gifts for Mama and Aunt Nattie, and Fawn had to agree they were marvelously better than the local hides they’d rejected back at Lumpton Market.
“Every patrol usually brings back something,” Dag explained. “It varies with where they’ve been and what opportunities they’ve found. Whatever part of his or her share a patroller doesn’t want or can’t use is turned over to Stores, and the patroller gets a credit for them, either to draw the equivalent item out later or trade for something of use. Excess accumulations are taken down to farmer country to trade for other things we need. After all my years of patrolling, I have a long credit at Stores. You be thinking about what you want, Spark, and chances are we can find something like.”