Dag gave Copperhead a knee to the belly, ducked the return snap of yellow teeth, and tightened his girth for a second time. He turned to grip Fawn’s hands, then embraced her as she flung her arms around him and held hard. He put her from him with a kiss, not on her lips, but on her forehead: not farewell, but blessing. The tenderness and terror of it wrenched her heart as nothing else had this anxious morning.
And then he was heaving himself up on Copperhead. The gelding, clearly refreshed by his holiday in pasture, signified his displeasure at being put back to work so early in the morning by sidling and some halfhearted bucking, firmly checked by his rider. The four patrollers angled onto the road and vanished in the shadows; Fawn saw a few more mounted shapes trotting to catch up. Those left behind turned back silently to their tents, though Cattagus gave his niece Sarri a hug around the shoulders before he went in.
Fawn was entirely unable to contemplate falling back to sleep. She went into her tent and straightened her few belongings—housekeeping was a short task with so little house to keep—and tried to set her mind to the work of the day. Spinning was endless, of course. She was helping Sarri with her weaving in return for share of the tough cloth she was presently making and for teaching Fawn how to sew a pair of Lakewalker riding trousers, but it was too early to go over there. She wasn’t hungry enough yet to eat more plunkin.
Instead, she traded her shift for a shirt and skirt, put on her shoes, and walked down the shore road toward the split to the bridge. The gray light was growing, with the faintest tinge of blue; only a few pricking stars still shone down through the leaves. She was not, she discovered, the only person with this notion. A dozen or more Lakewalkers, men and women, old and young, had collected along the main road in small groups, scarcely talking. She tried nodding to some neighbors she recognized from the plunkin delivery chore; at least some nodded back, though none smiled. But nobody was smiling much.
Patience was rewarded in a few minutes by the sound of hoofbeats coming from the woodland road. The cavalcade had already broken into the ground-eating trot of the long-legged patrol horses. Dag was in the lead, riding alongside Saun, listening with a thoughtful frown as the young man spoke; but he swiveled his head and flashed a smile at Fawn in passing, and Saun looked back and managed a surprised salute. Others along the road craned their necks for a glimpse of their own, exchanging a few last waves. One woman ran alongside a young patroller and handed up something folded in a cloth that Fawn thought might be a forgotten medicine kit; in any case, the girl grinned gratefully and twisted in her saddle to thrust it away in her bags.
Fawn wasn’t sure how seventy patrollers could seem at once so many and so few. But every one had been well kitted-up: good sturdy gear, fine weapons, good horses. Good wishes. And what she’d just seen was only a tenth of Fairbolt’s patrollers. It wasn’t hard to see where the wealth of this straitened island community was being spent.
As the tail of the company vanished around the bend, the onlookers broke up and began walking back to their tents. Almost at the last, an angular figure emerged from the cover of some straggling, sun-starved honeysuckle bushes across the road. Fawn, startled, recognized Cumbia at the same moment the Lakewalker woman saw her. She gave a nod and a polite knee-dip to her mother-in-law, wondering for a moment if this was a good chance to begin speaking with her again. It occurred to Fawn that this task might actually be easier without Dag and his nervy…well, prickliness seemed an inadequate word for it. Pigheadedness came closer. She mustered up a smile to follow, but Cumbia abruptly turned her head and began walking rapidly down the woodland road, back stiff.
It dawned on Fawn that the preparations for such dark morning departures had for long been Cumbia’s task. And Cumbia had once had a husband who hadn’t returned from patrol, or only in the form of a deathly bone blade. Was this the first time her son had ridden out without bidding her farewell? Fawn wasn’t sure if Cumbia had tried to show herself or hide herself, over there on the other side of the road, but she knew Dag hadn’t glanced that way. Dar, Fawn noted, had not come with his mother, and she wondered what it meant.
Face pinched, Fawn turned back onto the shore road. She held her hand over her marriage cord, trying for that reassuring tingle. Come on, girl, he’s not even over the bridge yet. But there, the little prickling answered her silent query nonetheless. Thataway. She took a deep breath and walked on.
In the inadequate light of their half dozen campfires flickering across this roadside clearing, Dag walked down the horse lines inspecting, but not with his eyes alone. Three horses lame. Not bad for three days of hard pushing. The company had traveled with several packhorses carrying food and precious grain. Patrol horses were normally grassfed, except now and then in farmer country where grain was easier to come by, but grazing took time and grain gave better strength. The loads of provender were rapidly dwindling; tomorrow morning, they could cache three emptied packsaddles and trade out animals, and leave no one slowing the rest by going double-mounted. Yet.
Dag had led his company miles north from Hickory Lake to pick up the straight road west, despite Saun’s pleas that he could guide them, once they’d passed the borders of Oleana into Raintree, on a shorter, swifter route. They were now, by Dag’s reckoning, a half day’s ride due north of Bonemarsh Camp. Not a direction from which relief—or, from the malice’s point of view, attack—might be expected. According to the shaken party of Lakewalker refugees, mostly women with children, that they had encountered and questioned late this afternoon, the malice had holed up at Bonemarsh. Temporarily. Dag had been waiting for such intelligence. Now he had it, it was time to commit his company to his plan. No excuses, no delays.
He sighed and began a roundabout stroll through the settling camp, touching this patroller or that on the shoulder. “Meet by my campfire in a few minutes.” Razi and Utau were both among them, and to Dag’s deeper regret, Mari and Dirla. Others from other patrols, all with skills known to him; not of bow or sword or spear, though all were proficient enough, but of groundsense control. A few were partnered, but most would be leaving their usual partners behind. They won’t like that. He wished that might prove the worst of their worries.
The night sky was misty, only a few stars showing through, and the ground was sodden. The company had ridden through miserable rain all day yesterday, blowing east into their faces as they pressed west. The next few days should prove fair, though Dag wondered if that would be more to their advantage or to their quarry’s. Hauling logs to keep their haunches out of the damp, the patrollers he’d tapped collected quietly around the dwindling fire, watching attentively as Dag came up. In all, sixteen: his twelve chosen, the other two patrol leaders, Saun, and himself.
“All right”—he drew breath—“this is what we’re going to do tomorrow. We’re facing a malice not only at its full strength, and mobile, but who now certainly knows what sharing knives are. Getting close enough to kill it will be a lot trickier.”
Saun stirred and subsided on his log, and Dag gave him an acknowledging nod. “I know you weren’t too happy about not sending word ahead, Saun, but a courier could barely have outpaced us, and I wasn’t keen to send a rider alone into woods maybe full of mud-men. We are several days ahead of any other possible reinforcements from the east, and also well ahead of any return messengers. No one knows we’re coming, no one knows we’re here—including the malice.”
Dag controlled an urge to pace, grasping his hook behind his back and rocking slightly instead. “I have—one time—seen a malice this advanced taken down, at Wolf Ridge in Luthlia.” The younger patrollers around the fire blinked and sat up; a few older ones nodded knowingly, gazes growing more intent. “The strategy had two pieces, though the way it played out was partly accidental. While the most of us held the malice’s mud-men and slaves—and attention—in open battle up on the ridge, by way of diversion, a small group of patrollers good at veiling their grounds slipped up on the lair. There were eight pairs in that group, and each pair carried a sharing knife. Orders were, if anyone went down, their partner didn’t stay by them, but was to take the knife and go on. If any pairs went down, the same with their linking pairs.” The reverse, Dag and everyone listening to him was aware, of the usual patrol procedure to leave no one behind. “When enough patrollers got close enough to the malice to risk a rush, they did.” It had been down to four survivors by then, Dag had been told later. “And that was the end of that malice.” But not of the cleanup, which had gone on for months thereafter.