“That what you been crouching over all these past three days?”
“Pretty much.”
“Huh. Let’s see. No, girlie, the burn,” he added impatiently as she thrust out her scorched bundle. She gave him her other hand; he held it in his dry, thick fingers, and his gray head bent slightly. He was dressed as usual in nothing but the short trousers and sandals that were his summer uniform, and she was conscious of the smell of him, a mix of old man and lake green, not unpleasant at this concentration, and very Cattagus. Would Dag smell like that when he grew as old? She thought she could learn to like it.
Fawn stared at her rejected knitting as Cattagus kneaded her palm. “Do you think Mari would like those socks? They’re too big for me and too small for Dag, but they’re good for under riding boots. If she’s not too proud to take work from a stupid farmer,” she added bitterly. “Or Cumbia’s castoffs.”
“That last might actually be a draw,” said Cattagus, with his whistling chuckle.
He released her hand, which had stopped throbbing; Fawn peeked at the red marks, which had faded to pink instead of raising blisters as she’d thought they would. He does healing groundwork like Dag. “Thank you,” she said gratefully. Cattagus nodded, picked up the socks, and set them beyond his leather scraps, signifying acceptance of the gift, and Fawn blinked back eye-fog again.
Fawn turned away, then turned back, blurting, “Cumbia said because I can’t veil my ground it’s just like walking around naked.”
“Well,” said Cattagus in a slow, judicious drawl, “Cumbia tends to be a bit on the tight side, herself. Full of things she doesn’t want others to see. Most folks our age just give up and be what they are.”
Fawn tilted her head, considering this. “Older farm folk can be like that, some of them. Well, not with their grounds, of course, but with clothes, and what they do and say.”
“Cumbia’s still tryin’ to fix the world, I’m afraid. She’d have been a relentless patroller. Thank the absent gods she went for a maker.” He appeared to lose himself in a vision of patrolling with a younger Cumbia, and shuddered.
“What does she make? Particularly?”
“Rope and cord that does not break. Very much in demand for folks’ boats and sailboats, y’see. And other key uses.”
“Oh. So…so she was making magic when I, um, interrupted her…?”
“No great thing if you did, she’s been doing it for so long. Wouldn’t have slowed her a bit if you’d been someone she wanted to see.”
“I was not that,” Fawn sighed. She blinked, trying to recapture her thought. “So do Lakewalkers go about with their grounds open, too?”
“If they’re relaxed, or wishful to take in the world around them at its fullest, aye. Too, lots of folks have short groundsense ranges. So you’re out of their sight, so to speak, at any little distance, even if you’re flaring.”
But everyone in this campsite, the children excepted, had long groundsense ranges. She had a sudden horrible thought. “But when Dag and I, when Dag opens up to me…um.”
Cutting off her words was no help; Cattagus was chuckling downright evilly. Leaving no doubt that he’d caught her meaning, he said, “Me, I cheer for Dag. Even though Mari hits me. Those Redwing women are a stern sisterhood, I can tell you.” He added to her hot blush, “It’s this breath-thing, y’see. Puts me out of the action myself, mostly. ’Bout all I can do these days is wave on the luckier ones.”
Fawn’s blush deepened, but she dimly recognized that he had handed her back this intimate revelation by way of turnabout: even-all. Cruelty and kindness, how could one morning hold so much of both? “Folks is folks, I guess,” she said.
Cattagus nodded. “Always have been. Always will be. That’s better.”
She realized she had grown much calmer; her throat no longer ached. She touched the cord on her left wrist, and nodded to Cattagus’s. “Is Mari all right this morning? Too?”
“So far.” His eyes narrowed at her cord. “Dag did something to yours, didn’t he? Or…to you.”
Fawn nodded, though she flushed again to recall the exact circumstances. But Cattagus, while he could be shrewd or crude, was not mean-minded, and seemed unlikely to press her for private details. “I got my ground to go into Dag’s cord all right, by a…a trick, I guess, when we wove them, but I couldn’t sense his. So he did some extra groundwork on mine just before he left. It’s good to know I could find him, if I had to. Or he me, I suppose.”
Cattagus opened his mouth, stopped. Blinked. “Beg pardon?”
She held up her wrist, closed her eyes, and turned about. Opening them, she found herself facing west into the woods. “That way. It’s pretty vague, but I reckon, if I got closer, the sense of just where he is would grow tighter. It did the other morning when he was nearby, anyhow.” She turned and looked in surprise at Cattagus’s climbing brows. “Don’t everyone’s cords do that?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
Cattagus rubbed his nose. “Wasn’t exactly the cord he did the work on, I think. Best not to mention that trick to anyone else till he gets back.”
“Why not?”
“Um. Well. Let’s just say, if Dag wants to add any complications to his argument with the camp council, let him pick and choose them himself.”
There was an undercurrent, but in what direction it flowed Fawn could scarcely guess. “All right,” she said doubtfully. Wistful, she stared west again. “When do you think they’ll come back?”
He shrugged. “No knowing.” But his eyes seemed to know too much.
Fawn nodded, not so much in agreement as silent sympathy, and took herself off to her tent. She needed to think of a new project for her hands. Not knitting. The sun was climbing toward noon. She hoped it lit Dag’s path, wherever it was now winding.
Dead silence, thought Dag, was never a truer phrase.
The high summer sun beat down on a winter landscape. The marshland open to his gaze looked as if it had suffered a week of killing frost. What should have been high green stands of reeds lay flattened and tangled, browning. The line of planted poplars along which his patrol was ghosting looked ghostly themselves, yellowing leaves spinning down one by one in the breezeless air. The air itself was hot, moist, close as only a Raintree summer could be, but devoid of the whine and whirr of insects, empty of birdcalls. It was a blight indeed when even the mosquitoes lay dead, floating with rafts of miscellaneous pond wrack in long, gray smears atop the blank water. The undersides of a couple of dead turtles made dim yellow patches in the murk. The blue sky reflected there in crooked strips, weird contrast to the scum.
The blighted soil nipped at his feet, yet without the deeper sucking drain on his ground that marked land long occupied by a malice. More; Dag could not feel that dry shock in his midsection, like the reverberation of some great blow to the body, that told him a malice lay near. Cautiously, he stood up for a better view of the ruined Lakewalker village that lay along the shore across a quarter mile of open water.
Crouched down in the dead and dying weeds behind Dag, Mari hissed nervous warning.
“It’s not here,” he breathed to her.
She frowned, nodded acceptance of this, but whispered back, “Its slaves might still be.”
He dared to open his groundsense just a little, swallowing against the nausea induced by so much recent blight beating against him. When he was sure he wasn’t going to vomit, he opened himself further. Nothing fluttered in his perception but a few distraught blackbirds, fled from the earlier disruption, returning to search futilely for mates or nests.
“There’s nothing alive for a mile—wait.” He hunkered down again. A few hundred paces beyond the village, in a boggy stretch along the shore, something swirled in his senses, a familiar concentration of distorted ground. Ground around the patch seemed to seep toward it, creeping through the soil like draining water. He narrowed his eyes, searched more carefully.