Dag nodded and trudged on.
The distorting animals trapped in their mud pots were much the same repellent sight as yesterday. The five surviving makers and three patrollers, more inexplicably trapped, were at least physically supported now, as comfortable as they might be made in bedrolls on the ground in the warm summer shade. The other patrollers taking turns to lift them and spoon liquids into them must also be ground-closed and walking blind, Dag realized.
Even apart from the hazard of this peculiar sticky ground-snare, he had the irrational apprehension that opening his ground would be like a man pulling a dressing from a gut wound; that all his insides might spill out. He found that while his back was turned, Saun and Dirla had unsaddled Copperhead and set up Dag’s possessions and bedroll in a flat, dry spot raked clear of debris. They’d been awake as long as he had, blight it, why were they so blighted perky? Blighted children…The moment his haunches hit his blanket, Dag knew he wasn’t getting up again. He sat staring blankly at his bootlaces, transported in memory back to the night after his last malice kill, with Spark on the feather tick in that farmhouse kitchen.
He was still staring when Saun knelt to undo one boot, and Dirla the other. It was surely a measure of…something, that he let them.
“Can I bring you anything to eat? Drink?” asked Dirla.
Dag shook his head. While riding he had gnawed down a number of leathery strips of dried plunkin, on the theory that he might so dispose of two tedious chores at the same time. He wasn’t hungry. He wasn’t anything.
Saun set his boots aside and squinted out into the afternoon light upon the silent, wasted marsh. “How long do you suppose till this place recovers? Centuries?”
“It looks bad now,” said Dag, “but the malice was only here a few days, and the blight’s not deep. Decades at most. Maybe not in my life, but in yours, I’d say.”
Saun’s eyes pinched, and he traded an unreadable look with Dirla. “Can I get—do you want anything at all, Captain?”
I want Spark. A mistake to allow himself the thought, because it bloomed instantly into a near-physical ache. In his heart, yes—as if there were any part of him not hurting already. Instead, he said, “Why am I captain all at once, here? You call me Dag, I call you Hey, you, boy. It’s always worked before.”
Saun grinned sheepishly, but didn’t answer. He and Dirla scrambled up; Dag was asleep before the pair left the grove.
Fawn, who hadn’t been able to fall to sleep till nearly dawn, woke in the midmorning feeling as though she had been beaten with sticks. Mint tea and plunkin did little to revive her. She turned to her next hand task, weaving string from her spun plunkin flax to make wicks for a batch of beeswax candles Sarri was planning. An hour into it her eyes were blurring, and the throbbing in her left hand and arm was a maddening distraction that matched the throbbing in her head. Was it her heartbeat or Dag’s that kept the time? At least his heart’s still beating. She set down her work, walked up the road to where the path to Dar’s bone shack led off, and stood in doubt.
Dag’s his brother. Dar has to care. Fawn considered this proposition in light of her own brothers. No matter how furious she might be with them, would she drop her gripe if they were hurt and needed help? Yes. Because that’s what family was all about, in her experience. They pulled together in a crisis; it was just too bad about the rest of the time. She set her shoulders and walked down the path into the green shade.
She hesitated again at the edge of the sun-dappled glade. If she was truly parading about ground-naked, as Cumbia accused, Dar must know she was here. Voices carried around the corner of the shack. He wasn’t, then, deep in concentration upon some necromantic spell. She continued around to find Dar sitting on the top porch step with an older woman dressed in the usual summer shift, her hair in a knot. Dar was holding a sharing knife. He drew a peeved breath and looked up, reluctantly acknowledging Fawn.
Fawn clenched her left wrist protectively to her breast. “Mornin’, Dar. I had a question for you.”
Dar grunted and rose; the woman, with a curious glance at Fawn, rose too.
“So what is it?” Dar asked.
“It’s kind of private. I can come back.”
“We were just finishing. Wait, then.” He turned to the woman and hefted the knife. “I can deconsecrate this in the afternoon. Do you want to come back tonight?”
“Could. Or tomorrow morning.”
“I have another binding tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll make it tonight, then. After supper?”
“That would do.”
The woman nodded briskly and started away, then paused by Fawn, looking her up and down. Her brows rose. “So you’re the famous farmer bride, eh?”
Fawn, unable to figure her tone, gave a safe little knee-dip.
She shook her head. “Well, Dar. Your brother.” With this opaque pronouncement, she strode off up the path.
By the bitter twisting of Dar’s lips, he drew more information from this than Fawn could. Fawn let it go; she had much more urgent worries right now. She approached Dar cautiously, as if he might bite. He set the knife on the porch boards and eyed her ironically.
Too nervous to plunge straight in, Fawn said instead, “What was that woman here for?”
“Her grandfather died unexpectedly in his sleep a few weeks ago, without getting the chance to share. She brought his knife back to be rededicated.”
“Oh.” Yes, that had to happen now and then. She wondered how Dar did that, took an old knife and bound it to the heart of someone new. She wished he and she could have been friends—or even relatives—then she could have asked.
Never mind that now. She gulped and stuck out her left arm. “Before Dag rode off to Raintree, I asked him if he couldn’t fix it so’s I could feel him through my marriage cord the way he feels me. And he did.” She prayed Dar would not ask how. “Last night about two hours after midnight, I woke up—there was this hurting all up my arm. Sarri, she woke up about the same time, but all she said was that Razi and Utau were still alive. Mari, too, Cattagus says. It didn’t do this before—I was afraid that—I think Dag’s hurt. Can you tell? Anything more?”
Dar’s face was not especially revealing, but Fawn thought a flash of alarm did flicker through his eyes. In any case, he did not snipe at her, but merely took her arm and let his fingers drift up and down it. His lips moved, tightened. He shook his head, not, seemingly, in defeat, but in a kind of exasperation. “Gods, Dag,” he murmured. “Can you do worse?”
“Well?” said Fawn apprehensively.
Dar dropped her arm; she clutched it to herself again. “Well…yes, I think Dag has probably taken some injury. No, I can’t be sure how much.”
Offended by his level tone, Fawn said, “Don’t you care?”
Dar turned his hands out. “If it’s so, it won’t be the first time he’s been brought home on a plank. I’ve been down this road with Dag too many times. I admit, the fact that he’s company captain is a bit…”
“Worrisome?”
“If you like. I can’t figure what Fairbolt…eh. But you say the others are all right, so they must be taking care of him. The patrol looks after its own.”
“If he’s not lost or separated or something.” Fawn could imagine a hundred somethings, each more dire than the last. “He’s my husband. If he’s hurt, I should be lookin’ after him.”
“What are you going to do? Jump on your horse and ride off into a war zone? To lose yourself in the woods, drown in a bog or a river, be eaten by the first wolf—or malice—whose path you cross? Come to think, maybe I should have Omba saddle up your horse and put you on it. It would certainly solve my brother’s problems for him.”