Fairbolt scratched his ear. “Yeah, I didn’t figure that news would sit too well with you.” He hesitated. “I owe an apology to Fawn, for trying to stop her here when you were calling her from out of that groundlock. It seems right cruel, in hindsight. I had no idea it was you behind her restiness that day.”
Dag’s brows drew down. “You been talking to Othan about the Bonemarsh groundlock?”
“I’ve been talking to everyone who was there, as I had the chance, trying to piece it all together.”
“Well, just for the scribe, it wasn’t me who told Fawn to put that knife in my leg, like, like some malice riding a farmer slave. She figured it out by her own wits!”
Fairbolt held up both palms in a gesture of surrender. “Be that as it may, how are you planning to handle this council challenge? I’ve discouraged and delayed it about as much as I can without being bounced off your hearing myself for conflict of interest. And since I don’t mean to let myself get excluded from this one, the next move has to fall on you. Which is where it belongs anyway, I might point out.”
Dag bent, venting a weary sigh. “I don’t know, Fairbolt. My mind’s been working pretty slow since I got back. It feels like a bug stuck in honey, truth to tell.”
Fairbolt frowned curiously. “An effect of that peculiar blight you took on, do you think?”
“I…don’t know. It’s an effect of something.” Accumulation, maybe. He could feel it, building up in him, but he could not put a name to it.
“It wouldn’t hurt for you to tell more of your tale around, you know,” said Fairbolt. “I don’t think everyone rightly understands how much would be lost to this camp, and to Oleana, if you were banished.”
“What, brag and boast?” Dag made a face. “I should be let to keep Fawn because I’m special?”
“If you’re not willing to say it to your friends, how are you going to stand up in council and say it to your enemies?”
“Not my style, and an insult to boot to everyone who walks their miles all the same, without fanfare or thanks. Now, if you want me to argue that I should be let to keep Fawn because she’s special, I’m for it.”
“Mm,” said Fairbolt. If he was picturing this, the vision didn’t seem to bring him much joy.
Dag looked down, rubbing his sandal in the dirt. “There is this. If the continued existence of Hickory Lake Camp—or Oleana—or the wide green world—depends on just one man, we’ve already lost this long war.”
“Yet every malice kill comes, at the end, down to one man’s hand,” Fairbolt said, watching him.
“Not true. There’s a world balanced on that knife-edge. The hand of the patroller, yes. But held in it, the bone’s donor, and the heart’s donor, and the hand and eye and ground of the knife maker. And all the patrol backing up behind who got the patroller to that place. Patrollers, we hunt in packs. Then all the camp and kin behind them, who gave them the horses and the gear and the food to get there. And on and on. Not one man, Fairbolt. One man or another, yes.”
Fairbolt gave a slow, conceding nod. He added after a moment, “Has anyone said thank you for Raintree, company captain?”
“Not as I recollect,” Dag said dryly, then was a little sorry for the tone when he caught Fairbolt’s wince. He added more wistfully, “Though I do hope Dirla got her bow-down.”
“Yes, they had a great party for her over on Beaver Sigh, I heard from the survivors.”
Dag’s smile tweaked. “Good.”
Fairbolt stretched his back, which creaked faintly in the cool silence of the shade. Between the dark tree boles, the lake surface glittered in a passing breeze. “I like Fawn, yet…I can’t help imagining how much simpler all our lives could be right now if you were to take that nice farmer girl back to her family down in West Blue and tell them to keep the bride-gifts and her.”
“Pretty insulting, Fairbolt,” Dag observed. He didn’t say who to. It would take a list, he decided.
“You could say you’d made a mistake.”
“But I didn’t.”
Fairbolt grimaced. “I didn’t think that notion would take. Had to try, though.”
Dag’s nod of understanding was reserved. Fairbolt spoke as if this was all about Fawn, and indeed, it had all begun with her. Dag wasn’t so sure his farmer bride was all it was about now. The all part seemed to have grown much larger and more complex, for one. Since Raintree? Since West Blue? Since Glassforge? Or even before that, piling up unnoticed?
“Fairbolt…”
“Mm?”
“This was a bad year for the patrol. Did we have more emergences, all told, or just worse ones?”
Fairbolt counted silently on his fingers, then his eyebrows went up. “Actually, fewer than last year or the year before. But Glassforge and Raintree were so much worse, they put us behind, which makes it seem like more.”
“Both bad outbreaks were in farmer country.”
“Yes?”
“There is more farmer country now. More cleared land, and it’s spreading. We’re bound to see more emergences like those. And not just in Oleana. You’re from Tripoint, Fairbolt, you know more about farmer artificers than anyone around here. The ones I watched this summer in Glassforge, they’re more of that sort”—Dag raised his arm in its harness—“doing more things, more cleverly, better and better. You’ve heard all about what happened at Greenspring. What if it had been a big town like Tripoint, the way Glassforge is growing to be?”
Fairbolt went still, listening. Listening hard, Dag thought, but what he was thinking didn’t show in his face.
Dag pushed on: “Malice takes a town like that, it doesn’t just get slaves and ripped grounds, it gets know-how, tools, weapons, boats, forges and mills already built—power, as sure as any stolen groundsense. And the more such towns farmers build, and they will, the more that ill chance becomes a certainty.”
Fairbolt’s grim headshake did not deny this. “We can’t push farmers back south to safety by force. We haven’t got it to spare.”
“Then they’re here to stay, eh? I’m not suggesting force. But what if we had their help, that power, instead of feeding it to the malices?”
“We cannot let ourselves depend. We must not become lords again. That was our fathers’ sin that near-slew the world.”
“Isn’t there any other way for Lakewalkers and farmers to be with each other than as lords and servants, malices and slaves?”
“Yes. Live apart. Thus we avert lordship.” Fairbolt made a slicing gesture.
Dag fell silent, his throat thick.
“So,” said Fairbolt at length. “What is your plan for dealing with the camp council?”
Dag shook his head.
Fairbolt sat back in some exasperation, then continued, “It’s like this. When I see a good tactician—and I know you are one—sit and wait, instead of moving, as his enemy advances on him, I figure there could be two possible reasons. Either he doesn’t know what to do—or his enemy is coming into his hand exactly the way he wants. I’ve known you for a good long time…and looking at you right now, I still don’t know which it is you’re doing.”
Dag looked away. “Maybe I don’t either.”
After another silence, Fairbolt sighed and rose. “Reasonable enough. I’ve done what I can. Take care of yourself, Dag. See you at council, I suppose.”
“Likely.” Dag touched his temple and watched Fairbolt trudge wearily away through the walnut grove.
The next day dawned clear, promising the best kind of dry heat. The lake was glassy. Dag lay up under the awning of Tent Bluefield and watched Fawn finish weaving hats, the result of her finding a batch of reeds of a texture she’d declared comparable to more farmerly straw. She took her scissors and, tongue caught fetchingly between her teeth, carefully trimmed the fringe of reeds sticking out around the brim to an even finger length. “There!” she said, holding it up. “That’s yours.”