Fawn translated, “A touch of Lakewalker magic healing.”
“Oh.” Chicory looked both impressed and alarmed. “That’d be a new start, for sure. All right…” He craned suspiciously as Dag laid in lines of ground, but his lips parted as his hurts eased. “How de’! That’s a strange thing. Never had a Lakewalker offer me anything like that before!”
“I aim to be a medicine maker to farmers, once I learn more of the trade,” Dag explained. “It isn’t anything anyone’s done before.”
“Mighty strange place, this big river,” sighed Chicory.
Plans were made to deliver the boatwrecked men to a town two days down the river, where Chicory hoped to find an old friend who would help them to shoes, clothes, and enough gear to commence walking home. Meanwhile, Berry undertook to watch for signs of their lost boats. The exhausted men slept in piles and didn’t wake again until the Fetch tied to the bank for the night and Fawn had to clear the decks of her kitchen to start supper.
Dag wasn’t sure if he wanted to wrap a cloak of husbandly protection around Fawn, or clutch her to him like a talisman against such a concentration of strange farmers. Just who was supposed to be protecting whom? But with fifteen people crammed aboard the Fetch, privacy—not to mention private conversation—was out of the question.
Dag quickly learned that Chicory’s crew were mainly his friends and neighbors from a small town on a feeder creek to the lower Beargrass, southwest of Farmer’s Flats and so not in the direct path of last summer’s horrors, news both Dag and Fawn took in with relief—his covert, hers warmly expressed. Chicory had acquired his tag of Captain by getting up a troop of local volunteers to go help out when the troubles began, when the malice had grown advanced enough to kidnap and mind-slave Raintree farmers, marching them to attack other settlements in turn. By the looks they exchanged, Barr and Remo were inclined to mock this self-appointed rank; Dag, the more he listened, was not.
Ford Chicory proved to be an excellent tale-teller. He was no blowhard like Boss Wain; his place at the center of his tales was as often as the butt of the joke as the hero, but he had a knack for holding his listeners in thrall either way. After dinner, aware of his audience and perhaps in return for the boat’s hospitality, he even told a creepy ghost story that had both Hawthorn and Hod bug-eyed and half of the crew pretending not to be.
Tales now being as readily exchanged as coins in a dice game, everyone clustered around the hearth as Chicory and his crew learned in turn about Berry’s quest, Dag and Fawn’s West Blue marriage, and—inevitably, Dag supposed—Dag’s place in the campaign against the Raintree malice. Dag did not willingly volunteer his words, but with Fawn, Whit, the crew of the Fetch, and once in a while even Barr and Remo chiming in, he didn’t need to do much more than adjust their Dag-tales for overenthusiasm. As the Raintree men’s picture of him shifted from itinerant medicine maker to ex—patrol captain, they grew warier—Dag could not decide if this was a relief or an annoyance—but Chicory’s attention sharpened.
“I’d seen old blight bogle lairs when I was out hunting, from time to time,” Chicory told Dag. Dag wondered how often the man had ventured into forbidden territory above the old cleared line, but now did not seem the time to ask. Chicory went on, “Gray patches, all nasty and dead. It didn’t take no high-nosed patrollers to convince me to stay off ’em, no sir!”
Dag let his groundsense flick out. A successful hunter like Chicory might well possess a rudimentary groundsense like Aunt Nattie’s, if some passing Lakewalker had climbed his family tree a few generations back. It was impolite to inquire, though, and since Chicory seemed to have led an irregular wandering life far from his birth kin, he might not know himself.
The Raintree man continued, “I’ve met your patrols, run across your camps—they never invited me in, mind, more like invited me to move along—but I’d never seen Lakewalkers run before.”
“They went streaming past us like rabbits, when we got up north of the Flats,” said a crewman in a faintly scornful tone.
“Now, that was the women and their young shavers, mostly,” said Chicory in a fair-minded way.
“Malices snatch the youngsters first, by preference,” Dag said. “When a malice goes on the move, Lakewalkers have learned to get the little ones out of the path as fast as they can, with the rest—off-duty patrollers, other adults—for rearguard. Likely you didn’t get far enough north to meet the rearguard, or the malice might have taken you, too.”
“We met plenty of them mud-men,” Bearbait put in, face darkening in memory. “Both before and after they lost their wits. Ugly mugs, they were.”
“The malice makes them up out of animals it catches, you know,” Fawn said. “By groundwork.” She went on to describe the grotesqueries of the mud-man nursery she’d seen at Bonemarsh Camp, with such simple directness that she seemed unaware of how thoroughly she was topping Chicory’s ghost story for keeping folks awake in their bedrolls later.
Upon reflection, Dag was not surprised to learn that Chicory’s troop had acquitted itself well upon the mud-men—hunting and killing bears and wild pigs would have trained them in both methods and daring. But Chicory’s face grew graver when he remarked, “Ugly as they was, they didn’t bother me near as much as those bogle-maddened farmers we met up with. Because they weren’t driven witless. It took you a little to realize they weren’t right in the head, because they walked and talked as if what they was doing was sensible, and they looked just like anybody else, too. You couldn’t hardly tell who was on what side, till they jumped on you, and then it could be too late. What we did find, though”—he rubbed his chin and frowned at Dag in the lantern glow and firelight—“was that if we rode in and grabbed up a few, and took ’em back south far enough, they’d come to their senses. We first found that out trying to capture one to make him talk. Got him far enough away and he talked, all right—not that you could make much sense of it through the crying. After that, we tried to catch as many as we could, and carry ’em away till they found their lost minds again. Wouldn’t any of them join us to go fight, after, though.”
Dag’s brows rose in increased respect. “I didn’t realize farmers could do that, on the edge of a malice war. Huh. That would be…good. Draw down the malice’s forces.”
“You took a chance,” said Remo in disapproval. “If you’d got too close to the malice, it might have caught your minds in turn, and then the malice’s forces would have been up, not down.”
Chicory said stiffly, “Seems to me such a chance would’ve overtaken a man sitting still, just the same.” He eyed Dag sidelong, and added, “I was never too fond of Lakewalkers, and the ones I’ve met have pretty much returned the favor—but I do admit, after last summer I don’t like blight bogles a whole lot more.”
The lead-in could not be spurned; Dag set Fawn to describing Greenspring again, as he did not think he could bear to. Fawn and Whit together managed a creditable explanation of groundsense and sharing knives. Barr and Remo listened with troubled faces to these deep Lakewalker secrets being bandied around; the boatmen, with expressions ranging from disturbed to disbelieving. Chicory, though, just grew quiet and intent.
Chicory seemed a village leader of sorts—if a terrible boatman—with initiative and wits enough on dry land to persuade friends and kin to follow him into discernible danger, for a good cause. His words, as well as the slices of his ground, gave Dag much to digest as he retreated with Fawn to their curtained nook. The bits of ground were converting far more readily than those of the mosquito or even the oats, nearly indistinguishable from an ordinary supporting or healing ground reinforcement. As with malices, it seemed people made the best food. Lakewalker cannibals, indeed. Neither Chicory’s ghost tales nor his war stories had unnerved Dag, but as Fawn cuddled into the curve of his body and drifted into sleep, that last reflection kept him awake for a long time.