His voice grew lower, more desperately persuasive. “But we could get away now, you and me. When I saw you, it was like I woke up from a yearlong nightmare. I was so afraid for you—I would never have let Crane have you. I never imagined you’d rescue me. But see, I know where some of Crane’s caches are. If we slipped away now, tonight, while the others are busy, we could both go back to Clearcreek rich and never have to go on the river no more. I never want to see the river again; it’s been the ruination of me. We could wipe all this out like a bad dream and start over.”
“Is that what you was plannin’ to bring back to me?” said Berry in a scraped voice, staring down at her clenched hands. “Bags of coin soaked in murdered folks’ blood?”
Alder shook his head. “Crane owes you death payment for the Rose at least, I figure.”
“Why, if it sank in a storm?” Fawn inquired, lifting her eyebrows. His return glare was nearly lethal.
Alder recovered himself and went on. “It’s all that Lakewalker sorcerer’s fault. He messes with folks’ minds, puts them in thrall to him. Destroys good men—delights in it. You saw Skink. He was just an ordinary boatman, not a speck different from your papa’s hands on the Rose, before Crane caught him and turned him. That’s why I could never get away. Gods, I hate Crane!”
That last had the ring of truth. Berry looked up at him, and for a moment, Fawn thought she saw her hard-pressed resolution waver, if that wasn’t just the water in her reddened eyes.
“If Crane beguiled you,” said Fawn, “then you’re still beguiled right now, and it isn’t safe to let you go, because you’d just run right back to him. You couldn’t help it, see, just like you couldn’t help the other.”
Alder’s lips began to move, then stopped in confusion. Did he see the dilemma he’d backed himself into?
Berry spoke at last. “’Course if you ain’t beguiled, it’s hard to see how it was you couldn’t get away before this. Seems to me a man who just wanted to escape, and didn’t care about no treasure, could’ve swum out in the night and set himself on a bit of wrack and floated away most anytime this past summer. Come to the first camp or hamlet past the Wrist in about a day and gone ashore for help, and gave warning what nasty things was hiding up in the Elbow. And this would all have been over long before now. If you wasn’t beguiled. So which is it, Alder? Make up your mind.”
Alder’s mouth opened and shut. He finally settled on, “That Lakewalker. He’s sorcelled me all up. I can’t hardly think, these days.”
“Then I daren’t let you loose, huh?” said Berry, and rose to her feet. “Come on, Fawn. There’s ain’t no sleeping in here. Let’s go set to the roof. The air’s cleaner up there, I expect.”
“I expect it is,” said Fawn, and followed her out the back hatch into the chill dark.
The night sky was clear and starry over the river valley. A half-moon was rising above the eastern shore. They sat cross-legged on the roof, looking around at the black bulk of the bluff, the few dim lights leaking from the boat windows down the row. The creek water gurgled in the stillness, giving itself to the Grace. Fawn heard no shouts or cries of commencing battle, but from three miles away on the other side of a hill, she didn’t expect to.
“Alder was a good man all his life, up in Clearcreek,” said Berry at last.
Fawn said nothing.
“The river really did ruin him.”
Fawn offered, “Maybe he just never met such hard temptations, before.” And after a little, “Spare me from ever doing so.”
“Aye,” breathed Berry. No insect songs enlivened the frosty night; their breath made faint fogs in the starlight. She said at last, “So, is Alder beguiled or not? Did Dag say?”
Fawn swallowed. It wasn’t as if there would ever be a better time or place to tell Berry the truth. “He said not.”
A long inhalation. “I sort of realized it must be that way, after a while. Or Dag would’ve released him along with Skink.” Cold haze trickled from her lips. “I can’t think which way is worse. Ain’t neither is better.”
“No,” agreed Fawn.
“I don’t see no good way out of this.”
“No,” agreed Fawn.
They huddled together in silence for a long time, waiting for light or word, but the cold drove them inside before either came.
20
Dag braced one knee on a fallen log, checked the seating of his bow in his wrist cuff, and locked the clamp. He opened himself for another quick cast around, cursing, not for the first time, his ground-sense’s inability to penetrate more than a hand’s breadth into solid rock. Barr and two of Chicory’s bowmen had reached their position on the opposite side of the cave mouth. Remo and another Raintree hunter were creeping up on the opening in the cave roof, through which a trickle of wood smoke, steel-gray in the light from the rising half-moon, made its escape. It would be Remo’s job to see that nothing else escaped by that route. Lastly, Dag checked on Whit, clutching his own bow at Dag’s side. Whit’s face, striped by the shadows from the bare tree branches, was nearly as pale and stony as the moon, entirely drained of all his wearing humor. The effect was not as much of an improvement as Dag would have thought.
He choked back anger, not only at the cruelty of the bandits, but at finding them here, now, in the middle of the journey he’d intended as Fawn’s belated wedding gift. She’d been terrorized once by the bandits at Glassforge, and he’d sworn that no such horror would touch her again. Granted, she hadn’t seemed terrified tonight, just tense and resolute. He would keep the ugliness well away from her this time, if he could. He tried not to think about the fact that her monthly fertile days were starting up, a lovely sparkle in her ground, normally the signal for them to switch to subtler Lakewalker bed customs. Far from bandits of any sort. Don’t dwell on that threat, old patroller, you’ll just make yourself crazy. Crazier. But he was determined that none should escape this cave trap to trouble her, or Berry, or anyone else. He bit his lip in frustration, unable to make a count of targets through the shielding rock walls.
Wonder of wonders, the two trampling gangs of boatmen, one led around the upstream side by Chicory, the other around the downstream side by Boss Wain, nearly joined again by the entrance to the cave before the guard there woke from his drunken stupor and yelled alarm. Too late, thought Dag in satisfaction. His groundsense flexed open and shut, wavering between picking up events and blocking the flares of the targets’ injuries. All his fooling around with medicine making seemed to have left him much more sensitive to such…he cringed, taking in the sizzle of a knife cut, the explosive flash of a thump with a cudgel, still searching for his true target.
Where was this Crane, blight it? They must have caught the Lakewalker leader asleep inside, just as Dag had hoped, or else the boatmen would never have crept this close before being spotted. Because none of the Fetch’s Lakewalkers had bumped grounds with him outside, not within a mile.
Cries, crashes, and screams sounded from the cave mouth, borne outward in the orange flickering from torch fire and wildly wavering lantern light. A bandit trying to lift himself out the smoke hole was knocked back in by Remo’s partner, like a man hammering down a peg. Remo followed, disappearing from both view and groundsense. Good, Dag had at least one scout inside to help the rivermen deal with the renegade. He ruthlessly stifled worry for Remo’s inexperience as a group of five bellowing bandits clumped together and fought their way out the cave mouth past Wain’s men, breaking and running toward Dag and Whit.
“See ’em?” said Dag, raising his bow and drawing hard.
“Yep,” said Whit through dry lips, and mimicked him. Both steel-tipped arrows flew together; both found targets.
“Great shot!” said Dag. Beginner’s luck, more likely. Dag’s second arrow was on its way before Whit’s shaking hands could nock his next. It wasn’t a disabling hit, lodging in the bandit’s thigh; the man was not felled but only slowed. This bunch must realize how little mercy they could expect from their boatmen prey-turned-hunters. The three still on their feet turned back and began running, or limping, the other way, around the cave mouth and up onto Barr’s position. None made it past.