A strange brag. If Crane couldn’t be the best, he’d compete for being the baddest? Evidently so.
“I won my rounds, of course. It was too easy. I stayed on a few weeks, learned the trade, persuaded and beguiled a few fellows just to see what would happen. Then I took Brewer’s game to its logical conclusion. From behind. I was never quite sure if he was surprised, or not.”
“Once you’d won, you could have left, surely. However you were guarded before,” Dag said suggestively. “If you could walk past farmers like a ghost, why not bandits?”
“Go where? Farmers still wouldn’t have me, and Lakewalkers…would’ve been able to smell the blood in my ground, by then. So maybe Brewer won after all, eh?”
“Suicide?” said Dag mildly.
Crane stared at him in astonishment. “I didn’t have a bonded knife! Nor any way of getting one, once I was banished. The blighted camp council stripped mine from me along with everything else.” Crane turned his head away. The flow of his talk dried up for several minutes.
Fawn’s face screwed up in the slow realization that Crane—even Crane! — was taken aback at Dag’s suggestion not because he feared self-murder, but because he scorned to so waste a death, with no sharing knife to catch it. His response seemed quite unthinking and altogether sincere. And Remo and Barr looked as though they found nothing odd in this at all. She pounded her fist gently against her forehead. Lakewalkers! They’re all Lakewalkers! All mad.
Dag finally spoke again. “You’ve kept this gang going for a long time, though, as such things go. I can see where you gave the bandits a sort of twisted leadership, which held them to you, but what held you to them?”
Crane jerked his chin—in lieu of the shrug he could no longer make, Fawn supposed. “The coin, the goods, I’d not much use for, but Brewer’s game fascinated me. Besides being mad after money, I think Brewer liked running the cave because it gave him something lower than himself to despise. Me…It was like owning my own private fighting-dog kennel, except with much more interesting animals.
“I hardly had to do a thing, you know? They just arranged themselves around me. Drop any Lakewalker down amongst farmers, that’s what happens. If he doesn’t rise to the top, they’ll blighted shove him up. They want to be ruled by their betters. They’re like sheep that can’t tell the difference between shepherds and wolves, I swear.”
“So did you make them, or did they make you?” Dag asked quietly.
Crane’s smile stretched. “You are what you eat. Any malice learns that.”
This time, it was Dag’s turn to twitch, and Crane didn’t miss it.
Dag took a long breath, and said, “Remo, give me that knife you found.”
Remo rather reluctantly pulled the sheath cord over his head. Dag weighed the knife in his hand and regarded Crane sternly. “Where’d you come by this? And that boatload of Lakewalker furs?”
Crane twisted his head. “It wasn’t my doing. Just an evil chance. Pair of Lakewalker traders down from Raintree chose to pull in their narrow boat and camp practically in front of the cave. There was no holding the fellows, though I told them they were being blighted fools. I lost six of those idiots in the fight that followed.”
“Did you try the game on the Lakewalkers?”
“They didn’t live long enough.”
Dag touched the knife sheath to his lips in that odd habitual gesture.
“You’re telling me half the truth, I think. This knife was bonded to a woman.”
Crane’s jaw compressed in exasperation. “All right! It was a string-bound couple. They both died the same.”
“You murdered her, and didn’t even let her share?” said Remo.
“She was dead before I got to her. Fought too hard, there was an unlucky blow…At least it saved me a tedious argument with the Drum boys. I figured it’d be a bad idea to let them learn they could play with Lakewalkers.”
A rather sick silence followed this pronouncement.
Crane did not break it. Past hope, past rage, past revenge upon the world. Just waiting. Not waiting for anything, just…waiting. He spoke as if from the lip of a grave he no longer feared but wanted as a tired man wanted his bed.
Dag’s hand folded tightly around the sheath. He asked, “If you had a bonded knife, would you choose to share, or to hang?”
Crane’s look seemed to question his wits. “If I had a bonded knife…!”
“Because I think I could rededicate this one,” said Dag. “To you.”
Barr’s mouth dropped open. “But you’re a patroller!”
“Or a medicine maker,” Remo put in, more doubtfully.
“I said, I think. It would be my first knife making, if it worked.” He added dryly, “And if it didn’t work, leastways no one would complain.”
Crane blinked, squinted, said cautiously, “Do you fancy the justice of it? To put an end to me with that woman’s own knife?”
“No, just the economy. I need a primed knife. I hate walking bare.”
“Dag,” said Remo uneasily, “that knife belongs to somebody. Shouldn’t we try to find the rightful heir? Or at least turn it in at the next camp?”
Dag’s jaw set. “I was thinking of applying river-salvage rules, same as with the rest of the cave’s treasure.”
Barr said, “Should he be allowed to share? His own camp council didn’t think so even back when he carried far fewer crimes in his saddlebags.”
“He’s Crane No-camp now, I’d say. Which makes me his camp captain, by right of might, if nothing else. I guarantee his priming would have no lack of affinity, leastways.”
His glance met Fawn’s startled one; his lids fell, rose. Yes, she thought, Dag would know all about affinity. Barr and Remo were both looking at him with some misgiving after these peculiar statements. Fawn didn’t blame them. An even stranger look lingered in Crane’s face, as if it shocked him to find there was something still in the world for him to want—and it was in his enemy’s hand to give or withhold. Wonder grew in Fawn, winding with her horror. She’d expected Crane to say, Blight you all, and let the malices take the world. Not Yes, I beg for some last share in this.
As if testing his fortune in disbelief, Crane growled blackly, “We made better sport in the cave. Would it give you a thrill, big man, to kill me with your own hand?”
Dag’s gaze flicked down. “I already did. All we’re doing now is debating the funeral arrangements.” He leaned on his hand and pushed himself up with a tired grunt. He was finished with his questions, evidently, although Barr and Remo looked as though they wanted to ask a dozen more. Not necessarily of Crane.
“Captain No-camp?” Crane called as Dag started to turn away.
Dag looked back down.
“Bury my bones.”
Dag hesitated, gave a short nod. “As you will.”
Fawn followed him to the kitchen, where he drew the bone knife from its sheath and hung the cord around his neck. He made no move to hand either back to Remo.
“Scoop up a kettle of river water and put it on the fire for me, Spark. I want to boil this knife clean of its old groundwork before we reach the cave landing.”
After the Fetch moored above the mouth of the bandit cave, Crane was removed on a makeshift litter of blankets stretched between two keelboat poles borrowed from the nearby Snapping Turtle. Heads turned and murmurs rose both from boatmen and roped bandits as he was carried past. He shut his eyes, possibly pretending to be unconscious, an escape of sorts; the only one, Fawn trusted, that he would have. Dag followed, but was seized on almost at once by Bearbait and one of the Raintree hunters, who dragged him off to the cave to look at the hurt men again, or maybe at more hurt men.
Wain’s lieutenant, Saddler, tramped down the stony slope and hailed Berry.
“We found a slew of boats tied up behind that island over there,” he told her, with a wave at the opposite shore, the same level leafless woods that lined most of the river along here, save for the weathered ridge that backed the cave and shaped the Elbow. Only the—relative—narrowness of the channel gave a clue to a river-wise eye that it was an island.