Whit took over helping with Hod during their stops, at least. Hod still didn’t say much, but his gaze followed Dag around in something between worry and fascination. Tanner and Mape were kinder to him, which served only to confuse him, as though kindness were a baited trap into which he feared to fall.
Dag was quiet all day. They put up for the night in a barn let by a roadside farm to travelers and their beasts—no hotel, but warmer and more sheltered than last night’s uncomfortable sleep on the ground. The next morning, Fawn was relieved when Dag seemed enough himself to climb back up on Copperhead for the last leg of the journey.
Noon found the teams plodding up a long slope along a wooded ridge. Dag edged Copperhead alongside the wagon, and said to Fawn, “Climb on.” He had that elusive smile he wore when he looked forward to surprising her, so she stood up, balanced herself, and swung her leg over behind Dag. When she’d adjusted to a secure perch, he let Copperhead roll out in his long patrol walk, and they pulled ahead as though the wagons had parked. At the top of the ridge, he let her slide down, and swung after her. Walking backward, he took her by the hand and brought her to the lip of the road.
The valley of the Grace spread out below them in the gold-blue autumn light. The river seemed to have put on her party dress, her banks and bending hillsides a swirl of color: scarlet and purple-red, glowing yellow, bright brown. The water reflected the azure of the sky, save where it broke into a sparkling shoal, necklace to the dress. Brooches of boats slid upon the water—a distant keel, a broad, blunt ferry—with a girdle of flatboats pulled up along the farther shore. Fawn was dimly aware of Whit, trotting up panting to see whatever there was to see. She was more aware of Dag, watching her face. She wasn’t sure if he was seeing just the river valley reflected there, or something more, but his mouth softened in an ease that handed her joy back to her, to be passed back to him again, redoubled.
“Oh,” said Whit, in a voice the like of which she’d never heard come out of him before. She glanced up, startled, to watch his lips part, his mouth grow round. Wonder, she thought, though you could well mistake it for a man punched in the stomach.
“Lookit those boats. Lookit…” he went on, though she was fairly sure he’d forgotten there was anyone listening. “That’s one big river. Even half dry, it’s bigger than any river I ever seen. It’s like a road. A great grand road, running from mystery above”—he turned with the river’s curve, like a man dancing, twirling with his lady—“into mystery below. It’s like, it’s like…it’s like the best road ever.” He blinked rapidly. His eyes were shining.
No, not shining. Wet.
5
Back aboard Copperhead, Dag rode close to the second wagon as they made the turn at the top of the ridge and started down the road into the valley. Fawn, beside Tanner, sat bolt upright and earnestly alert, ready to work the wheel-brake at the teamster’s word. In the front wagon, Whit had his head cranked sideways, goggling at the river. Dag’s eye followed his gaze.
Half a mile upstream on this side, Pearl Riffle Camp was just visible amongst the thinning leaves, a scattering of tent-roofs—Fawn would have called them cabins, Dag supposed—along the wooded hillside. Opposite the Lakewalker camp, below the mouth of a creek, lay Possum Landing, the level stretch of shore where the ferry put in and where cargoes were traditionally transferred from the old straight road to the river, or vice versa. There were more farmer houses clustered upslope from the landing than the last time Dag had ridden through here, and more sheds for storing goods.
Eight flatboats and a keel were presently tied to the trees along the muddy bank on that side, waiting for a rise in the water level to dare the shoals below; a good selection, though if the water rose suddenly from some big storm upriver, they could all be underway in an hour. But the water was still falling, judging from both the width of the mud margin and the fact that a couple of the flatboats, tied imprudently too close to the bank, now had their bows stuck in the drying mire. Even the wharf boat was half-grounded.
Dag turned in his saddle to look over his shoulder. Half a mile below the glittering shoals on this side, where the river again curved out of sight, was the farmer hamlet of Pearl Bend, which also boasted a wharf boat serving the crossing, as it made sense to offload heavy cargo before hauling a boat up over the Riffle, or wait to load on till after successfully negotiating the hazard coming down. The Glassforge men would take the bulk of their goods there. Pearl Bend, too, boasted more roofs than Dag remembered; practically a village, now.
Dag turned back to find the cautious glass-men pulling their wagons to a halt at a wide space in the road, huddling toward the hillside. A troop of riders was coming up the slope, double file—a Lakewalker patrol, outbound from Pearl Riffle Camp, likely. A dozen and some men, maybe half that many women, a normal complement. Dag drew Copperhead in behind Tanner’s wagon and squinted down the track. He fought an impulse to open his crippled groundsense wide, closing it down instead. He could look with his eyes well enough.
Outbound for certain, Dag decided, as first patrollers drew level with the wagons and fell into single file to pass. They appeared far too rested and tidy to be anything else. He suppressed a company captain’s inventory of the condition of every horse, rider, and weapon approaching. Not his job, anymore.
The patrol leader, who had barely glanced at the wagons, looked up as he spotted Dag and urged his mount forward. Dag opened his groundsense just enough to keep Copperhead polite as the strange horse loomed near.
“Courier?” demanded the patrol leader, a spare, middle-aged fellow with a shrewd eye.
Because why else would a Lakewalker be riding alone, and if the news Dag bore was bad, perhaps this patrol was about to acquire a more urgent task than their routine search patterns. His mind would not connect Dag, in Lakewalker gear on what was obviously a patrol horse, with the party of farmers that his patrol was rounding.
Dag touched his hand to his temple in a courteous salute, but said, “No, sir. Just travelin’ through.”
The patrol leader’s shoulders eased in relief. “Any news from the north?”
He meant patrol news, Lakewalker news. “All was quiet when I passed through Glassforge, three days back.”
The leader nodded. He looked as if he’d like to pause for fuller gossip, but the last rider cleared the obstructing wagons and kicked her horse into a trot to take up her place in the re-forming double file. He contented himself with a return salute and a “Travel safely, then.”
“You, too. Good hunting.”
An acknowledging grimace, and he trotted after the others.
Dag took back his place as Fawn’s outrider as the two wagons creaked into motion again. Fawn twisted around in her seat to watch the departing patrol, turned back, and glanced across at Dag. Concern shone in her big brown eyes, though for what cause Dag was uncertain.
Tanner, too, cast a curious look over his shoulder. “So, all those Lakewalkers are going off to hunt for blight bogles, are they? With their, their ground-senses?”
“Yes,” said Dag. “Pearl Riffle Camp doesn’t cover as big a territory as Hickory Lake—that’s my, was my, home camp. Hickory has eight, nine thousand folks, the biggest camp in Oleana. Doubt Pearl Riffle has eight or nine hundred. They can field maybe two or three patrols, barely a company. But their more important task is right here, keeping the ferry crossing open in case of need. If the Glassforge malice had gotten out of hand—more out of hand—we might have called on Lakewalker camps from south of the Grace to help out. Or the other way around, if they ran into trouble down there.”