Fattened for the slaughter, he tried not to think. An even more giggly troop, albeit led by a sterner matron, along with Fawn, who refused to explain anything, cornered him with strings and proceeded to measure various parts of his body—happily for his shredding equanimity, not that one—and floated away again in gales of laughter. Nattie’s weaving room, ordinarily a quiet refuge, was jammed, and the kitchen was not only crowded but intolerably overheated from the busy hearth. By noon, Dag followed the men into self-imposed exile, although he lurked close enough to listen to the singing floating out through the open windows. With all the males gone, some of the songs grew unsurprisingly rowdy; this was to be a wedding party, after all. He was glad Fawn was not to be deprived of these flourishes due to her strange choice of partner.
The female help left before supper, although with plans to return again in the morning for the final push, but it wasn’t till afterward that Dag found his thinking time. He settled by himself on the front porch, dangling his legs over the edge and watching the quiet river valley turn from gold-green to muted gray as the sun set. In the eaves of the old barn, the soft, tawny mourning doves called in their soft, tawny voices. It was Dag’s favorite view on the whole farm, and he thought whoever had originally sited this house must have shared the pleasure. He felt strangely unanchored, all his old certainties falling behind, and no new ones to replace them. Except for Spark. And she made an unlikely fixed point in his spinning world, because she moved so fast he feared he’d miss her if he blinked.
He caught sight of Rush walking down the lane in the gathering shadows. After the bowl episode, the twins had stopped aiming barbs at him, but only because they now avoided talking to him at all. If he couldn’t make friends, perhaps intimidation would do instead? Whit by contrast had become rather fascinated with Dag, following him about as though afraid he’d miss another magic show.
Dag tried treating him as a particularly feckless young patroller, which seemed to work. If only his arm hadn’t been broken he might have offered to teach Whit archery, which would have made a good way to move them along amiably. As it was, his idle comment about it made Whit say, showing willing to a degree that surprised him, “When you come back, maybe?”
Which made him wonder: were they ever coming back? Half of Dag’s original intent for the marriage proposal had been to repair Fawn’s bridges here in case of some dire need—in case of his death, bluntly. A Lakewalker would be trying to join his bride’s family, to fit in as a new tent-brother; and the family in turn would expect to receive him as one. Farmer kin took in new sisters, not new brothers, and they weren’t trained up to the reverse. It had taken Dag some time to realize that the only members of the family he really needed to please in order to carry off Fawn were the elders, and they had quite expected her to be carried off sometime by someone in any case. Dag was a stretch of custom, but not a reversal. The questions this begged for Dag’s own homecoming niggled hard, the more so since Fawn could not anticipate most of them.
And here came Rush again, walking back up the lane. He spied Dag on the porch and angled toward him between the house and the old barn, a grassy area the sheep were sometimes turned out to crop. What the sheep refused to eat was scythed once a year to keep the space from turning back to woods and blocking the view. Rush, Dag realized as he approached, was tense, and Dag considered opening his groundsense wider, unpleasant as it was likely to prove.
“Hey, patroller,” said Rush. “Fawn wants you. Down by the road at the end of the lane.”
Dag blinked once, slowly, to cover the fact that he’d just snapped open his groundsense to its full range. Fawn, he determined first, was not down by the end of the lane, but nearly out of his perceptions to the west, up over the ridge. Not alone—with Reed?—she seemed not to be in any special distress, however. So why was Rush lying? Ah. The woods below were not unpeopled.
Concealed among the trees near the road were the smudges of four horses, standing still—tied? Four persons accompanied them. Three blurred grounds he did not know, but the fourth he recognized as Stupid Sunny. Was it so wild a guess to think that the other three were also husky young farm boys? Dag thought not.
“Did she say why?” Dag asked, to buy a moment more to think.
Rush took a couple of breaths to invent an answer, apparently having expected Dag to leap up without delay. “Some wedding thing or other,” he replied. “She didn’t say, but she wants you right now.”
Dag scratched his temple gently with his hook, glad that he had mostly stuck to the deeply ingrained habit of not discussing Lakewalker abilities with anyone here, Fawn and Nattie excepted. He was now one move ahead in this game; he tried to figure how not to squander that advantage, because he suspected it was the only one he had. It would be amusing to just sit here and watch Rush dig himself deeper concocting more desperate reasons for Dag to walk down the hill into what was shaping up to be a neat little ambush. But that would leave the whole pack of them running around loose all night to evolve other plans. As little as Dag wanted to deal with this tonight, still less did he want to deal with it in the morning. And most especially did he not want it to impinge on Spark in any way.
His brotherly enemies, it seemed, were looking after that angle for him just now. So.
He let his groundsense play lightly over the lower woods, which he had crossed several times on foot in the past days, looking for… yes. Just exactly that.
A
flush, not of excitement, but of that very peculiar calm that came over him when facing a bandit camp or a malice lair jerked his mind up to another level.
Targets, eh. He knew what to do with targets. But would targets know what to do with him? His lips drew back. If not, he would teach them.
“Um… Dag?” said Rush uncertainly.
He wasn’t wearing his war knife. That was fine; he had no hand to wield it.
He stood up and shook out his left arm. “Sure, Rush. Where did you say, again?”
“Down by the road,” said Rush, both relieved and the reverse. Absent gods, but the boy was a poor liar. On the whole, that was a point in his favor.
“You coming with me, Rush?”
“In a minute. You go along. I have to get something in the house.”
“All right,” said Dag amiably, and trod off down the hill to the lane. He descended it for a few hundred paces, then cut over to the wooded hillside, plotting his routes. He needed to surprise his ambushers on the correct side for his purpose. He wondered how fast they could run. His legs were long; theirs were young. Best not to cut it too close.
Mari would beat me for trying this fool stunt. It was an oddly comforting thought. Familiar.
Dag ghosted down the hill at an angle until he was about fifteen feet behind the four young men hiding in the shadows of the trees and keeping watch on the lane.
Looks like Sunny took my advice. It was still early twilight; Dag’s groundsense would give him considerable advantage in the dark, but he wanted his quarry to be able to see him. “Evening, boys,” he said. “Looking for me?”
They jumped and whirled. Sunny’s gold head was bright even in the shadows.
The others were more nondescript: one stout, one as muscular as Sunny, and one skinny; young enough to be foolish and big enough to be dangerous. It was an unpleasant combination. Three were armed with cudgels, for which Dag had a new respect. Sunny had both a stick and a big hunting knife, the latter still in the sheath at his belt. For now.
Sunny got his breath back and growled, “Hello, patroller. Let me tell you how it’s going to be.”