walking; only Fawn looked back in regret. When dusk descended, they found a high spot off the road to make a camp. Fawn was not impressed with its comforts, although the boys did get a fire going despite the damp. She unpacked their food and shared it around.
Dag and Barr were soon heads down over the offending boots. Dag, quite adeptly it seemed to Fawn, instructed Barr in how to persuade them to be more waterproof. Muddy boots. Soon to be un-muddy boots, but which would not then walk on their own, nor force their owner to dance through the night, nor stride leagues at a step. So much for glamorous Lakewalker magic, wicked necromancy, rumors of cannibalistic rites. If only other folks could see these fellows as I do…
“Hey, Fawn!” Remo called from beyond the firelight, where he’d been rustling around along a weed-choked drainage ditch. “Want an alligator?”
“No!” she cried back in alarm. “I don’t want one!” Had he found one? How big? Could it smell her new shoes from there? If so, would it be angry? And if Remo caught it, instead of being promptly bitten in traplike jaws as his carefree enthusiasm deserved, would he make her try to cook it…?
Remo came tromping back out of the darkness with a wriggling form stretched between his two hands. Boot magic was temporarily abandoned as Barr jumped up to look, too. Dag, unhelpfully, sat on his log and grinned at Fawn’s expression. Which would have annoyed her more except his grins had grown too rare, lately.
“It’s… small,” said Fawn as the beast was eagerly presented to her gaze. A foot and a half of struggling lizard; Remo had one hand firmly clamped around its long snout and the other stretching its lashing tail. It hissed protest and churned its short legs, trying to claw its captor.
“Just a baby,” agreed Remo. “They hatch from eggs, they say. Like chickens.”
The bulging yellow eyes, with vertically slit pupils, looked even less friendly than a chicken’s. Baby or no, this was not, Fawn sensed, an animal that would welcome cuddling. Bo’s tale of the boy, the bear cub, and the thorn would have come out very differently in the end, if the boy had drawn the barb from the paw of a creature like this.
When the Oleana boys had finished exclaiming over the catch, they then squabbled over whether to let it go again. Fawn gave this plan no encouragement.
Even barring what horrors a malice might make of such a creature, those things grew, presumably, into what had mauled that boy at the Lakewalker camp. And if she volunteered to cook it, it couldn’t end up introduced alive into her bedroll later, although she supposed the boys would be more likely to try that game on each other than on Dag. They weren’t her own brothers. Their ruckus would still disrupt her sleep.
They toasted the meager fragments over the coals. Fawn found that alligator meat tasted like some off cross between pork and the boiled crab claw she had tried in the Drowntown market-and like campfire smoke, of course, but everything tasted of that. It would beat starving, but Fawn did not foresee a future in alligator farming. Treating the skin did keep the patroller boys occupied for the rest of the evening, leaving Fawn to cuddle with Dag in their reptile-free bedroll in a vain attempt to get warm.
When the camp finally settled for the night, she murmured into his collarbone, “Dag…?”
“Mm?”
“I thought what you and Remo discovered about unbeguiling, back up on the Grace, was pretty exciting. I figured you’d be talking about it to every new Lakewalker we met. Instead, I don’t recall as you’ve even spoken to any Lakewalker we’ve passed.”
He gave an unrevealing grunt. The verbal equivalent to that thing he did with his eyelids, she decided.
“I been wondering why not,” Fawn finished, refusing to be daunted.
He sighed. “It wasn’t quite that simple. Yes, my trick works to unbeguile farmers, I’m sure of that part, but I still don’t know what the effects are on the Lakewalker, to be taking in all that strange ground. I’m willing to experiment on myself. I’m less willing to put others at risk, till I know-” He broke off.
“What?”
“What I don’t know yet.”
She wanted to reassure him, to say, Well, at least we’re heading in the right direction to find out, but for all she knew she’d dragged them out on a fool’s errand. Tomorrow would-might-tell. “You will let this Arkady fellow know all about it, though, won’t you? Promise?”
“Oh, yes,” he breathed, stirring her curls. “Sleep, Spark.”
–-
Midday, on a side road striking west from the Trace, they passed from fallow fields into woods; Dag guessed they were crossing out of farmerowned land onto that of the Lakewalker camp. The camp itself came up sooner than he’d expected, only a few miles farther on. Magpie, recognizing her former home, tried to pull ahead, and for the first time Fawn had to rein back to her companions’ walking pace. The road climbed a low rise that proved to be a former river bluff, and Dag’s heart gave an odd lurch when he glimpsed the familiar glint of lake water through the leafless trees. I’ve been long away from home, this patrol. This cutoff was an old watercourse of the Gray River, which had ages ago looped thirty miles west instead, leaving this crescent-shaped lake and the groove of land in which it lay.
A quarter mile along the crest, the road dodged left again, descending to the shallow lake valley. A spur curved back down the slope into the woods. Just past where the tracks met, two flanking tree stumps cradled a peeled pole across the road at knee height; not so much a gate as the idea of a gate. Less cursory were two armed patrollers, taking their turn at this light camp duty between patrols. They watched Dag’s little party approach with alert curiosity. Dag presumed their open groundsenses-his was nearly closed just now-assured them that their visitors bore no ill will.
“Oh, hey!” said Remo, his spine straightening. “It’s those two girls who were selling horses at the Drowntown market last week!”
“Oh?” Barr followed his gaze, brows climbing. “Aha! So, partner, why didn’t you take me along to help buy that birthday horse, huh?”
“Didn’t think you were interested in horses,” said Remo blandly.
They all paused before the level pole.
“Well, if it isn’t the quiet fellow from Oleana!” said one of the patrollers, who had red-brown braids wreathing her head. “How de’, Remo. What brings you here?” Her taller blond companion looked approvingly at the boys, curiously at Dag, and doubtfully at Fawn. The redhead added more anxiously, “That piebald mare is working out all right, isn’t she?”
Remo ducked his head and smiled. “Hi again! Yes, the mare’s fine.”
Fawn nodded friendly confirmation from atop Magpie, who stretched out her nose and snuffled at her former handlers. “We’ve just brought our, uh, friend Dag here along to see that Arkady Waterbirch fellow you two told us about.”
Remo having apparently become spokesman, Dag was inclined to let him continue; he merely added a nod and touched his forehead in polite greeting. Then he wondered exactly what Fawn and Remo had said about him, because the two women stared at him in some surprise. He rehitched Copperhead’s reins around his hook and waited.
Barr chipped in, with a fine white grin, “Hi, my name’s Barr. I’d be Remo’s partner who he forgot to mention. I’m from Oleana, too-Pearl Riffle Camp, way on up the Grace. Real malice country up north there, y’know. Seems he also forgot to tell me your names…” He trailed off invitingly.
There followed an exchange of pleasantries in which Barr smoothly managed to extract the patroller girls’ names, tent-names, projected patrol schedules, family situations, the fact that the tall blonde had just returned from exchange patrol but the shorter redhead had never been beyond the territory of her home camp, and whether either had any pretty sisters-or ugly brothers. Dag would have been tolerably amused, if he hadn’t been so tired and strained.
Remo listened with growing impatience. Giving up on waiting for a natural break in the flow, he gripped Barr’s arm and overrode him: “And where would we find Maker Waterbirch?”
“Oh,” said the redhead, Tavia. She swung around and waved her arm toward the lake. “If you follow this road down and take the right-hand fork along the shoreline, you’ll pass the medicine tent about half a mile in. Old Arkady’s is the third tent after that, set apart. There’s these two big magnolia trees flanking his front path, you can’t miss them.” She glanced up at the listening Fawn, collected a nudge from her blond partner Neeta, and added, “If you follow this side road off east here, back down the slope, there’s a shelter and camp for farmers
