Barr put in, “Crane was an Oleana man, banished from a camp up there for theft and, um, keeping a farmer woman. He’d set himself up as leader to this bandit gang on the lower Grace River, taking and burning boats and murdering their crews-horrible stuff. If it wasn’t for us Lakewalkers being aboard, our flatboat would have been tricked like the others, I think.”
Remo went on, “Dag set us to gathering all the other boats and men that came down the river that day to make an attack on the camp and clean it out. Which we did. Dag, um, captured Crane himself. Barr and I were up the hill dealing with another bandit just then, so I didn’t exactly witness…” He trailed off with a beseeching look at Dag.
Dag said, in an expressionless voice, “I dropped him by ground-ripping a slice out of his spinal cord, just below the neck. Once saw a man fall from a horse and break his neck about there, so I had a pretty good guess what it would do.”
“That… seems extreme,” said Arkady, in a nearly matching voice.
He regarded Dag steadily.
“He was holding a knife to my throat at the time,” Fawn put in, nervous lest Arkady go picturing Dag as some cold-blooded killer, “and his men were about to get away with our boat. I don’t think Dag had much choice.”
“If I had it to do over,” said Dag, “… well, if I had it all to do over, I’d leave more men to guard the boats, regardless of how shorthanded it made us at the cave. But if it were all the same again, I’d do it again. I don’t regret it. But it left me stuck with this last mess in my ground…”
A general gesture at his torso.
Arkady frowned judiciously. “I see.”
“Aren’t you going to tell about the sharing knife? ” said Remo anxiously.
“Oh.” Dag shrugged. “We found an unprimed sharing knife in the bandits’ spoils, that they’d apparently taken off a murdered Lakewalker woman. Crane was due to be hanged with the rest, so I gave him the choice of sharing, instead. Which he chose. Surprised me, a little. I boiled the old bonding off the knife and reset the involution, and bonded it to Crane. And used it to execute him, which was dodgy, but everything else about the man was dodgy, so I figured it fit. First knife I ever made. I’d like to have your camp’s knife maker look it over for soundness, if I get a chance, though I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as a half-made knife. It either primes or it doesn’t.”
“And,” said Arkady, “you thought you could do this… why? ”
Dag shrugged once more. “My brother is a knife maker at Hickory Lake, so I’ve been around the process off and on. But mostly I learned how from taking apart the groundwork of my knife at Bonemarsh.”
“And, ah…” Arkady said, “the other kind of why? ”
What gave Dag the right, does he mean? Fawn wondered.
Dag regarded him steadily back. “I needed a knife. I hate walking bare.”
A little silence fell, all around the table.
“You know, Dag,” said Fawn slowly, “we’ve spent since last spring being knocked from pillar to post so bad it’s a wonder we’ve had time to breathe. But when you lay it all out in a row like this… don’t you see a kind of pattern to things? ”
“No,” said Dag.
She looked up at Arkady. “Do you, sir? ”
She thought his face said yes, but he pushed back his chair instead of answering. He said, “You folks look as though you all slept in a ditch last night.”
“Pretty near,” Fawn admitted. Infested with scary swamp lizards, at that.
“I’d think you’d all enjoy a hot bath, then,” said Arkady.
This won blank looks from all three patrollers. Fawn, appalled by a vision of heating pots and pots of water on the hearth, said hastily, “Oh, we couldn’t put you to so much trouble, sir!”
“It’s no trouble. I’ll show you.”
A little… smugly? Arkady led them outside and down some stairs from the lakeside porch to an area of flagged pavement. At the far side was a remarkable setup: a shower bucket with a pull rope on a post, made private by a cloth-hung screen, and a big barrel, its bottom lined with copper, over a fire pit. Coals still glowed underneath.
“You can take the path down to the lake to get more water, all you want”-Arkady pointed to a pair of buckets on a yoke-“and heat it in the barrel. More wood’s in the stack behind those forsythia bushes. Put the hot water in the shower bucket, soap up and rinse down, soak in the barrel after. Take your time. I need to go talk with some folks, but I’ll be back in a while.” He paused and studied Dag. “Er… do you shave? ”
“Now and then,” said Dag dryly.
“Now, then.”
Arkady went back in, popped out a few moments later with a stack of towels and a new cake of soap, and disappeared again, this time for good. Fawn stared after him, bewildered by this turn, though not ungrateful.
“Do we stink that bad? ” asked Remo, sniffing his shirt. Barr was too busy delightedly examining the mechanism of the shower to answer.
“We aren’t too pretty, compared to Arkady,” Fawn allowed.
“And this keeps us occupied here for as long as he wants to talk to… folks. How many folks, I wonder? ” said Dag, sounding less impressed.
Oh. Of course. Fawn’s gratitude faded in new worry. How many people in the camp had more authority than this groundsetter, that he needed to consult them? It answered Dag’s question, if in an unsettling fashion: not many.
But Dag assisted Fawn to take the first turn, and then took one himself with apparent enjoyment. She thought Barr very gallant to volunteer for the last turn, till he refused to come out again. Granted, soaking in the barrel, which steamed in the chill air, was blissful. He was still pickling in there when Arkady returned, to find the rest of them dressed and clustered around the hearth drying their hair. Dag’s system was to run a towel over his head once, but Remo fussed more over his than Fawn did over hers.
Arkady put his hands on his hips and looked Dag over. “Better,” he allowed. “I can’t have you following me around the camp looking like some starveling vagabond, after all.”
“Am I to do so? ” asked Dag warily. “Why? ”
“It’s how apprenticing is done, normally.”
Fawn almost whooped with joy, but Dag merely rubbed his newshaved chin. “I take your offer kindly, sir, but I’m not sure how long we can stay. My work is up north, not down here.” He glanced at Fawn.
Arkady answered the question beneath the question. “You can all stay here at my place for the moment. Including your farmer bride, though it’s asked that she not wander around the camp unescorted.”
Fawn nodded glad acceptance of the rule, though Dag frowned a trifle, which made Fawn wonder belatedly, Asked by who?
“You’ll just be watching and listening at first, you understand,” said Arkady, “at least till I can figure out some way to cleanse your dirty ground. If I can.”
Dag flicked an eyebrow upward. “I’m good at listenin’. So am I to be your apprentice-or your patient? ”
“A bit of both,” Arkady admitted. “You asked-no, she asked,” he corrected under his breath, “if I saw a pattern in your tale. I did. I saw a man coming late and abruptly into groundsetter powers, totally unsupervised, making the wildest mess of himself.”
“You know, sir, you don’t sound too approving, but my two top notions were that I was going mad, or that I was turning into a malice. I like your version better.”
Arkady snorted. “Normally, the development you’ve experienced would have unfolded over five or six years, not five or six months. Naturally you found it confusing. And-how old are you? Mid-fifties? ”
Dag nodded.
“Well, your talent’s around fifteen years late showing, to boot. I don’t know what you were doing all that time-”
“Patrolling,” said Dag briefly.
“Or why it’s all released now,” Arkady continued.
Dag smiled across at Fawn.
“Do you think your farmer girl has something to do with it? ” demanded Arkady. “I admit, I don’t see
