He nodded silently and hunkered down on a fallen log below the earthen banks, turning his face up to a dapple of sunlight, eyes squeezing shut. Fawn hurried down the path.
She found Dag and Arkady just finishing lunch, packing up the basket.
The Oleana boys had gone off somewhere, good.
“Fawn!” said Dag, rising from the table in surprise. “I thought you’d be at the market. Are you hungry? ”
She gave her head a quick shake.
He hesitated, giving her that uncomfortable penetrating Daggish look. Groundsense, gods, her skin might as well be glass. “Are you all right? ”
“Something’s come up,” she told him, not glancing at Arkady. “Can I talk to you private? ”
“Ah, hm,” said Arkady, his brows lifting inexplicably. “Perhaps it’s as well. I’ll walk on back to the medicine tent, Dag. You take all the time you need.” With a benign wave, he took the basket with him, setting it outside the front door. Well, this was easier than she’d expected. So far. She wasn’t sure that was a good thing. Fawn waited till she could no longer hear his footsteps going up the path.
“Fawn,” Dag began slowly, “there’s something-” but she overrode him, saying, “Oh, Dag, it’s so horrible!”
“Huh? ” he said warily. “No, Spark, it won’t be that bad, I’ll be with you every-”
“It’s Finch Bridger’s nephew, poor tyke. He stepped on a nail and got the lockjaw. Oh, Dag, I know Arkady won’t like it, but can we go to him? He’s only five years old!”
Dag blinked. Paused. Blinked again. “Who? ”
Rapidly, Fawn related what Finch had told her. “Can we go to him? Do we dare? Can Lakewalker medicine makers even treat lockjaw? ”
Dag replied, with agonizing slowness, “I’ve read up on it in Arkady’s casebooks. They do groundwork on the nerves, and try to get enough water and food down between the spasms to keep the patient alive till the worst passes. I’ve only run across two cases. One was a woman at Hickory Lake came down with it-after childbirth, gods, there’s another!-Hoharie brought her through somehow. Didn’t see that one, only heard about it-tent gossip. Another was a patroller caught way out on the big summer wilderness sweep up in Luthlia. The treatment failed. He shared. Not right away-when he and his patrol couldn’t bear it anymore.”
“Do you think you could do that nerve work? Despite not having seen it? ”
Dag vented a long sigh, scratched his head. “How old did you say this youngster was, again? ”
“Rising five, Finch says.”
“Absent gods,” Dag muttered.
“The Bridger farm is about ten miles off. Finch has a cart. Do you think we could get there and back before Arkady… um, no, likely not.”
Dag shook his head. “It can take days to pull someone through lockjaw. Or… not.”
“I can pack up what we need for some overnights in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
“I’d really rather you stayed here.”
“And face Arkady alone? ” She shook her head vigorously. “Don’t you dare leave me to him! He’d make mincemeat of me. It’s going to be bad enough when we get back. Anyhow, it would be madness to send you into an upset farmer household without me to ease them along. To know what Lakewalkerish things need explaining to them, and how.”
“That is unquestionably true.” He stared at her unnervingly. “Well… it’s not a very contagious sort of disease, in the usual course of things. You might be safe around it.”
“Well, of course!”
“If you didn’t get too close.”
She stared back at him, perplexed. What was he going on about, here? Never mind. Once they got to the Bridgers’, she would deal with things as they needed to be dealt with, same as always. She wet her lips.
Marshaled what had to be said. “Now-you sure, Dag? Because if you’re not, I can go tell Finch no myself.” That much, at least, she could spare him. “This could cost you Arkady.”
He smiled wryly down at her, traced his thumb across her warm cheek. “If it does… then his price is too high, and I’m too poor an old patroller to afford him.”
She gave a short nod, swallowing the lump in her throat. “We’d best bustle about, then.”
She went to their room to pack a sack, and he went to Arkady’s work chamber to borrow a few items of equipment he thought he might need. Quite without permission, and Fawn suspected that wasn’t going to go down too well with Arkady either. She returned to the main room to find him writing Arkady a brief, truthful note.
Well… it said he’d been asked away to treat a sick youngster, and not to expect them back at any particular time. If he left out the word farmer in front of youngster, it wasn’t a lie. Nor even, in all probability, a concealment.
She led Dag back to the sun-speckled hollow to find Finch sitting on the ground with his arms wrapped around his knees, his head bent.
When he heard them approaching he scrambled to his feet, wiping his sleeve across his wet face.
He stared in shock at Dag, looking back and forth-or up and down-between them. “Uh…”
“This is Dag,” said Fawn, grabbing his left arm in a possessive hug.
Snapping eyes daring Finch to say boo, defying him to stare at the hook, and if he blurted one word about how short and young she was, or how old Dag was…
Dag nodded politely. “Finch.”
“Sir!” Finch gulped. “You’re, um…” He peered sideways. And up.
And back to Fawn’s tense face. “… not what I expected.”
“Generally not, but folks get over it,” said Fawn rather tartly, then controlled her prickliness. Finch had enough troubles; he didn’t need to know what they might be sacrificing in his cause. “I’ve been thinking. It might be more discreet if we were to circle around and meet your cart at the end of the road, out of sight of the market.”
“I don’t think it’ll make much difference in the end, Spark,” said Dag.
“Still, there’s no point in going fishing for questions and arguments and delay.”
Since Finch nodded vigorously, this plan was adopted. A quick walk through the open woods brought them to the head of the road not long after the cart arrived, and Dag helped her swing their sacks up into the back. She sat next to Finch, and Dag took the rear-facing seat behind them, folding in his long legs with a sigh. Finch slapped the reins across his mare’s back, urging her into as fast a trot as the roads would allow.
–-
To Dag’s eye, the Bridger farm looked not so snug and rich as Fawn’s family place in West Blue, being more crowded and cluttered, its flat yard still full of churned mud from the winter rains. But it seemed to have all the essentials: a big barn, a large woodlot, outbuildings in varied states of repair, fences penning cows, pigs, and chickens, if not their smell. The unpainted wooden farmhouse was two stories high and foursquare.
Dag followed Finch into the dim center hall feeling they were a noisy invasion; for a moment, the hush seemed deathly, and he thought, Too late!, not knowing whether to be grieved or relieved. But a moan from above-stairs, and a woman’s sob, cured that impression as fast as did his reaching groundsense.
They clumped up the stairs into a crowded corner room. On a bed that seemed far too big for him, a small boy writhed in pain. His lips were drawn back in the distinctive near-grin of his disease, his neck rigid, his breath whistling through his tight little teeth. A young woman, clearly his frantic mother, was patting and stroking him as if she could coax his straining muscles to relax. His grim grandmother sat on the bed’s other side, holding his clutching hand and looking exhausted.
Both stood and stared at the apparition of Dag, eyes filling with fear and desperate hope. A few days earlier, Dag thought, it would likely have just been fear. Dag swallowed and drew Fawn in front of him like a human shield. His own ground seemed to center itself, drawn like a lodestone to the agony in the bed. “Fawn,” he muttered, “deal with them. I need to see to this.”
He released his grip on her right shoulder, and she stepped forward, her motion catching the women’s eyes. Smiling, Fawn gave her little knee dip, and said brightly, “How de’! I’m Fawn Bluefield and this is my husband, Dag Bluefield. I guess Finch has told you how he met me in the New Moon farmer’s market. Dag here’s training up to be a Lakewalker medicine maker.”
Good of her to get that training up in right away, to stop them from expecting such miracles as Arkady could no doubt produce. Names were offered in return in thin voices: Cherry Bridger, the mama, Missus Bridger, the grandmama. Finch’s mother stared at her careless son who had produced this Lakewalker prodigy, new doubt
