her, horribly irritated. Bending his aching forehead to the cotton-stuffed mattress, he closed his eyes.
“Why do you keep making him stop?” Cherry Bridger demanded nervously. “If he kept on, couldn’t he fix it for good and all? ”
“Because,” Fawn rather snarled, “if Dag gets groundlocked to Spa-to a patient, and the patient dies, Dag could die with him. That’s what happened to Arkady’s apprentice just before Dag.”
“Oh,” said Cherry in a smaller voice. “I didn’t know that.”
“Time you learned. Farmers need to learn more about Lakewalkers so they won’t misunderstand how to handle them. They’re a dreadfully nervy bunch, you know. High-strung.”
Delicately conveying that Dag should be treated carefully; Dag was not ungrateful.
The afternoon was bad. The evening, worse, and Dag began to wonder if coming out with Finch would turn into one of the worst mistakes of his life. But sometime during the night his ten minutes of snatched sleep became twenty, then forty. When Fawn woke him, blinking, after two hours solid, he realized they’d turned some corner. That, and a good farm breakfast, revived him enough to go on.
The lull between bouts lengthening, Sparrow had time, in his restless misery, to grow bored. Dag diverted him with what children’s stories he could remember from his distant youth, or Lakewalker ballads recast into tall tale. He wished Bo were here. The other members of the boy’s family, as they drifted in and out to help, listened along wordlessly.
As the next dawn edged toward noon, then night, Dag felt as though he’d been stuck in this room for about a thousand years.
It was somehow decided, not by him, that he needn’t stay by the bedside anymore, but that someone would come get him when more groundwork was wanted, which was now up to three and four hours apart. He was led off to a real bed in another room. With a washstand. And Fawn.
It was his first chance to speak with her alone in days-he’d lost track of how many. But shouldn’t he have his wits about him for a talk so important?
He was fairly sure that he should. And that he didn’t.
So he let her pull the brightly colored quilt up over them both, hugged her in hard, and slept like a dead man.
11
Fawn awoke tucked up under Dag’s left arm, so early in a misty dawn that the farmhouse was still silent. She was wearing one of his shirts for a nightdress; he was stripped for sleep as usual. She stretched her neck to put her ear to his heartbeat, then glanced up. He was awake, looking down at her.
“Slept out, finally? ” she asked.
“Yes, I feel much better now.” His hand traced over her neck, breast, belly, and rested there, spread-fingered. His expression grew curiously tender.
She gave him a sleepy smile. “What? ”
“You amaze me,” he whispered. “Every day, you amaze me.”
She cuddled in more firmly. I think I have the better part of that trade.
She wondered just how refreshed he found himself this morning, and considered lifting the quilt to check. They’d made do with much less privacy than this back on the Fetch, time to time, muffling early morning giggles in each other’s quick kisses.
But Dag’s face grew serious, and he sighed. Yet he made no move to rise. Talk, then? Or maybe talk first, then…
“Remember the night of the pig roast? ”
She kissed his collarbone. “Yes? ” she said encouragingly. She stifled worry. Was he finally going to cough up whatever had been putting him off his stride since then? About time.
“I was a little distracted. I was… gods, Dag, stop making excuses for yourself…” His mutter trailed off. He drew breath and began again. “Your fertile time was starting up, and I didn’t catch it. I… we… I made you… you’re pregnant.”
She froze in astonishment. His chest had stilled, not breathing. A wave of shock seemed to rise from her feet through her lungs to the top of her head, and for a moment she wasn’t sure if it was good or bad or just immense, because her whole world was turning inside out. With a squeal of wild joy, she lurched up and kissed him smack on the mouth. “Oh! Oh!”
His squeezed eyes flew wide; he kissed her back, hugged her hard, released her; only then did his chest collapse in a woosh of breath.
“Well! That’s a relief. Thought you’d be mad at me, Spark.”
“Is that why you blurted it out so blunt? ” She stared, confused and a trifle alarmed. “I admit, this might not’ve been my first pick of time ’n place, but you don’t expect babies to be convenient. Not if you have a lick of sense. Aren’t you happy? ”
His arms tightened around her. “Ecstatic. Confounded.” He hesitated.
“Taken by surprise.”
“But we’re married. We knew this was bound to happen sometime, that’s what marriage is for. Surprised today, sure, but not… not in general.” Her nose wrinkled. “I suppose it could be like patrolling for malices. They’re what you went out looking for, but it’s still a surprise to find one that day.”
His deep laugh rumbled in his chest, and she was reassured. “Not my first pick of comparisons, Spark!” The laugh faded. “Except for the part about being scared.”
“Scared? When you went out after them again and again? Brave, I’d say!”
He shook his head, his expression growing inward, as if looking into long memory. “No. That wasn’t courage, just a kind of numbness. It was like I’d lost all affinity with the world. Now, though… oh gods, I care so much I can’t hardly breathe.” He dotted kisses all across her face, quick, almost frantic pecks. “And I’m scared spitless.”
About to say, It’ll be fine, Dag!, she paused as the complexities of their present situation began to creep back to her mind. Instead she said, “Babies, once they’re started, come on in their time, not yours. You just have to scramble around as best you can.”
She reached up and set her finger to his lips, stopping whatever he’d been about to say, as her own memory gripped her. The boy who’d fathered her first lost child had feared only for his own threatened comfort.
He’d greeted the news of its bare existence with anger, rejection, threats of unforgivable slander.
This astonishing man in bed with her wanted to remake the whole world into a safe cradle for her second. Or leastways turn his heart inside out trying.
She’d a sneaking suspicion wisdom was to be found in some happy medium, but on the whole she preferred Dag’s approach. “You amaze me, too, Dag,” she whispered.
He rolled toward her, folded her in.
She nuzzled his chest hair, then thought of yet another advantage to possessing a Lakewalker spouse. “Hey! Is it a boy or a girl? ”
“Too early to tell even for groundsense. It’ll be another few weeks till anyone can be sure.” He drew her upward to kiss her again, then added, “A girl could carry on our tent name.” His attempt at a neutral tone failed to conceal his hopeful interest.
“But if she married a farmer, she’d take her husband’s name,” Fawn felt constrained to point out.
“Any boy who marries our girl will take her name and like it!”
She giggled madly. “You sound so fierce!”
He blushed. “I ’spose I am getting a bit ahead of myself, Spark.”
Truly.
Uncertainty began to nibble away at her first joyful surprise. Because her attempt to picture the birth of this child foundered on the first question, Where? Somewhere between the surety of this morning’s breakfast and the air dream of the child’s future wedding lay a whole lot of today’s-work. And a need, burning as inexorably as an hour-marked candle, to get things settled. Laying in winter supplies on the farm every fall had taught her how to
