with something else.”
“What? ”
“I was hoping you might get some new notions, once you had more cud to chew on. You’re the brilliant groundsetter. Aren’t you? ”
Arkady gave him a look between annoyance and amusement. “Don’t try those trainer tricks on me. I invented them.”
“Well, then.” Dag’s lips curled up in hope. Two days without a new problem to bite on, and already Arkady was getting restive. Dag just had to keep him moving north, and wait.
Barr, apparently wrenching his mind away from a disturbing vision of Arkady as a cow, said to Dag, “So what was the groundwork? ”
“Ah,” said Dag. “This may prove to come under what Arkady calls medicine tent work. Which means if I explain it to you, it’s in aid of someone, and not for tale-telling.”
Barr took this in. “This means if I gossip about it, you pound me? ”
“This means you don’t gossip about it. Period.”
Barr opened his free hand in cautious agreement, and set it again to his thigh.
“I believe Calla tried to persuade or beguile her sweetheart Sage,” said Dag. “And failed, near as I can tell.”
“Persuade him to do what? ” asked Barr.
“It seemed to be what a farmer might call a love spell.”
Arkady snorted. “Pointless. The boy’s besotted with her.”
“I wonder if she realizes that? ” Dag was put in mind of Fawn when he’d first met her, lumbered with desperate self-doubts. How could all these young women not know how lovely they were? “I don’t see my way clear yet, but I figure if I wait and watch, it will all lay itself open to me. Meanwhile, we have these two youngsters here with more than a touch of groundsense, and no one at all to instruct them how to go on with it. They seem to be”-he glanced at Arkady and picked his word-“damaged.”
“Oh? ” said Arkady, straightening in his saddle.
Hooked you. Dag repeated Finch’s tale, more or less, of the two young half bloods blundering between worlds, finding no clear path. Or paths deliberately blocked? Dag’s curiosity grew.
In a baffled voice, Barr said, “But you just met them yesterday, Dag. They don’t even like us. Why are you taking them up?” Dag’s and Arkady’s matching looks had barely intersected on his skull when he continued, “Oh. Fawn’s pregnancy. Of course you want to study half bloods now.”
Dag drew breath. “That, too. But do you also remember when I met you and Remo? Why did I take you two up? ”
“I don’t know,” said Barr. Reminded, he glanced back over his shoulder at the empty road where, to his obvious discouragement, no wayward partner galloped to catch up. “I… don’t know.”
He looked for aid to Arkady, who merely shrugged. “I don’t know that I can put a name to it, either. But it touches the heart of what marks a true maker. I promise that you didn’t get me out on this mad road just because Dag can do some tricks.”
Dag exchanged a salute even-all for Arkady’s considering nod, then turned Copperhead to catch up with Fawn.
–-
Fawn was glad for the invitation to nap in the wagon, and hardly needed Dag’s hint to want to make friends with Calla. But the Trace so fascinated her, she stayed upright on Magpie for the whole of that afternoon.
The landscape was much the same as it had been since Graymouth- now fifty-odd miles behind them-a succession of swamps, woods, woods in swamps, cleared fields on the higher ground, and little villages.
The good weather brought out not only local traffic-farm wagons and riders and pack mules-but road crews. They passed gangs of men and boys shoveling up barrows of dirt from the verges to raise the crown above the wet, or filling in low spots with wagonloads of gravel. It seemed to be a point of pride for each village to maintain the famous road in its vicinity; Fawn learned to spot the debatable boundaries between townships by the ruts.
During a midafternoon break, they were passed by what Fawn thought of as real Trace traffic, a caravan of some forty northbound mules loaded high with crates of valuable black tea. A muleteer strode along for every three beasts, fellows whose rough looks would have alarmed her before her time on the river, though now she could see they were merely ex-flatboat crews working their way home. They stared back at the bright wagon, and at her and Calla, but didn’t make rude hoots or anything. Indigo complained that the caravan would grab off the best campsites and their beasts eat all the new spring grass, and leave a lot of alarming-sounding mule diseases in their trampled wake, but Sage allowed amiably that their party could likely find other sites.
Some farms bordering the road made a bit of coin renting fenced pastures by the night for just this purpose. With seventeen animals to feed, this was tempting despite everyone’s youthfully slim purses, although the Smith women had loaded on enough gift grub for people that no one was going to have to cook for the first three days. But just before sunset they came upon an open meadow along a watercourse that no one seemed to be demanding payment for, not too eaten down by prior visitors, so they pulled off.
The still, brown channel was overhung with creeper-laced cypresses and thick with mysterious shadows and birdcalls, and Fawn was grateful for the Lakewalkers making an alligator patrol before bed. All they stirred up was a family of scurrying animals that looked to be the unlikely offspring of a possum mating with a turtle. Dag, accused, denied that ancient or recent Lakewalker magery had anything to do with the armor-plated possums. When the boys poked them with sticks they rolled up like pill bugs, inspiring a brief round of creature-ball till they unrolled and scampered indignantly away.
Sodden with fatigue, Fawn fell into their bedroll, pleased to learn the night song of a mockingbird from the circle of Dag’s arms; the next thing she knew, morning light tickled her eyes.
This day’s start was quicker but not so lively. She wasn’t the stiffest, climbing up onto her horse again; Arkady seemed creakier, but his chill squint defied anyone to comment. Dag and Barr mirrored each other in a series of patroller stretches accompanied by a rude, rhyming challenge chant that set them both laughing, but allowed them to lunge up onto their mounts without groans. Indigo was fun to watch, helping Sage hitch up their mules. When he talked to the beasts, coaxing and cajoling and praising, Fawn could almost imagine them talking back, or at least signaling with their big floppy ears. It wasn’t near the overwhelming effect Dag had on mice-fortunately, as being followed about by half a dozen entranced mules might get awkward-but put her in mind of it.
But by that afternoon, not all the charms of the Trace could keep her upright in her saddle. She crawled into the warm and creaking shadow of the wagon’s canvas roof with a thankful moan, and didn’t wake till the light was growing golden. Her mouth felt as if she’d been chewing on cotton, but at least her limbs didn’t seem to be dripping off. Recalling her mandate to make friends, she went forward to the box. Calla stiffened at her greetings, but Sage obligingly scooted over so she might sit up on his other side.
“Long way to Tripoint,” Fawn observed invitingly, gazing down over the harnessed backs of the mules. She liked the way their ears bobbed like swaying branches as they walked briskly along.
“Yep,” agreed Sage. “Though we have a good pace going, so far. If we can keep it up, it might take us a week to hit the Barrens, and maybe two after that to make the Hardboil River ferry. Which will be about the halfway mark, folks say.”
The Barrens, Dag had explained to Fawn, were a two-hundredmile- wide tongue of ancient blight extending due east from the Western Levels that had for long divided north from south. For most of a millennium, the only way across had been around, either down the Gray River or up the eastern seaboard. It had only become safely passable again a few hundred years ago. Because malices did not come up on old blight, no Lakewalkers patrolled that waste, and no farmers attempted to wrest a living from its still-bitter soils. Without camp or village markets, folks crossing it had to pack all their own supplies. Rumor made it bandit country, which went with the lack of patrols, Fawn supposed.
“I saw a bit of the Barrens when we were passing down the Gray on the Fetch,” Fawn offered. “Scrubby country, all sandy and flat, and no river towns at all. Quiet stretch, but it was still a relief when we got past it and saw green again.”
This triggered a string of interested questions from Sage about their river journey. Inevitably, their encounter with the awful river bandits infesting Crooked Elbow came out, but Fawn downplayed it in favor of explaining as
